I spent many a late evening at the Knoll in La Jolla, CA with my friends from high school. It’s been a while since I’ve been back, but when a friend came to visit recently, I told him about it and wanted to take him there because I knew he’d fall in love with the place. We weren’t able to make it, instead spending a leisurely afternoon at the Self Realization Fellowship above Swamii’s and meandering through the shops in Encinitas. I was itching to see it again, so I decided to drive down this morning and while I was there, I figured that it would be a good time to take some shots. After doing so, I remembered the Ansel Adams shot of Scripps Pier – I’m not sure where Ansel was when he took the photo, but it was probably somewhere near the Knoll.
I also reminisced about the time that Stephanie and I decided that it was a brilliant idea to hike down the cliffs to the beach below, only to find (many, many hours of walking later) that we had locked her keys in the car. Fortunately, I knew someone who worked at a cafe down the mountain (again, we walked…) who loaned us his car, but I digress…
The thing about the Knoll is that you really have to know about it to find it. In other words, no one really stumbles upon it. I have no idea how we came to discover it, but I’m incredibly glad that we did.
The Knoll is a place for admiring beauty from above, away from the crowds that tend to gather at the beaches down below. A place for solitude and reflection, or when you’re 16 and think you’re smarter than everyone else, a place to hang out with friends talking and smoking cigarettes (a habit I abandoned more than a dozen years ago).
