Exploring Kelp Entanglements at San Simeon

After an atmospheric river had its way with the coastline, the beach at San Simeon was decorated in large piles of tangled giant and bull kelp.

Beachcombing with family at San Simeon last December, after the season’s largest storm had passed through, we found ourselves face to face with dozens of piles of tangled bull and giant kelp, ripped from their undersea moorings by the large swells and left to tumble and toss in the surf, battered and bedraggled by local reef rocks, left to dry out and die out on local beaches.

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As my family hiked on, I stopped to soak up the scene - endless variations of plant entanglements - root balls looking like bird nests, bull kelp ropes wrapped into bowls around leafy greens, the long “whips” wrapped around barnacles, stretched and tied by surf action.

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I loved how the warm beach light bounced around inside these little dioramas, tiny specks of light sand set off against the burn umber tone of seaweed masses.

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I spent a week doling these out online, one per day, and was lucky to have caught the attention of a kelp expert on Blue Sky who offered the following:

There aren’t many places where both giant and bull kelp intersect! Bull kelp really starts taking off in southern Big Sur. Giant and bull kelp are “co-dominant” through the Monterey Bay, but north of San Francisco, bull kelp takes over, all the way north across the Alaska peninsula! There are pockets of giant kelp in some places in Alaska and BC though.

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When I thanked him for the info, he quipped “Anytime! I’m always happy to kelp out when I can 😉”

I worried that my family was getting too far ahead, but I also couldn’t pass up this opportunity, so kept shooting for a while.

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I’m not quite sure what to call this “genre” of photography (not that we need to call it anything). “Intimate Landscapes?” Something about that phrase has always struck me as being a bit corny, not sure why, and there aren’t really any landscapes visible here, but I also can’t think of a better term.

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Sometimes I feel so grateful for the “infinity-ness” of nature - from just a hundred or so atomic elements, literally endless varieties of mass and material, which can in turn intersect with other other mass and material, not to mention light, weather, time, in even more infinite possibilities. These blendings and variations felt particularly visceral as I leaned in to explore.

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But eventually I had to sprint away to catch up with my adventurer father, who was strolling steadfastly up the beach toward San Simeon Point, lost in his own meditation.

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I was grateful for the opportunity to have caught these gorgeous entanglements in this light, and while they were still fresh.