Two-Heel Drive

On a lark I created a Google alert for “Henry Coe” the other day, and it’s unearthed another gem: this one from a guy who calls his blog “Wondering Vet” (Vietnam, not veterinary school). He just got home from a five-day outing at Coe:

I’m drawn to the backcountry by the fishing and the physical challenge; however, while there I appreciate the quiet and peaceful setting. The park consists of rolling hills with oak forests, chaparral, manzenita, and other dry country vegetation. Some of the steep protected canyons are lush with green flowering trees. This time of the year the grasses that cover the hill are dry, although there are a few wild flowers. The golden poppies are obvious and beautiful in this dry terrain. About two-thirds of trails and roads that I covered the are steep, some reaching fifteen to twenty percent or more. Some of roads and trails, especially along dry Orestimba Creek, are comfortable and flat. The steep trails present some challenging hiking that equate in difficulty to those in Sierra Nevadas. Most of the park is semi-desolate. I love the place.

He’s also a philosopher/poet (we seem to get a lot of that in Northern California). In any case, it’s cool to find yet another who appreciates the charms of Henry Coe.

Happened upon this blog post by a trail runner who hiked in and camped out at Henry Coe State Park.

China Hole Trail dropped down to (crazily enough), China Hole, the swimming hole on Coyote Creek. Dodging the ubiquitous poison oak, we made our way along the Creekside trail–one of the prettiest sections of the trail we were on all day.

Creekside is a nice little trail — tricky and challenging in places but worth checking out. The bottom of the post links to the ubiquitous Gambolin’ Man.

Coepark.org reports that all fire-damaged areas have been declared open again.

Hat tip to Fedak for passing the news along; he’s packing his gear for a couple days of backpacking.

The only thing easy about Henry Coe State Park is the decision to go there. Easy because you can camp out almost anywhere you want without reserving a campsite. The odds are heavily in your favor that you’ll have much of the park’s 55,000 acres to yourself. I hiked 26 miles across two days over the weekend and saw maybe a dozen people. Camped next to pond with nobody but me and some wild turkeys on the opposite bank.

The plan on Saturday was to hike up to a couple lakes about 10 miles into the park — Coit Lake on the north and Kelly Lake about a mile south of it.

I started out about 8 a.m. in pea-soup fog from the park’s Hunting Hollow entrance. Hunting Hollow is in a deep valley between steep ridges; only way to get out of it is up. Easiest way up is to hang a left on the Lyman-Wilson Trail about a three-quarters of a mile from the parking lot. As Coe hills go, it’s not too bad. On a cool moist morning you might imagine that icy-cold Cokes are available in Hell.

I made my way to a place called Wilson Camp. Nothing left of it but a couple old trailers and old cabins. The trailers looked like a good hard shove would turn ‘em into a pile of kindling. The camp may have seen better days, but it’s got a nice privy and a couple springs nearby.

Not far from here is a major trail junction, with one trail, called Wagon Road, heading due north in my intended direction, and another, Vasquez Road, heading northeast and then southeast. I hiked down what I thought was Wagon Road in thick fog and came to notice the strong Pacific breeze was hitting me on the right side of my face, which would be impossible as I was certain I was heading north. Finally I broke out my compass for the first time since last summer and sure enough, I was going south — on Vasquez Road. I got my map out, double-checked my route and started doubling back. Well, at least I hadn’t walked even further.

On the way back it occurred to me that if you’re fogged in and can’t see nearby landmarks — ridges, waterways, mountain peaks, etc. — you’re essentially flying on instruments. Which means if you have instruments — map and compass — you have to actually use them; otherwise you might as well be hiking blindfolded.

Foggy summer mornings are heaven for shutterbugs because we know all the cool cloud formations will show up when the fog burns off.

A representative shot of the Wagon Road trail. It follows a ridge for miles and miles, offering wonderful views of the sprawling, rough terrain. It’s hilly but mild by Coe standards.

White cones of blooms from a tree along the trail.

My favorite snag of the day.

Even the occasional crag decorates the ridge line.

Good weekend for mariposa lilies. Saw a whole bunch of ‘em.

