Two-Heel Drive

Chalk this up to market capitalism: when you hike for pay you do things like:

• Go solo because you can’t afford to be distracted.
• Walk fast but stop constantly to take scads of meticulously framed pictures in the hope that one might be good enough to commit to paper.
• Constantly explore new places and write detailed, informative blog entries about the experience (committing it to pixels pays off in time saved writing the paid piece).

When you hike for fun you might:

• Hang out and share extravagant tall tales with your favorite hiking homies.
• Go somewhere you’ve gone a half-dozen times before.
• Dash off a few snapshots of hit-or-miss quality so you don’t slow the group’s progress.
• Take as long as you damn well please to get to the point of this week’s hike write-up.

OK, so now that I’ve run off all the gimme-the-facts-now-dammit Googlers, we can get down to uh, not business. I went on another FOMFOK hike at Monte Bello Open Space Preserve. We hiked a tad under four hours (with voluminous rest breaks), did the Stevens Creek Nature Trail, lunched at the Backpackers’ Camp, returned. Heard a rattlesnake, consumed wild berries, soaked up gorgeous vistas, got burnt if we forgot sunscreen.

This week’s hike convinces me there is no bad time to hike Monte Bello. If you can get a good hike in under a blazing August sun, the rest of the year is just peachy.

So let’s look at some pictures. (View the Flickr album if you’d rather skip the commentary).

Mike leads the way: This right turn goes down to the Stevens Creek Nature Trail, which is shady, lovely, and tracks right through the San Andreas Fault (don’t worry, there hasn’t been a major break along the fault here in 100 years, though it did kinda sorta destroy a whole city when it happened).

Along the Stevens Creek Trail. We had a huge group by FOMFOK standards, 15 in all, though I suspect the counts will fall off when word gets around that I’ve started hiking with them again. (I keep thinking when I post people’s pictures it’ll catapult them to global fame and fortune but what actually happens is their creepy boyfriends from 17 years ago find them online and restraining orders ensue. Sorry.)

We forced many a mountain biker to pick their way through our throng.

Pausing along a very steep road to the top of Monte Bello Ridge. This is a beast of a climb in August, but all survived.

Somebody said these are wild buckwheat. When you go solo you can take your time and get these pictures in focus. Proving there’s more to life than photo composition.

Nearing the ridge.

Made in the shade near the Backpackers’ Camp.

Some of us when over to Black Mountain and enjoyed the view.

Back at the campsite, Mike shares wild elderberries. You’d have to consume about 300 before you noticed you’d eaten anything, but they were a bit tasty (though a bit tart).

The whole mob.

You know what they say: when you get to the fork in the trail, take it.

Mike, proving he was a black bear in a previous life, goes for the wild blackberries.

The berries start out green and get shiny red before they blacken at full ripeness.

Rattlesnake observance. One was hiding near the reeds, rattling up a storm as long as people milled about nearby. The guys assured me they were beyond rattlesnake striking range.

This old bit of dead tree always invites a snapshot.

One last turn in the trail before we head back to the parking lot.

More Monte Bello links for your clicking pleasure:

• Ron AKA Grey’s pictures.
  
• The other Ron’s GPS data and snake rattle pix.
• My Monte Bello park profile.
  
• My previous Monte Bello hikes.
  
• Midpeninsula Open Space District page.
• Bay Area Hiker page.
• Trailspotting hike following our same route.

This is a first: meeting not one but two Two-Heel Drive readers for the first time on the same day. I decided to tag along with Mike Wimble’s FOMFOK gang because they were heading out to my all-time favorite Bay Area park: Sunol Wilderness. Yes, it’s madness to go there in August, but we had nice breezes, relatively mild heat and gorgeous, smog-free skies. Mostly made up for the punishing climbs up out of the Sunol canyon.

First, the readers:

Beth, who comments as Baychic around here (note you must be a Xanga member to see her page), signed up with FOMFOK a few months back and decided it was time to go along on one of Mike’s hikes before getting booted from the list (Mike is decent and generous to a fault but he is a stern custodian of his e-mail list: if you don’t come and hike, you get bounced). Beth is tall and thin, which I always translate as “will stand zero chance of keeping up with her on the trail.”

