Making our way down south, we found ourselves in Natural Bridges State Park near Santa Cruz where 100,000 Monarch butterflies overwinter each year.  Bree has a few friends that live in the bay area, so we met Matt, Robyn, and their two kids at the park.

The butterflies tend to cluster in the Eucalyptus grove at the park, and blend in quite nicely with the leaves.  The clusters that we found were far overhead, and in the early morning mounds of folded wings were near indistinguishable from the silvery leaves.

As the temperatures warmed, the mounds began swaying with the waking butterflies.  The morning light eventually warmed up the mounds enough that the butterflies on the outside of the mound began fluttering off.

After several hours of freezing our butts off in the eucalyptus grove, we left the butterflies and headed for the beach, where Harley was ecstatic to see the water, though a little tentative about its icy temperature.

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