My New Year's Eve pilgrimage to Cape Mendocino began at mid-day -- this year's route crossing Bear River Ridge to Bunker Hill and taking a left where The Wildcat changes name to Mattole Road, then drops down to Cape Town before the final climb up the massive headland's south shoulder.

On no other earthly perch have I felt the globe so obviously revolve as here. The sun does not so much set; no, the world simply turns away.

Cape Mendocino - the "elbow" of California

The landscape on the way to Cape Mendocino lent itself to panoramas, especially on the high prairies of Bear River Road with distant snow capped ridges above the Eel RIver east of Rio Dell.

A simple dirt road is home to more cattle than automobiles in pastures sloping down to the Bear RIver valley.

The old one-room Cape Town school house nestles in mist along the Bear River flowing from the east.

To the west of Cape Town, fog obscures where the Bear River meets the Pacific.

Looking down from the south side of Cape Mendocino, sunset is still about an hour away in a place where the day and the year seem to end at last light, not at some arbitrary number called midnight.

North of the Mattole Road straightaway, Sugar Loaf rock looms from coastal fog, its top at about the level of the cape that I hiked across last year.

Like a lingering benediction, the sky faded very slowly over the Pacific, almost as if the Creator of it all blessed the thankful prayers of a witness to the last light of another year.