Two-Heel Drive

My pal Vindu Goel is jetting off to Brooklyn this weekend to launch his new life as an tech guru for the New York Times, but he had to get one last Henry Coe hike out of his system. Not content to amble down to Frog Lake, soak up the sounds of woodpeckers and breezes floating through the tall Ponderosa pines, and stroll back along the gentle, lovely Flat Frog Trail, Vindu craved the Legendary Ass-Kicker of Coe: Mount Sizer.

I did the same hike in the winter of 2007, which made me the de facto guide — which usually guarantees at least an hour wandering blindly in the wilderness, but there are only two ways to get to Mount Sizer, the 3,182-foot summit of Blue Ridge. One requires climbing up the deadly Hobbs Road Short Cut (consensus pick as the steepest Bay Area trail); the other requires climbing 2,000 feet over about five miles via the Poverty Flat Road and the Jackass Trail, then descending the Short cut and enjoying 2,000 feet of climb over four miles back to the park HQ.

An out-and-back to Mount Sizer is 13 miles; the counter-clockwise loop we did is 14 and change; there’s 4,000 feet of elevation gain, minimum, regardless of route; a protracted climb of four or five miles at the end is unavoidable.

What’s also unavoidable: the conclusion that this is among the few Bay Area hikes which must be done, and not just to prove how much punishment your lower extremities can withstand. On clear days in the winter you can see all the way to the High Sierra from the trail near Mount Sizer. Right now there’s abundant evidence of the massive Lick Fire, which torched over 45,000 acres of the park last year. The Jackass Trail cuts right through the burn zone in a few places.

It’s one of the wildest places in Northern California you can reach on foot and get home in time for dinner. You’ll want a good meal — though most rigorous hikes dampen the appetite, this one is so extravagantly draining that the hunger instinct will running flat-out within an hour or so.

Enough chatter, let’s see the pix:

Vindu admires the view near the turn-off to Jackass Trail. If you go this way, note that the trail is very faint, though more hikers will no doubt beat it down some more in the next few weeks. It’s a bit hard to follow at times, but just keep in mind you’re heading up the spine of a ridge — as long as you keep going upward you won’t stray far from the trail.

Burn damage starts showing up almost immediately along the Jackass Trail.

The trail follows this drainage through a burned-out area.

Inevitably, the green is already returning. The winter rains washed way most of the soot, leaving brown hills and the twigs that were the bases of dense shrubbery that practically explodes into flames when fire comes through. The burn exposes how how much these plants dominate the landscape — it’s a thick green carpet of vegetation no human could ever hope to traverse without a bulldozer, but the fire burns off all that biomatter and leaves a rugged landscape waiting to be reborn.

Like this, in other words.

Vindu finds our place on the map on the road that ends the Jackass Trail. It’s easy to know which way to go: just head uphill.

Bluedicks with burn damage in the background.

This stand of Ponderosa Pine looks a bit scorched.

Mount Sizer summit itself is, frankly, unremarkable. It has a radio tower of some sort at the top, and a little spur trail leading up to it. Why hike to a place that isn’t worth the trouble of taking a picture? Mainly because this hike is so much greater than a single high point on a ridge. We have to name it after something.

So this is Booze Lake, where the Lick Fire started.

We paused for lunch at this bench at the top of the Hobbs Road Shortcut — a relentless 1.4 miles that’s only marginally less draining than going up it.

Lupines sprout on the Short Cut. A little beauty is welcome on this beast of a trail.

Once you get down to Coyote Creek, it’s advisable to rest up and prepare for the last four miles uphill to the park HQ. It’s a slog, no doubt about it, but it offers a tutorial on taming the beastly hills of Coe: Set a pace, slow down when you tire. Purge all thoughts of the hill ever ending; such thoughts add psychological duress to the strain on your feet and legs, and you don’t need any more difficulties.

Here’s the Short Cut from across the ridge on Hobbs Road. Not many switchbacks along this route.

After about two miles of climb, Hobbs Road goes downhill for about a half-mile, crossing a creek at a trail junction that gives you two choices: 1.5 mile back to the HQ on Hobbs Road — and another 600 feet of climb — or 2.9 miles along Flat Frog Trail, one of the nicest single-tracks in the park.

