It’s the days between Christmas and New Years, and I decided to go take a walk on the sand at the southern-most beach in Carlsbad, California, known as Ponto Beach. This beach is just west of the Batiquitos Lagoon and it is possible to start walking down the beach in Carlsbad and end up on Grandview Beach in Encinitas. A number of the photos I’m adding today are from Grandview Beach.
Above is the first glimpse you may get after parking at Ponto Beach, and walking onto it in the afternoon as I did. The sun is hinting that it will be hiding from view soon.
There are some other people on Ponto Beach, but not too many, because of the time of year, and a dredging project with Batiquitos Lagoon is going on which has displaced a lot of the sand that was on the beach. It looks very different right now than it does during the summer months.
From Ponto Beach, you can see the Smokestack on top of a retired power station that generated electricity for Carlsbad residents for a number of years. I’ve shown people pictures of the Carlsbad coast, and they asked about the smokestack, wondering why it was there. It has become somewhat of a landmark to people in the area, and there are people fighting to keep it from being removed, as has been planned.
The building that housed the power-station has become the site of a desalination plant, which is turning saltwater into drinkable freshwater, and is supplying San Diego County with a percentage (I heard 17%) of the freshwater used in the County daily.
On the other side of the smokestack is the older Carlsbad Village.
I started walking down the beach away towards Encinitas, to the south of Carlsbad. Immediately to the left is a bluff, where a hotel/resort is being built. There are stairs that people can take to the top of the bluff, and I decided to climb up and see what I could see from up there.
I was surprised by something unexpected once I climbed halfway up.
At the top of the second level of stairs was a hawk surveying the brush and the area around the Batiquitos Lagoon. He was keeping an eye on me, as I took this photo, too. I guess he saw something he wanted to take a closer look at, and after about 5 minutes he flew off towards the Lagoon.
I took a look around from here and then climbed down, and walked into Grandview Beach in Encinitas.
There are stairs down from the Bluffs above Ponto Beach, and people were coming to Grandview beach from Encinitas, including surfers, people who wanted to walk along the beach, and even some people with propane grills and beach chairs having something to eat on the beach. You can see the first set of stairs down from Leucadia (a section of Encinitas) which has been long known as a surfing community.
I tried to keep away from the water so that my sneakers didn’t end up soaked (I’ve failed to keep them dry in the past.)
People are the only creatures that walk along the beach. You can see footprints from people and from birds as well.
I have seen a couple of people in the past fishing in the surf. I don’t have any idea how successful they are at catching anything this way. but it looks relaxing being on the beach this time of day.
I decided that I should start walking back to my car at this point because it might be dark by the time I made it back home
I had been using a plugin to allow people to scroll through images I posted here, and this is my first post where I saved my images to my Media Library and wrote about my visit.
I’ve been to Ponto Beach a number of times. It is about a 10-minute drive from my house, and I will likely return.