PHOTOS: Traveling the Salinas River, from headwaters to sea.

The Salinas River is beautiful and ugly, welcoming and forbidding, wet and dry. In its 150-plus mile length, the river takes on many identities, and is different things to different people. 

Traveling its entire span was a journey of discovery filled mostly with joy, sometimes misery. But always, there was companionship. 

Co-adventurers Katie Pofahl and Kevin Miller put together a website at salinasriver.org that chronicles the trip with imagery and narrative, and this photo slideshow is a small supplement to the pictures on that site. 

Katie Pofahl's diligent photo-snapping along the way provide the most recent documentation of the state of river. As she took several hundred photos, only a handful of them are posted here.  

The only blank spot in the photo record is a 10-15 mile stretch north of Santa Margarita Lake. At that point, we were moving in and out of sometimes neck-deep water so often that Pofahl had no time to pull her camera in and out of dry safekeeping. 

Fortunately (for me), that part of the trip remains vivid in my mind, but anyone else who wants to see that stretch will have to tackle it themselves. 

Still, this slideshow provides a revealing snapshot of what the river looked like from start to finish in the spring of 2014.