Ron, AKA Grey, was the first guy to arrive after me at the Sunol parking lot. He told me he found Mike’s group from a link here. He lets his geek flag fly at this copious compendium of links. He even has a South Bay hiking blog.

Enough introductions. On to the hike. Fearless leader Mike apparently had not endured any significant bodily discomfort of late, so he opted to go straight to Flag Hill, one of the meanest ascents at Sunol. Actually, “mean” is a bit unkind. It’s steep, but it’s also a nice single-track trail with abundant views on the way up.

That’s Donna Jones throwing her arms wide for the world. Or something. She covers Watsonville for the Santa Cruz Sentinel and is an old pal of ex-Sentinel reporter Dan White of “Cactus Eaters” fame. We have the same boss, ultimately, and we often talk shop on FOMFOK hikes. But not with other people around, it just bores them silly.

Mike, with his back to the spectacular Sunol backdrop.

My latest thing is: get people in the picture. I started with this excellent Flag Hill Trail snag.

Axis of Evil, meet Nexus of Niceness. (Mike with FOMFOK co-chair Kathy).

Here we are at the top of the Flag Hill Trail. Approaching hikers ask us “which way to Little Yosemite.” Only, about three miles back the way you came.

Hikechic flashes her winning smile at the Flag Hill Rocks. Kristen, right, is always trying to talk Mike into taking longer, more strenuous hikes. Mike always explains that he hikes for fun, not strain.

Dirk studies his map at the Flag Hill rocks.

The other Ron on our hike, adjusting his shades at the moment, is a former San Francisco State biology professor (evolution is his niche, as I recall). When Mike and I broke out our iPhones on one rest stop, he noted “humanity has gone from hunting and gathering to pointing and clicking.” OK, you had to be there.

Ron munches an apple at a bench near one end of the Eagle View Trail, which dives down into a canyon along a nasty-steep hillside where one slip will plunge you into a tangle of nasty brambles that will probably save your life but make you wish you were dead. It’s one of my favorite Sunol trails.

Mike needs dramatic imagery for his annual hike DVD. He’s still working on the 2007 edition, so this one might take awhile to see the light of day.

So those are this week’s highlights. More links:

This’ll be the last one I do for the San Jose Mercury News.

Tucked into a remote section of the Santa Cruz Mountains south of La Honda, the park is one of three grouped nearby. The other two - Sam McDonald County Park and Memorial County Park - have far more amenities (car-camping sites, restrooms, etc.) but don’t have Pescadero Creek’s trails.

Situated deep in the boonies, Pescadero Creek’s two trail heads have zero creature comforts, which probably explains the dearth of hikers. Still, hardy trekkers could hardly ask for a better setting: Well-marked, nicely graded trails zigzag through a redwood forest making a remarkable recovery from the logging era. Add it to your must-hike list.

Read the whole park profile.

I made a snap judgment Wednesday to check out Mission Peak at sunset, which I had been fixing to get ready to do for ages. Winehiker Russ loves to lead this hike (just under six miles with 2,000 feet of elevation gain), and now I see why. It’s the same ol’ sweaty slog to the top, but the fading light casts a glow on the hill that you never see at any other time of day; it even causes shade in a few places, imagine that. The sunset itself its just OK on a cloudless night — it can be spectacular on partly cloudy days — but the light show gets much better as the sky turns from purple to black. And if you pick a full moon night, you can stroll down without a headlamp.

Yeah, I took pictures:

Even the cow pictures come out better this time of the evening.

Even with the hills pretty much browned over, the peak looks better in the evening because it’s the only time when the sun illuminates the rocky sections just below the summit.

Speaking of rocks, these were very photogenic in this light.

I took this just a few minutes before the sun fell below the horizon. I planned on taking 90 minutes to reach the top exactly at sunset but didn’t calculate the need for picture taking and rest breaks. Even with my timing off by a few minutes, I still had some nice shots.

Fellow hikers goof off with their cameras. There were about a dozen people up there.

Full moon rises over the Diablo range.

More summit shadows.

Really liked this one.

Lights of Alameda County looking north toward San Francisco begin to flicker in the fading light.

Shot this with a 15-second time exposure, with the camera resting on a fence post near the cattle guard high on the peak.

Another 15-second exposure, facing in the opposite direction, with some Photoshop tweaks to lighten it up a tad.

