Product Description
Natural Bridge Panoramic Art Prints
Natural Bridge Panoramic Art Prints
Natural Bridges State Beach is a 65-acre California state park in Santa Cruz, California in the United States. The park features a natural bridge across a section of the beach. It is also well known as a hotspot to see monarch butterfly migrations. The Monarch Butterfly Natural Preserve is home to up to 150,000 monarch butterflies from October through early February. Natural Bridges State Beach is world-renowned for its yearly migration of monarch butterflies. Visitors can see thousands during the butterflies peak season. The best time to see monarchs in the park is usually from mid-October to late January. The grove’s eucalyptus trees are located in a small, protected canyon, providing the Monarch needed shelter from the wind. These winter flowering trees are also a convenient source of nectar for the butterfly. This beach, with its famous natural bridge, is an excellent place to view shore and ocean birds, migrating whales, and seals and otters playing offshore. Further along the beach, tide pools offer a glimpse of life beneath the sea. Low tides reveal sea stars, crabs, sea anemones, and other colorful ocean life. Tide charts are available in the Park Store. The first inhabitants in the Santa Cruz area were small groups of Native Americans. The Ohlone were a semi-nomadic tribe that hunted game and marine mammals and supplemented their diets with shellfish, fish, edible roots and shoots, acorns, nuts, and seeds. Natural Bridges State Beach is named for the naturally occurring mudstone bridges that were carved by the Pacific Ocean into cliffs that jutted out into the sea. The arches formed over a million years ago when a combination of silt, clay and diatoms were solidified into a mixture of stone that formed the three original arches of the beach.
