When we were at Black Sands Beach talking to the guy who took our pic – the one walking his dog named Horchata and wearing a hat with her photo on it – he recommended that we check out Patrick’s Point State Park if we wanted to see another beach with beautiful rocks.

I told him we were headed to Agate Beach at Sue-meg State Park, and was that nearby what he was talking about? And that’s how I found out that California recently renamed Patrick’s Point to Sue-meg (in order to better recognize the Ner’-er-nerh/Coastal Yurok People). I thought it was awesome that we were already planned to spend the night there.

You know I gotta shout out every bathroom ever. Do you see how gigantic the gap under this door was?! Come on.

There are a couple of campgrounds at this park – Agate, Abalone, and another one with a less cute name that I can’t remember off the top of my head. We pulled into our site, stretched our little cramped legs, and headed down to the beach to scope it out.

Here’s our sleeping set up in the van! We have it down to a comfortable science now. This was a different bear box than we were used to. The green handle goes into a keyhole, which then you can turn to trigger the lock. It felt like a child safe logic puzzle at first haha

The overlook from the parking lot is absolutely gorgeous. The trail leads from there, downhill on sandy switchbacks forever, then to some cute stairs, and finally to the star of the show – the beautiful rocky coastline and beach of tiny little stones.

So naturally we sat down to play. 🙂 There were little groups of people around us doing the exactly same thing, it was a funny solidarity moment.

What can I say? Kid in a candy store. We stayed as long as we possibly could before racing back up the trail in hopes of making dinner at our campsite before it was completely dark.

Here’s my little haul. Don’t worry, yes it’s perfectly fine to collect rocks from the beach and take them home.

My favorites are the two rounded pieces of wood at the bottom. Too cool.

We lit a fire for the fun ambiance, then go to work setting up our little kitchen. We definitely beat dark for the cooking, but for the eating was a whole ‘nother story haha. Luckily the mood was SO full and super-super bright this night. Also, this Cracker Barrel mac & cheese is the most perfect camp food – it comes with the liquid cheese so you don’t have to mess around with powder, milk, butter, etc. Nothing like settling down for the night in the cozy van with a warm tum of pasta.

We’d become very acquainted with banana slugs by this point on our trip and no less enamored by them. They’re so insane – how it possible that this dude shrank to that THUMB SIZED DOT when we scared him, then re-stretched out to his full glory a minute later? They really don’t like the vibrations/noise that come from rattling that bear box.

He was carrying a little stone on his back. It’s so cool how their little snail goop gets stuff stuck to them and then they drag it all around the forest floor.

My morning sunrise bathroom-run beach view wasn’t so shabby.

We pried ourselves out of our sleeping bag cocoons and quickly drove around to a few viewpoints in our side of the park, like Wedding Rock.

We’d originally planned to go to Patrick’s Point Tide Pools on the other side of Sue-meg but it was closed because of the trail having been washed out. But nothing to be too bummed about since I know we’ll *definitely* be back here one day… and probably leaving with even more pockets of smooth little agate pebbles.

About Sue-meg State Park:
https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=417
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue-meg_State_Park

Make campground reservations at Sue-meg:
https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=30928

Sue-meg SP’s land acknowledgement:
https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=30933

Agate Beach trail via AllTrails:
https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/california/agate-beach-trail