The walk back is the best part — with the sounds of night creatures raising their usual after-dark ruckus. I even heard a couple coyotes yelping back and forth at each other; a bit scary at first till you realize it’s not somebody screaming bloody murder up the trail.

As is always the case at Mission Peak, you need to be ready for a cold, windy experience at the summit, even in the summertime. It was pleasant Wednesday but it can be all over the map. Just take a jacket along.

More Mission Peak links:

• My park profile, with hard, harder and hardest hike suggestions.
• My previous Mission Peak hikes.
• My Flickr pix | everybody else’s.
• Bay Area Hiker’s Mission Peak page.
• Winehiker Russ’s Mission Peak moonlight hike.

I’m finally going to get around to checking out Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, which has two sections in the woods near Felton in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I’ve been to Cowell’s Fall Creek Unit a couple times (hikes here and here | Flickr pix here.) but haven’t gotten to the park’s main unit.

Lots of of folks have posted Cowell-related linkage:

• BAHiker.com has Cowell covered.
• Redwood Hikes has great pictures and trail suggestions. (This is a great Web site; buy their maps and help ‘em keep it up.)
• Virtual Parks has great maps (though you’d be well advised to just buy the same maps at the park because they’re too huge for squeezing onto standard printer paper).
• State of California’s Henry Cowell page.
• Santa Cruz State Parks page notes the Zayante Indians once lived there.
• Kevin Gong and his friends went splashing through the San Lorenzo River a few years back.
• Mountain Parks Foundation lists activities (such as: Guided Tours of the Ancient Redwood Grove, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays).
• Wikipedia also has it covered. Trivia: The highest points are far enough above sea level to support fairly unique chaparral communities known as “elfin forests”.
• Flickr pix, 1,419 tagged to date. (The place is pretty in winter).
• Yelp reviews give the down and dirty. Favorite quote: “i don’t know about you, but i absolutely cannot camp without beer. i need to be drunk enough to psyche myself out into peeing into bushes, sleeping outdoors, dealing with spiders and spending concentrated amounts of time with nature.” Seems the rules about no alcohol in the campgrounds are strictly enforced.

Looks like the main attraction in the summer is wading/swimming in the San Lorenzo River. Or, in my case, falling in. Should be interesting.

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I covered a slice of Pescadero Creek a couple weeks ago but I knew I’d have to come back. The park delights my inner wannabe social historian — mercilessly logged by previous generations, now hiked by few who realize how remarkable the turnaround has become. Most of the second-growth forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains have been parks so long that it’s hard to tell they stand on former industrial sites.

Not so at Pescadero Creek, which is populated with massive stump after massive stump, many right next to the trails. And yet it’s also populated with grove after grove of spindly young redwoods busily putting a forest back on these hills. Many are right next to each other (and many grow out of the stumps, which is why it’s so hard to kill off a redwood forest).

You can’t walk out of these woods a pessimist about our species’ capacity to clean up its messes and learn from past mistakes. The injury and recovery are steps apart.

Mind you, Pescadero Creek is mostly trails. No facilities at the trailheads (not even any maps to guide your way, though there is one big map at a trail board near the Hoffman Creek Trailhead, which is, incidentally, the best place to start out from; the Tarwater Trailhead is just too far out of the way. I’ve posted a map at the bottom).

So, about Sunday’s hike: I did a 12-mile traverse loop starting out from the Hoffman Creek trailhead. Route: Old Haul Road > Pomponio Trail > Brook Trail > Bear Ridge Trail > Canyon Trail > Tarwater Trail > Pomponio Trail > Shaw Flat Trail > Old Haul Road.

Lots of pictures this week, let’s get to ‘em:

One of the giant stumps along the Old Haul Road. It’s just an old logging road, still paved, but if you’ve only got a mile or two in you, wandering up and down the Haul is a pleasant stroll.

The turnoff to Pomponio Trail is about .8 mile. Before long there’s a crossing at the Pescadero Creek, which runs all year.

Water’s low enough now to tiptoe across some old logs, but if you try this crossing in spring or winter you’ll probably have to wade across.

There’s a pleasant meadow at Worley Flat, no doubt the site of a former homestead. My hike topped out at about 1,300 feet, so the climbing wasn’t all that terrible.

