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National Park Mystery Spot 48 Revealed: Never Try To Swim There

Submitted by Bob Janiskee on August 31, 2012 - 1:45am

To solve the Mystery Spot 48 puzzle you had to figure out what named place in which of America’s 397 national parks can be identified by interpreting the following clues:

Greenhead mallards waddle and quack
And look just fine on my roasting rack.

I had to run my boat ashore to keep it from sinking.
They warned me about that storm; oh, what was I thinking?!

The answer is Drakes Beach at California’s Point Reyes National Seashore.

Located on a peninsula in Marin County about 40 miles north of San Francisco, Point Reyes National Seashore is a spectacularly scenic and heavily visited park renowned for its long beaches and thunderous ocean breakers, beautiful headlands, tall cliffs, lagoons and esteros, forested ridges, bushy hillsides, marshes, open grasslands, and watchable wildlife. Point Reyes is a greenline park that combines federal and nonfederal land, including a pastoral zone where leaseholders graze beef and dairy cattle. The 80 miles of coastline that this park protects are an extraordinarily valuable ecological resource.

Drakes Beach is a magnet for Point Reyes visitors, who find it a great place to stroll, fly a kite, toss a Frisbee, enjoy a picnic, or fish. Drakes is not a good beach for sunbathing or swimming because of the cold water, cool temperatures, bracing wind, frequent fog, and muddy quality of the sand.

Here’s is how the clues lead to the answer:

Greenhead mallards are male mallard ducks, and male ducks are called drakes.

If you have had to run your storm-battered boat ashore in order to keep it from sinking, you have had to beach it.

Congratulations to the Traveler readers who figured this one out: Moonpie, David Crowl, celbert, Caprice Kutz, and ed-123. All have qualified for our monthly prize drawing and a chance to win a signed copy of Stephen R. Brown's beautiful photo book, the Jewel of the Mall: The World War II Memorial.