Continental Shift

When you cross the San Andreas fault at Olema, California, you move from the North American tectonic plate to the Pacific plate, and everything changes. To set foot on the Point Reyes peninsula is to land on another continent, geologically of course, but also culturally, even spiritually—coming onto Point Reyes means to enter a more poetic consciousness and to slip into a salty, misty wonderland.

The peninsula is located just thirty miles north of San Francisco at the south end near Bolinas and forty miles north at the midpoint. It lies in the morning shadow of Mount Tamalpais, one of the birthplaces of mountain biking and the clunker revolution. Though perhaps some of the clunkers were tooling around the hills and dales of Point Reyes in the late seventies and eighties, it has remained  remote and inscrutable, courting perhaps a quieter, more contemplative two-wheeled adventurer. The total landmass of the peninsula is just over seventy thousand acres, and yet you feel like you have