Vindu said he was up for either one, but he hadn’t seen the Coe Monument, which requires the shorter, steeper route. So, up we went again. After all the climbing we’d done already it didn’t seem like that big of a deal, but it was brutal nonetheless.

One more shot of the monument — I always have to take a picture when I’m up here.

After that it was a quick dash back downhill to the park HQ, and after that it was back to town, to send Vindu off to new journalistic vistas. Here’s hoping he gets a few weekends off to climb some of those hills upstate.

My Henry Coe links:

• Sizing up Mount Sizer: Same hike, last year.
• All Coe Day hikes.
• All Coe overnighters
• Mercury News park profile

Other Henry Coe links

• David at Random Curiosity did the Sizer out-and-back in February.
• California state parks page.
• Pine Ridge Association
• Wildflowers of Henry Coe
• Bay Area Hiker.

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It’s not exactly a riot of color out there just yet, but there’s plenty for alert eyes to see. Oddly enough I’m still not seeing many California poppies in parks this season, but keep seeing tons growing along roads — must be they’ve adapted to breathing car fumes like the rest of us.

My original plan was to do the counter-clockwise Mount Sizer loop, which takes in the Poverty Flat Trail to Jackass Trail over to Hobbs Road and back along infamous the Short Cut. I got about a half-mile past Poverty Flat and decided spending the rest of the day trudging up and down Henry Coe’s most infamous hills wasn’t much of a vacation day. So I turned back and headed toward Frog Lake via the Middle Ridge Trail, which is in equal parts beautiful and brutal. I reached my point of despair (where I traditionally holler to the wilderness “When will this goddamn hill ever end?”) about quarter mile from the turn-off down to Frog Lake. Still put in about 12 miles, but at least I skipped the Hobbs Road Nightmare.

Taking the easier route freed up more time for taking pictures (and picking off ticks after sitting on the grass for closeups). I had better luck with the tight, close-in macro shots this time. Let’s get to ‘em (not all flowers, by the way):

Almost stepped on this newt on the way down Poverty Flat Road.

A shooting star along Poverty Flat Road.

Last year’s fire scorched this sign good, but there was very little evidence of fire damage, just a few blackened tree trunks. (The Poverty Flat privy was unhurt, thank the Lord.)

Coyote Creek’s easy to cross.

White Baby Blue Eyes on the Middle Ridge Trail, which had the most flowers of the trails I hiked.

This thing is called Indian warrior (not to be confused with Indian paintbrush, which is orange). It’s not an especially pretty flowering plant up close — all those spikes give it a vaguely punk rock look — but from this distance it looks pretty nice.

You know me with my oak and sky pictures.

Blue-eyed grass from along the trail down to Frog Lake.

More shooting stars, these on the Flat Frog Trail.

An oak silhouette near the end of the Flat Frog Trail.

Hound’s tongue — a very small flower that is quite pretty on close inspection. These grow like weeds at Henry Coe.

Special thanks to Jane at BAhiker.com and the Henry Coe Wildflowers page for identifying all these. If you didn’t see Steve Sergeant’s comment from his latest trip out to Henry Coe, here it is:

To follow-up, I hiked sort of a figure-8 loop from Coe HQ, over Hobbs Road, past Frog Lake, up to and down Middle Ridge over Mt. Sizer to the East Fork Coyote Creek, north along the creek to Long Canyon, up to the top of Long Canyon and back down Water Gulch, upstream along East Fork Coyote Creek to the park boundary, and back via the Narrows Trail and Poverty Flat Road.

There’s a lot of charcoal up there, but also a lot of green. As others have said, the fire did some good things in clearing a lot of choking underbrush. It also leveled all of the tall, dry grass that makes crossing open fields so unpleasant. Some areas look totally sterilized, while just a few minutes down the trail, the damage looks minimal.

I saw the most flowers along Coyote Creek in the lowest elevation areas. I’ll bet if someone had the time to get back into the far eastern parts of the park, they’d get quite a display. We saw some poppies and quite a few shooting stars coming up, and a lot more I wasn’t prepared to identify.

I’d say the area new headquarters will be in major bloom in 2-3 weeks. The areas down in the large creek valleys perhaps a week or so sooner.

Cynthia caught a squad doing a helicopter rescue drill at the park over the weekend.