Few wildflowers remain after the Fourth of July. These look like fiddlenecks. (They are sticky monkey flowers).

I did have one notable diversion not far from here: There’s a split in the Pomponio Trail where an old logging road disappears up the hill while the single-track trail obviously continues nearby. I got it into my head there must be something interesting up the old logging road, so I walked and walked and walked, uphill the whole way, on this unmarked trail.

Saw an excellent “fairy ring” grove of redwoods, noticed two deer grazing together — a doe and a buck, which had a big chunk of its antlers missing. I kept thinking the trail must come out somewhere, till I saw this:

I walked on a bit more but started getting a little worried about having strayed beyond the park’s boundaries. I turned back when a split in the trail fairly screamed “this is how idiots get lost.” It added about three miles that were among the best of the day.

Some of the aforementioned redwoods in the fairy ring. The two deer were back where I’d seen them before … must’ve been some good grazing around there.

Once I got back on track, I headed over to the next turn at the Brook Trail, one of the nicest paths through the park.

This cutaway had me envisioning Indiana Jones trying to run through while the gap was opening and closing every three seconds as he fled enraged, poison-dart-shooting forest dwellers.

Can’t help taking a picture of colorful s.

Peeling madrone bark is always photogenic.

Egads, the Headless Horsewoman!

I followed the signs to the Sierra Club Hikers Hut at Sam McDonald County Park. It’s kind of a disappointment if you can’t walk in, cook yourself some dinner and sip wine by the fireplace.

The views nearby are spectacular.

From the Hut I headed back downhill to the Bear Ridge Trail, which I took to the Canyon Trail, which is the most fascinating path in the park because of its mix of old and new redwoods.

These are some of the young ones. They grow like crazy if the climate’s right and people leave them alone.

One of the old ones. Must’ve been too far from the nearest road to cut down profitably. Only a few of these amazing giants remain — just enough to reward the effort of hiking deep into the woods.

Interesting geological happening: oil seeping into a creek, aptly dubbed Tarwater. The Tarwater Loop is probably the second-best hike at Pescadero, after the Canyon Trail.

On the return half of the loop I stopped by the Shaw Flat Trail Camp — the sites I saw looked cramped and ill-suited to tent pitching, though there may be better ones. Also, it’s a very long walk to get water at the Pescadero Creek.

Speaking of the creek, here’s my second crossing of the day.

I saw this flower growing on the Old Haul Road near the end of my hike.

So that’s about it. I never made it to the Butano Ridge Loop, which looks like a nice leg-burner over 10 miles to about 2,200 feet. Lots of hiking to be had in Pescadero Creek.

Pescadero Creek links:

• My first hike at Pescadero.
• Random Curiosity’s Pescadero hike.
• A weekly Walker hike at Pescadero.
• San Mateo County Parks page.
• County parks map. (free PDF)
• Virtual Parks shaded relief map. ($1 to download; worth every penny).
• Redwood Hikes Pescadero Creek hike.
• Mondo map of trails in Pescadero, Portola, Memorial and Sam McDonald parks. ($6.95, from Redwood Hikes, above)
• Kevin Gong’s hike.

Here’s a Google map for the Hoffman Creek trailhead:

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From this morning’s Mercury News:

If you’ve got a mind to do one crazy thing this summer, try hiking in the hot sun at Monte Bello Open Space Preserve.

The park in the Santa Cruz Mountains west of Los Altos Hills is vista-rich in all seasons, but it has a certain visual splendor in early summer — when the green forests provide an excellent contrast to the golden hills — that tempts a hiker to venture out on warm days more wisely spent in a cool redwood forest.

Read the rest.

Add Pescadero Creek County Park to your must-hike list, if it isn’t there already. It’s remote, quiet, full of ambitious young redwoods and a smattering of really old ones that, oddly enough, survived the steam-powered saws of outrageous fortune.

If you’ve hiked next door at Portola Redwoods State Park or the neighboring San Mateo County parks — Sam McDonald and Memorial — then you pretty much know the second-growth redwood vibe. Now matter how grouchy I get from working all week in an industry whose operative description is “smoking death spiral,” walking in these regenerated forests cheers me up. If the redwoods can come back, maybe people will someday read newspapers again.