OK, Coit Lake at long last. Three guys were camped on the opposite shore and were floating around the lake in inflatable tubes. This seemed to me to be a violation of a fundamental rule of nature: floating without beer. Unthinkable. (Hauling beer for 10 miles over these hills would have one benefit: you’d never live to experience the hangover.)

I ended up camping next to a pond down the road from Coit Lake. Almost Waldenesque except for my outbursts of profanity when a certain tent pole refused to do as it was told.

Look, Ma, a Quail!

And a bunny!

And a Deere!

So Sunday morning is much like Saturday: more pea soup. Kelly Lake is back there beyond those old trees.

Happened across this really nice campsite not far from Kelly Lake. I’ll camp there the next time I’m out here. Coit Lake is bigger but Kelly is prettier.

The trail up from Kelly Lake is mucho steep. Actually, of all the hiking I did over two days, this was the only really nasty stretch, and it doesn’t last long, a mile at most.

More fog-burning-off scenery.

Lots o’ dandelions going to seed around the park this weekend.

I headed down the Grizzly Gulch Trail, which is one of the prettiest ones I’ve seen at Coe. It’s a little-used trail, grown over in some places, but it tracks down a gorgeous valley full of trees, wildflowers, streams, occasional rock formations. You could probably camp out here for a week and never see anybody.

But you might see the bobcat. I came up over a rise in the trail and saw the tawny, bobtailed feline leap across the trail into the underbrush. There and gone in one second flat. Couldn’t have been more than 20 yards away — my best bobcat sighting to date.

Deer carcass picked clean by buzzards and others carrion eaters (no wisecracks about members of Congress, OK?). I doubt it’s a mountain lion kill, mainly because I don’t think a lion would leave it out in the middle of a rail.

One of a couple nice ponds along the Grizzly Gulch Trail.

More clouds painting cool pictures.

And if they’re framed by a dead tree, all the better.

So which do you like better, pictures of bucolic countryside….

… or pictures of bucolic countryside with dead-tree branches cleverly inserted into them?

This is the broad meadow looking toward the Hunting Hollow entrance to the park. After 14 miles, I was happy to see any hill I didn’t have to climb. (My feet were even happier.)

Acronym of the week:

PUDS is thru-hiker shorthand for “pointless ups and downs”, referring to the less interesting sections of mountains thru-hikers encounter from time to time; several PUDS in a row are MUDS, which is shorthand for “mindless ups and downs”. (source: whiteblaze.net)

This came to mind Saturday as I was hiking along the "roller coaster" section of Willow Ridge Road in Henry Coe State Park. Except real roller coasters are fun. If there were amusement parks which required you to push your cart to the coaster’s apex by hand, and if you were self-loathing enough to do this as a hobby, you’d have a fair approximation of what it’s like hiking this bit of dirt road.

I decided late Friday night that I had to get out of the house and go on a campout. I’ve often wondered about hiking out to Mississippi Lake at Henry Coe, so this seemed like a good time to give it a try. A cool, breezy day is forecast, with only a 30 percent chance of thunderstorms. Typically a one-third chance of getting stormed upon would all but guarantee getting soaked from above, but since I took all my raingear — which adds a pound an a half to my pack — Murphy’s Law kicked in anyway and delivered a weekend full of ominous-looking clouds but no actual rain.

The route to Mississippi Lake would warm the heart (and feet) of hardcore distance hikers. It’s eleven miles one way with a combined 3500 feet of downhill and 2500 feet of uphill on the way in (tag on another mile to find a campsite); reverse those numbers on the way back. If you’ve been following along you know that Henry Coe has brutal hills complemented by fantastic views; I’ve climbed the worst of these hills and seen the best of the scenery, but nothing quite prepared me for the Roller Coaster. It’s a tad less than four miles, a fine little workout if you parachute onto one end and grab a helicopter ride home from the other. But to hike there, you ascend two butt-kicker ups and descend two toe-jammer downs over the course of nearly seven miles. And then you slog on up and down and up and down and up and down for what feels like forever. The hills aren’t countless; I know because I tallied 20 of them. About five hilltops per mile. Wicked.

