Every New Year's Eve I drive the 38 miles from my front door to where Cape Mendocino meets the Pacific Ocean. That elbow of California angling into the sea looks like the bow of the boat for the lower 48 states, first landfall to meet every storm assaulting the middle of the continent -- and last landfall for the setting sun.

Cape Mendocino looms seaward with Sugar Loaf Rock connected like a bowsprit to this isolated outpost of the mainland. My hike traversed the cape for about a mile along the sunlit band at the right middle.

The aerial photo was taken a few years ago with a Leica M6 and 35mm Summicron on Fuji Velvia film.

Since publishing “Millennium Last Light” about the last sunset before Y2K, I have made the annual pilgrimage back to the haunting landscape of the Lost Coast, sharing its lonely witness to the last light of the year. Officially, December 31st sunset is at around 4:50pm. Narrow roads and steep terrain make for at least a one-hour drive. When cameras are in the car for this drive, past experience has confirmed that three hours for me is more likely. Add another hour or two for good measure, and I started out at one o'clock for the the last sunset of 2006.

The "Wildcat" is the road heading south out of Ferndale, California towards Cape Mendocino and the King Range. The name changes to the Mattole Road somewhere around the high prairies.

Olympus E-330 and polarizer filter with Zuiko 14-54mm/2.8-3.5 at 14mm zoom, f9, 1/40th second, mirror lockup and tripod.

Besides hitting the road early, I left better prepared, too. Instead of the splendid Olympus C-8080 as my backup camera, I had a brand new extra E-330 in the camera bag. As great as the 8080 is, especially with its remarkable zoom lens, the interface to the camera is a lot different from the 330. One digital camera interface is difficult enough to deal with, so when Adorama in New York lowered the price considerably, it was time to standardize camera bodies with a second E-330. With two identical bodies, it was handy to to keep different lenses on both cameras to use according to the situation.

Sheep graze in meadows that slope down to the mouth of the Bear River, just north of Cape Mendocino. Sun in the west provides nice backlight along with the Leica telephoto and FourThirds lens adapter. By shooting in RAW mode, I was able to "process" the RAW file in Photoshop once for overall best exposure and a second time with overexposure that showed the lamb's dark face. By combining the two files, a Photoshop layer mask let me overlay just the shadow detail from the overexposed layer.

Olympus E-330. Leica APO 70-180mm/2.8 Vario-Elmarit at about 150mm, 1/500th second, Aperture Mode, ISO 100.

Two reasons for an early start on this eighth annual outing since 1999: lots of great photo opportunities along the way, and a plan to hike the cape as well as to photograph it. I had sought many vantage points for the last sunsets of years past, but had never been on the huge cape itself. My Lowepro Sing 200 bag had proven itself on numerous outings, so I added a cheese sandwich to the seventeen pounds of gear, slung my tripod bag over the other shoulder, climbed a fence alongside the road and set out to the edge of the world.

Ocean fog starts to climb the King Range at the same time as I started my climb along Cape Mendocino. Kings Peak is a few miles south of the cape and rises to over 4,000 feet elevation just three miles from the ocean.

Olympus E-330 with Zuiko 14-54mm/2.8-3.5 at 54mm zoom, f8, 1/15th second, mirror lockup and tripod.

Only a few mule deer and a redtail hawk shared the fading light with me. I sat down and leaned back against the sloping grassland, pillowed by the camera bag on my back and enjoying the tasty sandwich. Temperature in the low 50's was perfect for strenuous walking and occasional jumps across a surprising number of streams flowing down the hillsides. With good boots keeping my feet dry I couldn't ask for better conditions.

Well, maybe the light could have been a bit more dramatic. A fog bank along the ocean horizon made for an early sunset, with just a bit of pink coming through a half hour later, a few minutes after official end-of-day. However, Cape Mendocino itself is always drama enough. On the other coast a million people were getting ready for a ball to drop over Times Square. On this coast, the really big ball sank beyond the horizon to the fanfare of crashing waves and quiet appreciation. All this for an audience of one with a couple of little cameras – I can hardly wait for next year.

Sugar Loaf Rock connects to the mainland along a natural narrow causeway at low tide. Using the aerial photo at the top of this page for reference, my grassy vantage point is about half way up the cape at the center of the photo. The road is at the far right of the sunlit fields, from which I hiked to where just a hint of sunlight colors the grass below a tiny white spot, the beacon light that warns mariners from a dangerous headland that is best visited on foot.

Olympus E-330, Zuiko 7-14mm/4, 7mm at f22, 0.4 second, Aperture Mode, ISO 100.