Elephant Seal Vista Point

Pull in here. Those enormous animals below the boardwalk are northern elephant seals, and the bulls with the great drooping snouts are why people mistake them for walruses. In my day you would not have seen one.

They were hunted down to about a hundred animals, and every seal alive today descends from that remnant. They came back to this beach long after my time, and I am glad of it. Stay on the boardwalk.

The boardwalk is free and it is open every day of the year, and there is nearly always something happening on the sand: the births and the great fights of the bulls in January, the females and the young ones moulting in spring, the juveniles hauling out in the fall. The people in the blue jackets are the docents of the Friends of the Elephant Seal, and they know these animals the way a rancher knows a herd. Ask them anything.

Their visitor center and shop are in the little town of San Simeon a few miles south. Give this twenty minutes at least. Nobody gives it less.

One more thing, and it is a family matter. The books say elephant seals, and the books are right. But when my grandson was a boy on this coast we called every one of these beasts a sea lion, and so did I, and so did everybody.

Point Lobos up the road is named for the sea lions, and to us a sea lion was whatever lay on the rocks and barked, whatever the book said. So if you hear a Plaskett say sea lion while pointing at an elephant seal, do not correct him. He knows.

He learned this coast before the books did.