The format of the column essentially forbids giving proper credit to the greatness that is Henry Coe, so this piece is not among my favorites, but I’m hoping it’ll get a few first-timers out to the park who might’ve had their curiosity tweaked during all the news about the Lick fire.

Autumn is a great time to visit Coe. Enjoy it while the weather is mild, crowds are small and tarantulas are on the prowl.

Springtime brings throngs of backpackers and wildflower gawkers, but the wildlife sightings last all year: I’ve seen bobcats, coyotes, deer, turkeys, vultures and a raft of raptors.

The great thing was, I got to use my favorite Henry Coe pic from the monument.

Though I have to admit he looks like he was put there by one of Jabba the Hut’s henchmen.

Two long hikes in the past week at Henry Coe have shown me that it takes some serious hoofing to see any of the remnants of the Lick fire, which burned across almost half the park’s acreage. Whether you come in from Hunting Hollow or the Park HQ, you’re looking at a minimum of six miles of hiking to see any evidence of the burn, and closer to 11 or 12 miles to see it up close (assuming you stay off the closed trails. You can always ignore the rules and saunter down to Poverty Flat, but it seems hardly worth the risk of getting busted just to gawk at some burnt trees; but if you do decide to risk it, you can rest easy knowing the privy down there survived, according to a guy I talked to yesterday).

I took the China Hole Trail to China Hole, then headed up the Narrows to Las Cruzeros and took the Mahoney Meadows Road up to its intersection with Poverty Flat Road, where I did get the chance to stand next to actual burnt ground. It’s at least six miles via this route, perhaps closer to seven, and it provides a tempting shortcut back to the HQ — but you’d have to take the closed Poverty Flat Road.

After seeing “Into the Wild” the other day I’m feeling a bit more chastened about going solo in the woods, especially into areas the Park Authorities have declared off-limits. If I slip on a rock and break my leg is six places, I don’t want it to happen in the last place people will start looking for me (and I don’t want to give smug Park Authorities the satisfaction of chewing my ass for violating the rules).

And now, the pictures:

Fire damage across the canyon is visible from about a half-mile down the China Hole Trail. The fire jumped Blue Ridge Road, rose to the ridge top and burned down this side all the way to Poverty Flat. Generally the fire stayed on the far side of Blue Ridge, which is why so much of it is beyond view.

Much of the fire burned thick chamise, which also thrives in the open areas of the hill heading down toward China Hole. This area has burned fairly recently — you can see the occasional toasted fence post — and all this grew back.

China Hole has a bit of water lingering, but it all smells enough that you wouldn’t want to wade in it. I stopped and gabbed with a guy camping nearby and another backpacker came along and asked us if the water was safe to drink when filtered. He noted it still smelled a bit skanky after he filtered some of it. He had three days of camping planned; here’s hoping the filter did its duty.

I always take pictures of the rocks in the Narrows.

Puddles were full of little fish — the real photographic challenge, though, is to catch a frog before he dives to the murky deep. I saw one jump, but he was gone before I had the cam ready.

On Mahoney Meadows Road, with burned area beyond Poverty Flat Road.

Now that you mention it, it is a pretty damn long walk to look at some burnt ground.

Poverty Flat Road forms a fire break.

One from the return hike: dead manzanita along the China Hole Trail. By the way this is an excellent time to check out the manaznita: the bark is deep brown and starting to curl.

Ruts from heavy equipment in the road on the walk back up the hill to the headquarters.

This really is a great time to be at Coe. And next Saturday it’s Tarantula Fest! (Alas, I’ve seen none of the great arachnids on the trail this year, but other hikers reported sightings)

Mountain bikers have gotten much further into the park from Hunting Hollow. Some pictures here. Also, Randy spotted some damage I missed the other day.

Remember how I said I was on vacation this week? Well, I did have an itch to see if any fire damage was evident at Henry Coe State Park. Bottom line: yeah, if you walk a long, long way. Melissa and I did the Coe Monument-Frog Lake-Flat Frog loop on Sunday and saw no evidence of fire at all — only the bulldozer tracks on Hobbs Road.

I did a more vigorous hike on Monday via Middle Steer Ridge to Wilson Peak and down to Grizzly Gulch Trail, which I followed down to the Coyote Creek entrance and road-walked a couple miles back to the parking lot.