OK, let’s look at some pictures.

Witnessing an Andean beast of burden at the park headquarters should’ve been my first clue. Llamas are interesting animals, just never forget they are essentially camels without humps, which means they can have a bit of an attitude.

At this point it’s only six more miles; after a nice trot down a hillside and a stream crossing at Los Cruceros, it’s up the Willow Ridge Trail (steep but gorgeous single-track) and a left turn on Willow Ridge Road. Then the fun begins.

After what seems troublingly similar to the passing of an ice age, Mississippi Lake shows up on the right.

I found a nice campsite perched on a hill overlooking the lake. That’s my shiny new GoLite Hut2 shelter; gotta love that forest green and only 22 ounces. My other tent weighs more than double that. Shaving off pounds sharply reduces the hike-from-hell vibe of this outing. On my first Henry Coe overnighter, I went six miles with 40 pounds. This time I went 12 miles with 21 pounds. I have such ungrateful feet: even with half the load they’re still whining about all those miles.

Quarter moon at dawn. The great thing about dawn is it gives you an excuse to abandon all pretense of a restful night’s sleep and pack up and hike on.

Morning at Mississippi Lake.

Wildflower season’s in full swing.

Took these just before the return trip on the Roller Coaster. I took a picture at the top of each hill to keep my mind occupied. It made the trip bearable but didn’t seem to make the hills any shorter.

This is about as much blue sky as I saw over the course of both days; it was chilly and breezy the whole time, which turned out to be perfect hiking weather.

More wildflowers along the trip down the Willow Ridge Trail on Sunday.

And some white ones…

And some blue ones….

Excellent snag.

The brown speck in the left tire track at just about dead center in this image is a bobcat I saw strolling up Hobbs Road. He trotted up this brutal beast of a hill like he had antigravity paws or something. On maximum zoom it’s possible to make out a animal with no tail and the distinctly feline lower hind legs.

Reckon that’s enough for this weekend. I’m going back to Coe next week for an outing that completes my lightweight backpacking course, so I’m sure I’ll have fresh complaints about the hills to recount then.

Weather last week was wonderful, except when it was gorgeous. I checked the San Jose forecast around Tuesday — blue skies and highs in the 70s through the weekend triggered my inner Boy Scout, which made it impossible to think of anything but a camp-out.

There is an easy way to camp out, which is to drive the car to a campground, pitch your tent, build a fire, toast some marshmallows, pop open a beer, soak up the sound of birds in the trees and critters in the forest, retire to the tent with its cot and pillows from home, and fall asleep serenaded by the sounds of the night.

The hard way is to cram as much as you can stand to carry into a backpack, hike seven miles through dry creeks and canyons to your campsite, pitch your tiny pup tent, twist and turn all night trying to get comfortable sleeping on the ground, serenaded by the sounds of mammalian creatures trying to get into your food supplies.

As Mother Nature’s hostage, I chose the latter.

Saturday morning, I drove as far as the headquarters of Henry Coe State Park, which has some of the most brutal hill hikes in the region but also has some of the most scenic, uh, scenery. From there it was about seven miles or so to a remote notch in a hillside called Hidden Spring.

The months since early June 2005 have mostly been a matter of resting up from my last Henry Coe camp-out in preparation for my next one. The park is simply spectacular in early spring, when the hills are green, the creeks are flowing and the wildflowers are in bloom. I figured, yeah, well, sure it’ll all be brown and blah but dammit, it’s the third weekend in November and it’s not raining, so I’m hitting those trails one last time before the winter rains hit.

I was pleasantly surprised to find an abundance of fall colors, and the usual vistas of rugged hills and ridges. Henry Coe is all ridges — up them and down them till to reach your campsite or pass out trying.

About 2.5 miles from the park headquarters, I hiked down a steep hillside on the Soda Springs trail. The springs used to be a tourist destination many decades ago; there’s nothing down there now but a creek, a broken-up old shack and some kind of stone shelter.