Could happen. I’m not betting the rent on the idea, but I suspect lovers of redwoods weren’t exactly brimming with optimism 100 years ago when all these hills were clear-cut.

Pescadero is a hike-in park; you can’t drive to its interior, unless you’re dropping off scofflaws at the county jail (an oddity that adds to the place’s charm). There’s only one trail head with a parking lot; otherwise you walk in from Portola, Memorial, or Sam McDonald.

So, anyway, my hike: I started at the lone parking area at Tarwater Loop Trail Head, which is at an optimal elevation of just over 1,000 feet — no matter how far you march down into the woods, you never have to worry about climbing more than 1,000 feet on the final return leg. The parking lot is at the end of Camp Pomponio Road (which is about a quarter mile past the Portola State Park entrance on Alpine Road, if you’re coming from Skyline Boulevard). From here you’ve got two options:

• Into the woods from the trail near the parking lot.
• Crossing the road and crossing a meadow for about a mile before entering the timber.

I did the former, but I’d recommend the latter, so you can finish your hike in the shade vs. the sun. Trails hiked: Tarwater, Pomponio, Bear Ridge, Canyon, Tarwater; miles: 8 or so.

Let’s see some pictures.

Trail board at the Tar Water Loop Trail Head. It’s all downhill from here. Coming back this way is shadier, but it might be a bit steeper than the sunny route.

This immense Douglas-fir is one of my favorite trees in these hills.

This looks like an old-growth redwood that somebody neglected to cut down. Note the odd elbow-shaped branch over at the right; I wonder if it dates to the 1906 earthquake, which caused quite a few trees in these parts to take strange turns.

Still wildflowers happening this year, especially in the shade.

And a few berries. Actually the woods around here fill up with edible berries later in the summer.

The redwoods get thicker the farther you get down the Tarwater Trail. They’re really growing like weeds here … I took this picture mainly to convey how dense they are.

Tarwater Loop Trail bottoms out at the Pomponio Trail, which heads back uphill after you cross a bridge over a creek. Just under a mile up, there’s a key trail junction that gave an option of hiking deeper into the park on Pomponio Trail, or heading in the general direction of where I started out. I started heading back on the Bear Ridge Trail, which connected to the Canyon Trail. These two trails are extremely remote and populated with the stumps of countless giants cut down in the logging era. Bear Ridge and Canyon again prove that you have to go deep to find the best trails.

A burnt trunk on the Bear Ridge Trail.

The spider webs on Redwood trunks always offer cool picture-taking opportunities.

Clovers grow near a creek where I paused for lunch at the bottom of the Canyon Trail.

The Tarwater Creek doesn’t have much water in it right now, but it’s probably a gusher in the winter. I imagine this crossing must be waded across.

Once I got back to the Tarwater Loop, I turned left and headed back uphill toward the parking lot.

A few sun-loving wildflowers survive as well.

Old shacks are oddly photogenic.

These examples of “farewell to spring” were everywhere — especially along the road to the parking lot.

The last mile and a half track through a pretty meadow … though it is a bit warm in the sun, which is why I suspect it might be better to start out this way rather than finish up in the sun. (This, of course, assumes you start out in the morning. If you start out in the afternoon with the idea of finishing around dusk, this might be a nice return leg).

When I finished I bumped into Mike Wimble of FOMFOK fame, who was rambling about with some geocaching buddies of his, who note there are quite a few caches along the Tarwater Trail, if you know where to look. I hiked with Mike and company on the Tarwater section last summer.

Here’s a Google map if you feel like trying this hike:

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In this morning’s Mercury News:

Huddart County Park, built on a Santa Cruz Mountains hillside west of Woodside, is better known for family reunions and Fourth of July barbecues than hikes. The racket of car engines and rowdy kids takes it off many veterans’ must-see lists, but the main gripe about Huddart dissolves within minutes of venturing into the woods beyond the party zone.

The farther you go, the more likely you’ll have a vibrant forest of redwood, oak and madrone mostly to yourself (you might have to share with a few joggers and equestrians). A stroll to the neighboring Phleger Estate promises one of the nicer redwood hikes on the Peninsula.

Read the whole thing.