The list of trail closures is noted above.

The rest of my Flickr photo set is here. If you scroll through you’ll see a long zoom pic of a distant ridge taken from Willson Peak — it looks sorta gray but I can’t say for sure that there’s any burn damage.

Sane dayhikes from the HQ and Hunting Hollow should be fairly free of burn damage. Getting deeper into the park at places like Mississippi and Coit lakes is out of the question for now.

The unburnt areas have been open since Saturday, it turns out.

This forum page at MTBR.com has a bunch of details from mountain bikers who’ve scouted the place (scroll down to post 246).

Lots of familiar places are off limits for now: Coit and Mississippi Lakes, Poverty Flat, Bear Mountain, Orestimba Wilderness, Pacheco Camp, and Hobbs Road beyond Middle Fork of Coyote Creek (I’m assuming this is the Short Cut.) Also, the new visitors center at Bell Station is closed temporarily.

I feel like a recon hike is mandatory within the next few days.

Lots of burn pix at this guy’s flickr site.

On Sunday, the forecast for Gilroy predicted a high of only 82, which struck me as an engraved invitation to stop in on Henry Coe State Park on the rare sub-100 day in August.

Naturally, it was at least 10 degrees hotter in the park, which gave me a perfect excuse to look for easy, shady miles and leave the leg-burners till winter and spring. One terrific find: the Ponderosa Trail, a spur from the trail that goes up to the Coe Memorial. It’s about nine-tenths of a mile, an easy loop once you make the 400-foot climb up from Coe HQ. It goes through a stand of Ponderosa pines and feels almost like hiking in the Sierra except for the lack of craggy peaks nearby.

The green and gold are a gorgeous combination this time of year, before the yellow turns to brown in September and October.

There is one nice dead tree.

And a nice live one nearby.

The ponderosa is a stately tree, to be sure.

On a clear day the the loop offers eye-popping views.

There’s even this lonesome picnic table to pause and soak it all in.

The rest of my pictures seemed unremarkable — mostly snags we’ve seen a dozen times before.

From the Coe Memorial I went down to Frog Lake, where I heard a distinct knocking sound on one of the large dead trees coming up out of the pond. Sure enough, there was a woodpecker pounding away. I’ve heard them before but it was the first time I’d actually seen a woodpecker at work. There’s a little path around the pond that’s worth checking out.

From there it was up to Middle Ridge Trail and back to the HQ via the Fish & Corral trails. This really is one of the better moderate hikes at Coe: almost all on single-tracks that take you through pretty much all the park has to offer, terrainwise, without infarction-inducing climbs up all those old gravel roads.

Every year around Mother’s Day, Mike and Kathy take their hiking club out to Henry Coe State Park, where wildflowers tend to still be in bloom and the weather’s pleasant enough that the park’s hills can be survived without keeping a rescue helicopter on call.

Saturday was just about perfect for such a venture — cool breezes coming in from the coast, blue skies to the horizon, colorful blooms. The hills were still the hills, but we took one of the less-painful routes and did fine.

OK, pictures:

I saw Old Glory flapping in the breeze at the Park Headquarters and dashed over to take a pic. (Suddenly I’m reminded of a bumper sticker I saw the other day “These colors Don’t Run THE WORLD” … only in Calif.)

On the drive to the park, Mike told me, “pictures need people in them!”

Dave gets in one more hike before heading back to Iowa.

Kathy, deep in thought at the junction to the trail heading to Frog Lake, where we’re going to do lunch.

Ducking through a tangle of snags along the way.

Some sun-behind-the-tree action.

An admirable snag.

Yet more light-behind-the-branches action.

Owl’s clover, which has a couple little yellow specks in a field of purple that make the flower look vaguely owl-like.

Another snag frames the action along the trail to Frog Lake.

After breaking for lunch, Mike and Kathy do a tick check.

The sky never gets this blue in the summertime around Silicon Valley — you have to get out in the country, away from civilization.

A mariposa lily, looking gorgeous as usual.

So, those are the highlights. I have a five-day weekend coming up starting Thursday, so I should have some interesting pictures by a week from now.

The idea of having 80-some thousand acres all to yourself is hard to get your head around — it’s not like you can act on such knowledge. Heck, it’d take 20 years to explore it all on foot, and while you’re getting to know one part, another part’s changing. Wilderness is like that.