Here’s the stone shelter. From here the trail zigzags across a creek for a mile and comes out at China Hole, the prettiest spot in this section of the park. Don’t try this route in the spring when the creek’s full of water, unless you have an incurable urge to to hike with cold, wet feet for a mile.

One of the puddles at China Hole. This was all under water last spring when I was here.

The China Hole Trail continues up the ridge to the right near here. It’s about two miles to my campsite from here. It’s pretty much all uphill, but only about 600 feet of elevation gain. A cakewalk by Henry Coe standards.

Caught the afternoon sun shining through some leaves.

Found the turnoff to Lost Springs Trail, hiked down about six-tenths of a mile, found my campsite — the privy even had toilet paper!

So I’ve got all my stuff set up by 1 p.m. Nothing to do but kick back and soak up the sights and sounds.

Oh, wait, where’s that Lost Spring?

Ah, found it. It’s about a four-minute walk further down the trail. It looked perfectly clean and drinkable but I was a good Boy Scout and used my water filter.

I took a little afternoon hike, capturing this image of the setting sun illuminating a tree.

One leaf hasn’t gotten the "it’s time to turn brown" memo.

The required dead-tree picture. I saw so many examples of interesting live trees that I didn’t trouble myself with shooting many dead ones this time.

Those are the Day One pictorial highlights. A few other observations:

• I’m reading a movie review in the New Yorker (hey, it’s lightweight and employs the world’s greatest writers; an excellent trail companion) and one passage makes me laugh out loud. The sound of my voice is like a trumpet — that’s how quiet it is out here. I hear voices a couple times and catch a glimpse of somebody’s jacket on the trail; humanity-wise, I’ve got this hillside all to myself.
• A breeze passes through the treetops and dozens of yellow leaves flutter to the ground like the prelude to snowfall. I look down from my magazine awhile later and one of the leaves has come to rest on my thigh.
• The hillside is coated with dry leaves, which crinkle every time an acorn falls. Just beyond my range of vision I hear creatures moving about; probably birds, squirrels, raccoons, etc. At one point I hear a massive rustle of leaves — something big is moving across the hillside, like deer or coyotes, but I see nothing. Friend or foe, I have no idea. But I know they’re out there.
• I cook my dinner after sunset and dine in the dark. All the while I’m hearing rustling in the leaves. I have one of those little lights that straps to the forehead — the beam dies at about six feet out. Every time I shine it in the direction of the noise, it stops. Whatever they are, they’re paying attention.
• I turn in around 7 p.m., figuring this’ll give me about 12 hours to get 8 hours of sleep. After awhile I hear the distinct chattering of raccoons in the general direction of the picnic table, where all my food is encased in a hard plastic bearproof container. "What kind of moron hauls these things to a place with no bears?" they mutter between curses. Answer: a moron who wants to keep the rats, mice and lesser omnivores out of his breakfast. (Most folks keep their chow in a bag hanging from a tree branch, but I’m getting in practice for camping in the Sierra, where anti-bear boxes are required.)
• Early in the morning, around 5 a.m., I hear a shrieking sound, either a bird or a coyote, and the sound of something large moving near the tent. I’m buried so deep in my mummy sleeping bag that I can’t get turned around to take a look until it’s gone. I’m guessing it was a coyote, because I’ve heard birds shout out warnings when the wild canines were lurking about.

Day Two: back to headquarters.

Warm sun feels good after waking up to temperatures in the 40s.

I hike down to a site called Los Cruzeros. From here there’s a rock scramble called the Narrows that loops back to China Hole.

One critter never made it home.

Most of the pools have a thin sheen of ice. This canyon fills with rainwater in the spring, making for a very wet, rocky journey for all who venture out this way.

Back at China Hole, the ice has melted. Four guy were camping near here; they looked really cold. I was fortunate to be moving and carrying about 25 pounds in my pack, so I was plenty warm. But the water in my bottle was fresh-from-the-fridge cold.

From China Hole it’s five miles, uphill all the way, back to the park HQ. This shot looks out into the park from the Corral Trail near the HQ. Henry Coe is a vast place; it stretches to the far peaks in this picture and beyond. It’s easy to see why some folks become so enchanted with the place. It’s pure wilderness about an hour from San Jose. The zones nearest the park entrances have springs, ponds and privies to ease the adjustment to the wilds.

