Pescadero

These photos are from Pescadero State Beach, just south of the mouth of Pescadero Creek (Gravel Beach: 2013).

AERIAL VIEW

Some of the beaches along this coastline are sandy right up to the toe of the bluff and some have nice cobble ramps like this one. To get cobble, you need a source of resistant rock - granite works better than the softer sediments that compose a bulk of these eroding bluffs and that yield only sand or finer stuff. I suppose even the completely sandy beaches may sometimes have cobble underneath, but I suspect the relative proportions of fine and coarse material vary significantly from one beach to the next. Of course, there are probably seasonal differences, too - typically we'd expect sandier in the summer, less sandy (and more exposed cobble) in the winter.

I think the sandpiper-like birds on the beach were indeed sandpipers. They seemed to spend as much time up near the edge of the cobble as they did down at the water's edge.