But if you ever go to Henry Coe State Park, the biggest state park in California, on a winter weekday, you’re bound to gain such knowledge because, frankly, nobody goes there during the week. It’s only 13 miles from the expressway but it might as well be 130, for all the tourist traffic it attracts.

Thing about Coe is, there is no easy way to enjoy it. It has a couple excellent fishing holes — each requiring five to six miles of hiking with a couple thousand feet of of uphill slogging. Only the hardest of the hard-core mountain bikers go there — it has miles and miles of jeep roads through some of the most gorgeous country this side of the Sierra, but I rarely see any bikers out there. The hills are just too evil.

Photographers, birdwatchers and amateur wild-lands biologists can have a field day, but not without serious strain. Flat fields are not exactly abundant.

I’m dwelling on the inherent Coe difficulties mainly because I hiked 14-plus miles there on Thursday and here it is Saturday morning and several major body parts are still complaining. I did a similar distance with similar elevation gain at Mount Diablo last month and felt none the worse for wear the next morning. But Diablo is one brutal haul to 3000 feet in the first few miles and the hard part is over.

Coe is one hill after another after another after another. The hard part is never over — till all the wounds heal.

So why keep going back? Because once you’ve been there, you can’t not go back. The gnarled oak trees, the hills stretching to the horizon, the breezes whistling along the ridge tops — any one of them alone might not be especially alluring, but the combination pulls hikers back to Coe like metal filings around a magnet. At times the hills feel unbearable, but at the moment of despair something will appear on the next turn of the trail to restore the motivation to move on. Might be a bobcat leaping across the trail, or a coyote shaking off the rain, or a mariposa lily hiding in the grass. You don’t walk away from this stuff unaffected. At least I don’t.

OK, so about Thursday’s hike. I did what’s known as the counter-clockwise Mount Sizer loop. It goes a few miles from the Park headquarters down a canyon to Poverty Flat. From there it’s a maybe a mile or so up Poverty Flat Road to the Jackass Trail turnoff, then 3.5 miles to Mount Sizer, the high point of Blue Ridge, and about six miles back to the park HQ. The last miles are the meanest: you give up most of the elevation gained in the six-mile slog to the Sizer Summit in less than a mile and a half down the infamous Hobbs Road Short Cut, and then you’ve got another couple thousand feet of climb back up the ridge to the park HQ. As turn-your-legs-to-rubber experiences go, it’s a doozy.

But enough words, let’s see some pictures.

Here’s the Jackass Trail — all single-track and another Coe gem which cannot be accessed without major uphill slogs to get to it. And major slogs all the way up it. It has oaks, pines and manzanita scrub — pretty much the gamut of Bay Area flora — along the way (all that’s missing is a redwood forest).

Fairly typical expression of the biodiversity. And all uphill, naturally.

Jackass Trail ends at this old jeep road on Blue Ridge. It’s a left turn towards the ridge top. Lots more excellent trees and breezes up this way.

A previously unseen dead tree can make all the suffering worthwhile.

Near the Sizer summit, it’s pretty as a picture.

Must be the season for Sierra sightings — the fresh snow from last weekend is clearly visible more than a hundred miles across the Central Valley.

More interesting oak tree tangles.

Mount Sizer summit itself is nothing special, and besides, mental preparations for the ruinous Short Cut descent must be made. Views like this from the Short Cut ease the strain a bit.

Coyote Creek awaits at the Short Cut’s end, from which it’s 4 miles of fun (by this I mean, agonizing brutality) back to the HQ. The upside is: lots more cool trees, backlit by the afternoon sun.

I wondered if this was some wilderness example of cellulite.

About a mile and a half from HQ is a trail junction which allows your feet to enter an argument with your legs: if the feet win, you go 1.5 (and another 700 feet of climb) by the shortest possible route. If your legs win you take the 2.9-mile route, which is mostly flat. My feet won this one, which had the side benefit of allowing me to see the Henry Coe Monument for the first time. Coe’s daughter donated a bunch of this land to the county, and putting up this monument was one of the stipulations of the donation.

A lovely scene on the last merciful downhill stretch of trail before returning to the HQ.

Yeah, so, those weren’t seven easy hours on the trail. But nothing worth having is ever easy.