If you’re thinking of hiking at Henry Coe, here’s the best advice I can think of: Stay off the dirt roads and stick to the single-track trails. The roads were built for motor vehicles and are too steep for puny people moving under muscle power. The trails were built with hikers in mind, and the worst of them are only half as bad as the roads.

Also, worry about water: The creeks fill up in early spring, making many passages precarious; then they dry up in the summer, taking away a prime water source. But the park has lots of natural springs that flow all year; you just need to know where they are, and how much water they have in them. The rangers at the park HQ can fill you in. I’ve hiked the meanest, steepest road in the park at the height of summer — even with plenty of water, I don’t recommend it.

But I highly recommend Henry Coe. Just be a good Boy Scout and be prepared.

I proved yesterday that I can walk five miles uphill with 40 pounds of camping gear strapped on. Actually, I sorta knew I could because I’d done it with a bit less weight last month, but I hadn’t done it at Henry Coe State Park, which has some of the steepest trails in the Bay Area. Miles just seem longer at Henry Coe — the downhills make you wish you were going up, the uphills make you wish you were going down. And since the park is situated on a series of mountainous ridges, difficult patches of trail outnumber easy ones by a ratio of about 30 to 1.

Last time I camped out by myself, got lonesome, and figured this time I’d find some people to go with me. So I went to Craig’s List, put "backpacking" in its search engine and happened across the East Bay Backpacking Club, which a couple women were getting organized. The group was so new that it had never actually gone backpacking yet, but the folks I talked to via e-mail sounded like they had tons of trail experience under their feet so I figured what the heck, if they’ve done it three times, they’re more experienced than I am.

Last week I sent a message to the group asking if anybody wanted to do an overnighter at Henry Coe. Two people volunteered — Teresa, the founder of the group, and Lourdes, one of the first to join up. I’m all "hey, the more the merrier" before giving much thought to what it looks like, old married guy me camping in the woods with two women who are not a sister, nun, cousin, or otherwise out of bounds. I picture myself a paragon of openness between guys & gals, but in the trenches I’m a prisoner of social convention, because this feels weird and foreign, like something guys like me just shouldn’t be doing.

Thus, my dilemma: going into the woods alone, risking falling down a hillside and the wild boars finding me before the park rangers do, or getting outside my comfort zone and going backpacking with two people who know what they’re doing but happen to be female. I was determined to go (but avoid becoming pig food), so I figured the latter would be wiser. That judgment turned out correct: I met Teresa and Lourdes at a BART stop, drove to the park, hiked six miles to the campsite on Saturday, hiked five miles back to the parking lot Sunday, dropped ‘em off at the BART — no big deal. They slept in their tents, I slept in mine, everybody got along fine. Nobody broke any legs and no wild pigs were seen.

I still feel a little iffy about it, but I’m sure there’ll be some guys along at the next club outing so we can talk about sports and cars, and belch loudly when no women are nearby. I’d have much preferred to take Melissa along (hey, she’s a much better cook!), but her feet and knees don’t do tough terrain, so everybody has to adapt a bit.

OK, enough gender angst, let’s look at the pictures.

Lourdes, in front, is the strongest hiker of the three. She goes up and down hills with this huge pack and barely breaks a sweat. I spent most of the hike in the middle, with Teresa trailing. Teresa has this Zen-like ability to judge how much energy she’ll need for the entire hike, and to take it slow and easy the whole way and ensure she’s not burned out at the end.

The weather’s fine at Henry Coe — normally it’s already in the upper 90s by this time of year, which makes hiking here a nightmare, but we had one last burst of cool weather last week and it lasted all weekend. Scenery’s not bad, either.

If you ever go backpacking at Henry Coe, it’s best to ask the rangers about the terrain and availability of water and campsites. We were hoping to camp at a cool little site called China Hole, but other campers had gotten there first. The second choice was an area called Poverty Flat, which is about a half-mile up the Coyote Creek. Scenery isn’t quite as spectacular, but there is an outhouse for campers (otherwise you have to poop in the woods and bury the remains, ick).

