@msolga,
Yeah, so then there was the walk in the woods. The Forest of Nisene Marks (name may be slightly different than that, but not much) sits just above Aptos, a sprawl of a town in the foothills south of Santa Cruz. Nisene was a Norwegian farmer woman or some such, and apparently owned all the land at least up to the ridge some time ago. The land is typical second-growth forest for the region. Redwoods dominate in the fog zone, which blends quickly to a mixture of Douglas fir, brush, manzanita, and maybe the occasional madrone as you move uphill. It's now a park, with 30 or 40 miles of hiking trails all told. Mountain bikes are allowed on the main road, and occasionally trespass onto the foot paths and cause a lot of erosion, especially as the trail bends to follow the countours of the ravines.
I went in not knowing what to expect. When I lived in the area, I always hiked the ravines right around Santa Cruz or went north toward Pescadero and Half Moon Bay or all the way south to Big Sur. The map at the entrance was enticing: two marked waterfalls, and a couple of different points on the ridge that could be accessed by an interlacing web of trails.
Down in the redwoods, it's like walking through a fairy tale. Ground cover is low and green, and in a lot of areas is kept at bay by a mixture of dead fall from the trees and thick carpets of needles. In the flats -- areas of rock filled in by relatively nutrient rich sediment -- ferns abound. There were a couple of hours at first of just walking through the redwoods, threading slowly up a canyon to the west of the main road. Most fords were bridged, so the usual hassle/excitement of crossing swollen streams on down trees and algae-slick rocks was largely absent for most of the ascent. I leap-frogged with a couple of older guys down from San Francisco as they went up slow and steady, and I kept following side paths to explore the ravine, laying down on a beach towel for lunch and a chapter under a cathedral, or fairy ring -- a circle of redwoods that have all grown up from the outlying roots of an older tree that's come down. The effect in these rings is indeed very cathedral like -- the light filters down through the branches of the circle of trees with a regular geometry you don't usually encounter in other types of forest. The effect is especially dramatic around midday, when the sun comes in from a high angle. In morning and evening the forest is largely cast into shadow, and the light takes on a bit of the reddish-brown hue of the bark and the needles on the forest floor.
Ascending to the ridge, with its dense scrabble of trees and brush, is somewhat anticlimactic after the majestic open spaces of the redwood forest, and after a brief pause to look down over the tree tops, it's back down into shadows. This move is hastened by the exuberant growth of poison oak near the ridgeline, and I realize that one of the blessings of the redwood is that some combination of its shade and its acidification of the soil is anathema to the damned leaves-of-three.
At a fork in the trail, by a crossing of the main stream, I run into the guys from San Francisco, finally taking a break. We joke about the apocalypse -- this was supposed to be Judgment Day, according to those nut jobs who'd grabbed the spotlight with their comical prophesy -- and I asked if they thought the side trail up to the waterfall was worth seeing. The younger of the two said he'd been up there a couple of years before, and, hey, why don't we all head up that way.
It was a big winter for storms in California, and the creekside trail was regularly broken by mudslides and freshly fallen trees. It's always interesting to see a redwood that's just come down. The hiker gets a glimpse of the entirely separate community that's living up in the canopy, where branches collect humus and become home to a host of plants and critters. Course, they're still a pain in the ass as you're crawling in the mud under a big trunk, or clambering over it, or scrambling up and then down a steep hill of loose sandstone and mud to get around it. The last hundred yards or so the ravine narrowed and was solidly choked with detritus, and were about ready to give up and turn around when we came into a bowl carved into the mountain. A modest waterfall tumbled into it from about 30 feet up. A mudslide had filled in most of the bowl to the left, and a young trunk had come down against the cliff, it's top resting against the waterfall itself. The shallow pool formed by the fall was about as broad as a suburban swimming pool, and had a sandy bottom in spite of all the mud around. The cliff itself might have been limestone, but my memory of the place and of geology aren't strong enough to say for sure.
I stayed at the falls for a while after the guys left, reading and mulling, and noticed the light was starting to get lower when a young couple showed up, so I left them to it and started back down the mountain. I'd come quite a ways by this point, and from the Xeroxed, hand-drawn map I reckoned it was probably six or seven miles back down, so I headed on my way.
More of the redwood stuff.
As evening started to draw in, I came into a broader valley that had been more developed back in the logging days than the rest of the forest. What had been a house was now a clearing marked by a plaque with a picture of a formal dining room that looked to have been taken in the early part of the 20th century. The trail now followed the old logging railroad, but the rails and ties had been removed and the only material evidence of it was the occasional half-buried steel cable (from switches, perhaps, or structural anchors to keep the rails from slipping downhill in the winter rains?). The slopes were gentler and the ferns more robust here than elsewhere.
At one point, the trail curved between two large trees and on the other side, its high-contrast non-coloring popping out of the greens and reds and browns of the forest like a neon sign, a skunk was going about its business, foraging for insects in the soft dirt of the trail.
I really don't want to get back into the little rental car covered in skunk spray, so I shout hello from about 20 yards, figuring she (for sake of a pronoun) will startle and head back into the forest.
She doesn't respond. Her utter lack of concern at my presence might be due to habituation to people, or she might simply be secure in the knowledge that no one in his right mind fucks with a skunk. Certainly the coloring, in this environment, was the opposite of camouflage. I tried tossing a stick in her direction. Still no response, so I copped a squat on a log and watched her go about her business. It was a few minutes before her foraging took her far enough off the trail that I felt comfortable walking by. She did deign to look up at me once, but gave no sign at all of apprehension.
The rest of the walk was uneventful. The trail, already pretty luxurious, humped up onto the gravel road, and I joined the flow of the dozen or so other people coming off the mountain from other trails. There was a generally meditative feeling among the walkers, though occasionally the shouts of mountain bikers reverberated through the trees.
By the time I reached my car, tucked in over sinuous roots at the bend of a switchback, I was ready to get out of my shoes and socks, grab a beer, and watch the sky go quiet over Seabright Beach.