So, how did I end up strolling through the blazing sun at Monte Bello Open Space Preserve after I told everybody yesterday I was hitting the redwoods at Pescadero Creek County Park?

Two things, both motivated by greed: 1) Pescadero Creek was closed for “red flag danger” (it’s open again today) and I wasn’t interested in getting fined for hiking in a park that’s been closed for safety reasons; and 2) I’ve had this crazy idea brewing in my brain to write a column about a counterintuitive summer hike … one where you embrace the sun rather than avoid it. The notion would dwell in the mental boonies where it belonged so long as nice sane hikes like Pescadero Creek were available for scouting.

Pescadero Creek is not easy to get to: you take Page Mill Road for about a thousand hairpin turns up to Skyline Boulevard, then take Alpine Road to just past the turn-off to Portola Redwoods State Park, and navigate a nasty one-lane road that is allegedly paved for another mile or so — if you get to the parking lot at the Tarwater Trail head and find out you won’t be hiking there today, you’re bound to think “well, dammit, I’m hiking somewhere around here.”

Just about anyplace else on earth, you’d be screwed, but in this neck of the woods there are so damn many parks and trails that you feel a bit like Robin Williams in that scene from “Moscow on the Hudson” where the profusion of coffee choices knocks him out cold.

Well, not exactly but anyway: I talked myself into the “sun worshiper hike” mainly because I needed a) something to write about for the next column; and b) Monte Bello was the nearest columnworthy park that I hadn’t already written about. (Aren’t you glad I’m filling you in on the minutiae of my editorial decisions? What else is a blog good for?)

So, about my Monte Bello Open Space hike (a blog is also good for taking six paragraphs to get to the point, because there’s no editor to ruin all your fun): You really can hike there in the summer, even if you’re not desperate for column copy. You just have to:

• Slather on a gallon of sun screen.
• Take about twice as much water as you’d haul on a shady hike
• Wear comfy clothes that cover but breathe so they don’t make you hotter.
• Walk really slowly when climbing hills to avoid overheating.

Fine, but is Monte Bello really worth all that? Yeah. Really, I’m not just trying to talk myself into it.

I’ve hiked at Monte Bello at least a half-dozen times, but always either with somebody else or with something else in mind rather than soaking up the experience of being there (it’s a nice link in a grand loop through the nearby open space preserves). This was the first time I really paid attention to what I was seeing. Let’s let the pictures do the talking for awhile here:

The view of Stevens Creek Canyon from near the parking lot: it’s one of the best in the Santa Cruz Mountains because it’s right on the edge of the oak woodlands/chapparal to the east and the conifer forest to the west. The green/gold contrast is most striking when the hills have the shimmering vibe of early summer, before the late-season brown-out kicks in. There is a seductive beauty here that entices you to hike right out into it regardless of the weather.

But from here you can also hike down into the pleasant shade of the Stevens Creek Nature Trail.

I believe this is an elegant brodeia (some think it’s an Ithuriel’s spear, but a couple others back me up on this one) Quite a few were growing on the nature trail.

Most of these oak woodland areas are lovely to walk in, but a nightmare to photograph, especially on sunny days, which overexpose every unshaded pixel of the picture.

This must be a Douglas-fir. It has an odd split in it. (When all else fails in the forest, shoot upward).

Here’s the end of the Nature Trail. Some guy was dragging his family out on a hike that his kids were complaining about every step of the way (I take it he only gets away with such outings on Father’s Day).

I swear, I took this picture myself and didn’t steal it from Dan Mitchell.

Bella Vista Trail is the must-hike route. It’s a single-track up to the backpacking camp. Somewhat steep, downright arduous in the open sun, not much shade (but enough oases to pause a few times on the way up). The view of Stevens Canyon is gorgeous the whole way, but gorgeous in away your eyes can appreciate but camera lenses really can’t capture. (Another of those “why we hike” things).

Black Mountain, elevation 2800 feet, is where I almost always end up. One of my favorite places in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and not only because of these cool rocks.

Saw a bunch of pink flowers like these. I’m assuming it’s a kind of poppy (Farewell to Spring is what the flower watchers call it).

So, those are the highlights. As always, feel free to add your comments.

Links:

• Midpeninsula Open Space District page.
• Bay Area Hiker.
• Yelp reviews.
• Trail Spotting.

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