The park headquarters is at about 2500 feet, and Poverty Flat is at about 1100. The question on our minds is how best to descend that 1400 feet. We could take the Poverty Flat Road, which is steep, dusty and less interesting, but the ranger suggests taking the Fish Trail to the Middle Ridge Trail, which takes us down to a fork of the Coyote Creek. It’s a beautiful hike, shady almost all the way. Still pretty steep, because it’s Henry Coe and all the trails are steep, but not too terribly difficult. Six miles vs. four, but better scenery and an easier descent.

Here’s the Coyote Creek fork, which we had to cross three times before we got to our campsite. Found out again that boots are waterproof only up to the point where the water pours in.

Lourdes and Teresa at the campsite, which was a bit small for three tents. We were about 20 feet from the creek, so the sound of water running was our constant companion.

Some of my stuff: Note the wet boots in the background. My new anti-bear canister has about three days worth of food in it. Melissa cooked up some veggie pasta for me and froze it in chunks that fit right into my new stove pot. The stove burns like the blazes — had to teach myself to turn the flame way down to avoid burning my chow, which was tasty as all get-out. Note to married guys: if you can’t take your wife along, count yourself lucky if you can take her cooking along.

As night falls, the crickets and frogs raise a racket like you wouldn’t believe. Fortunately, I’m tired enough to sleep through Armageddon. I wake up in the middle of the night, though, and they’ve all gone to sleep. There’s no wind and it’s quiet as a tomb out there. Then I hear an owl hoot-hooting, and a second one hoot-hooting in return. You go through all this sweat and strain to be awake at that moment, when you’re the only human who can hear those owls making chitchat in the treetops.

Sunday morning., I’m up at dawn because I can’t sleep a wink when there’s sunlight in my tent. I go scouting for the entrance to our return trail. It requires yet another creek crossing, which we all had enough of on Saturday. And it requires climbing 1300 feet in eight-tenths of a mile, the perfect way to ruin the effects of a good night’s sleep. I make an executive decision: we’ll go up the "easy" way, which covers that elevation in in about a mile and a half.

After taking 19 zillion pictures of pretty wildflowers, I thought a good ol’ dandelion deserved a shot.

Back at the campsite, my fellow campers haven’t emerged from their nylon cocoons. But the sound of me stumbling around will wake ‘em up soon enough.

Around 10 a.m. we break camp and head down the Creekside Trail to China Hole, which is at the confluence of two forks of the Coyote Creek. There’s water here all year, which is good to know in the summer, when Henry Coe dries up like a sponge that’s been left out in sun too long.

With scenery like this, the single China Hole campsite is always in demand on weekends when the weather’s pleasant. The water’s deep enough for swimming in a few places, but you have to get across the water to the campsite. Also: no outhouse. So if you come to the park thinking China Hole is your place to go, Poverty Flat is an excellent alternative (but there are many more — it’s a huge park).

An excellent rock at China Hole. Looks like the mouth of a rattlesnake getting ready to strike.

Along the China Hole Trail — you can judge how high you are by the nearby ridges. As long as the ridges are still way up there, you’ve got a ways to go.

Teresa loved this sign: only 26 miles back to Coe Headquarters, if you leave out the decimal point.

The grass has all turned golden now — creating an interesting visual contrast between the ground and the sky. This year is the first time I’ve actually walked over the hills as they are changing color. It’s an amazing transformation, much better to see close-up. The green hills of spring are OK, but I prefer the color of summer. This is why they call California the Golden State.

Coe Headquarters, just ahead. Or should I say just uphill. Because on this route, it’s all uphill. I know that because my legs are still reminding me this morning.

Few things I’ve figured out after this weekend in the woods:

• When you’re backpacking, social convention is just one more thing weighing on your shoulders.
• Anything can happen in the wilderness, and the bad things can kill you.
• Lots of people go backpacking solo, but it’s folly for a rookie.
• If you’ve got folks who are willing to come along for the hike (and, heaven forbid, go for help if something goes wrong), just bring ‘em along.