My May 2026 Photo of the Month is SNO61, made at San Onofre State Beach in Northwest San Diego County.
SNO61 Background
This month’s image came from a trip to San Onofre State Beach with friends Alex and Shuwen.
While “San Onofre” is most famous for surfing and the nuclear power plant, it offers a nice long beach with impressive rock strata. You get a very large San Mateo Formation sandstone layer (the ligher color stuff), with a couple million years of darker deposits. It is quite impressive to see!
Photographically, it is a bit of a challenge to give an image a true sense of size and scale. This was one of the times when I went to the beach, but spent almost all of the time facing inland.
Because this is May, we also had plenty of marine layer coming in, providing a nice backdrop. The folds in the San Mateo sandstone provided some nice light and shadow, which I liked.
I am no geologist, but I do know some nice geology when I see it. I have long overlooked San Onofre, remember camping there as a kid, once getting a tour of SONGS, but not much else. So these cliffs were nice, and definitely worth returning to not to mention I love old roads Old Highway 101 is how you enter the place).
Now, I will say that we have made a long habit of hitting up a taco shop after these excursions, and I am pretty sure we did, but now I don’t remember where that was. I should keep better notes to give you an accompanying taco shop report (PS: they’re all good).
As always, thank you for viewing, and I hope you enjoyed the image.
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T.M. Schultze is a San Diego-based photographer, traveller, and writer. He writes, photographs, and draws things of the outdoors that have inspired humans for thousands of years. He co-authored the Photographer’s Guide to Joshua Tree Park which can be purchased here.