The Laguna Beach coves, one at a time

Outdoors · Orange County

How do you actually work through the Laguna Beach coves?

Laguna Beach is not one beach. It is a chain of small coves separated by rock headlands, most reached by a public stairway or a narrow accessway between houses, and each one has its own sand, its own rocks, and its own tide window. Staying in Orange County for a month or more means you can work through them one at a time instead of picking one and hoping.

Access is the thing to learn first. Public stairways and street-end paths come off Pacific Coast Highway and the streets above it, and several are easy to walk past without noticing. Some coves connect along the sand at a low tide and become separate pockets again as the water comes up, so the same route is a long continuous walk one morning and a dead end the next. The downtown core is genuinely walkable, which is unusual for this county, so if you are staying near it you can reach several coves on foot and leave the car where it is.

The coves themselves differ more than you would expect over such a short stretch. Some are wide and sandy and good for a long flat walk. Some are mostly rock and shallow reef, which makes for excellent tidepools and poor towel space. Much of the water off Laguna Beach is protected, so what lives in those pools is left where it is — look, photograph, put nothing in a bucket.

The honest tradeoff is parking and season. Street parking near the coves is limited and much of the residential grid above them is permit-only, so a car often costs you more time than the walk saves. In summer, Pacific Coast Highway through town slows to a crawl and the lots fill by mid-morning. In May and June the marine layer sits over the coast for hours and sometimes all day, and a cove that is spectacular in October can be flat gray and cold in June. Nobody warns short visitors about that, and they find out on the one day they had.

The pattern that works over a longer stay is simple. Pick one cove per week and go early on a weekday. Check the tide first, because it decides whether you are walking sand or scrambling over reef. Once you have been to six or seven, you stop asking which beach is best and start knowing which one suits the tide, the swell, and the kind of morning you want.

If you're here for a month or more

Over a month you can stop treating Laguna Beach as a single destination and start using it the way residents do — one cove at a time, on the tide, on a weekday. Walk from where you are staying if you are anywhere near the downtown core, because parking is the part that ruins the morning. Ask your local manager which stairways are closest to the home and which streets are permit-only, so you learn the shortcut before the parking ticket.