Bluffs Beach Trail in San Onofre

• 3.3 mile loop, 239 feet of gain
• Dogs: yes, but don’t
• Parking fee: yes
• Cool feature: 16m yo geological formation on earthquake strike plate
• Paired with Left Coast Brewing Co.
• Travel read: The Dinner by Herman Koch

This is the week we added craft breweries as a permanent part of our ritual. And we saw a shark. I’ll come back to that.

We arrived to the Bluffs Beach Trail freshly peed and fed. Old people can learn. I had a small backpack with snacks and water.

A great 3-mile hiking trail this is not.

You park up top and descend right away. The “trail” is just the shore, and it’s covered in rocks. It was slow going and uncomfortable.

I was like, “OMG my kingdom for a few yards of normal strides” — only with profanity.

OK maybe it was just profanity.

Every time the tide came over the stones it made a cool rattling sound Doug described it french fries being lowered into hot oil. Nailed it.

As we were picking our way across, concentrating on not turning an ankle and enjoying the sounds of fast-food grease and profanity, we saw this.

We both starting singing: “Skee-dooby-dop.”

I thought that was going to be the best moment of the trip, because I didn’t know we were going to see a shark. I’ll come back to that.

When we finally got to the end of the one and a half miles of rocks — allelujiah! — there was a 16 million-year-old geological formation on the Cristianitos earthquake fault line that has been dead for 100,000 years. I was able to scramble up the rocks and touch the strike plate.

Doug got some photos of me with my hand on it, but I can’t find them. Possibly my vanity came into play.

I went looking on AllTrails for someone else’s photo, and found one that shows the D cups of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which is also in that spot.

On another hiking site I did find a video made by a hiker whose buddy was a geologist. It’s in three parts, and you can see all three of them here.

From there we hiked a trail up to the bluff. It was a regular trail with a dirt surface. OMG it was glorious.

It was on the bluff that we met a family leaning over the railing watching two sharks. The one we saw was right behind a bunch of surfers. It was a great white, more than 10 feet long.

The dad said the lifeguard had announced that the sharks were swimming there, but they weren’t hurting anybody, so some of the people kept on surfing.

One of the little boys said he was in the water and looked right at one. He did not mention whether there was little-boy pee pee released into the ocean at that point, but I wrote my own ending.

The one we were watching did not put his fin up, but they swim just under the surface so when there’s a wave swelling they bob up into it and you can see them very clearly. We could see one swimming around through the clear water, just hanging out.

And by “we,” I do not mean “my iPhone.”

I tried to make him easier to see, for my report to everybody about how I saw a shark, and possibly for my annual Christmas card.

We walked back the same distance across the bluff, with nice views and a much more family friendly soundtrack. It took us about a third of the time it took to get across below.

We had lunch and beers at Left Coast Brewing and then walked around exploring San Clemente, trying to get the B-52s out of our heads.

On the road, I was reading The Dinner out loud. At some point Google had presented me with a list of the top most unputdownable books and I ordered them all. The Dinner was among them.

The story posed some ethical questions that had us stopping to talk about what we would do in different terrible circumstances (involving helping our children cover up a crime), and the distribution of culpability when your kid does something bad.

I would recommend this book but Doug would not. Neither of us would recommend this trail. Maybe just go to Left Coast and skip the rest of the agenda.