Not that far south of Hollister, make a left at a little complex of buildings or a large farm, depending on how you look at it, that’s the start of it. This is CR J1, the Panoche Road, and it is only marginally maintained. As it winds its way up the Tres Pinos gulch the grand landscape views are presented in miniature. The views are close, the walls rise steeply but not to a particularly great height, and yet all the necessary components are present. The flat valley bottom, the flood plain, it’s barely a hundred feet wide. The creek, mostly dry right now, has cut a sharp vertical channel through it, a couple of feet deep. And the stream bed itself is gravel and stone cobbles. Everywhere along the bottom is green and as the land rises above the tiny plain, the grasses dry and brown. There are some cows here, and some horses there. In the wider places there might be a farm, or a dirt road leading off into the mountains, up some side creek’s draw. The Diablo Range is an intricate place. For the first hour the road is never not bending, always winding, ever routing around some topography. A few cars pass going the other way, but not many.

Then we reach the end of Tres Pinos creek and pass over into Panoche creek’s wash. The land opens up a bit, the road is a bit straighter, at least on a scale measured in multiple seconds of not turning the wheel. The pavement is in no better shape, there are and have been sections that are 50% slapped down asphalt patches. There are still farms, and even small communities. There is an elementary school out here, if you can believe it. At this point we haven’t had cell service for over an hour. In the wide Panoche valley, we pass a solar farm in the distance, and a sign for the Mercey Hot Springs. Stretches of road are only half paved now, sometimes it’s the left half and sometimes it’s the right half. Signs warn “impassable when flooded”. The green is gone and all around is a sea of dry yellow grass. The road makes a couple of those jig-jogs, a right angle right turn followed quickly by a left. It wants to keep going in a straight line, due east, but some property got in the way.

And then we’re on the New Idria road, and stopping at the Griswold Creek BLM day use area. There is beer litter, and old pizza boxes. The sign says no trash pickup and that is true, the trash has not been picked up. Littered in amongst all the carefully collected garbage, some of it is even bagged and ready to go, are shells of all sorts. Shotgun shells, 40 caliber, and a few rifle shells too. There are a few bullet holes in buildings, doors, and posts, but not as many as I expect. The picnic tables and shelters are newish, maybe less than five years old. The pit toilet building is in great shape, minus a few handgun dents and holes in the door, and minus the mess inside. Only use it if you really have to. Not sure the last time the septic was serviced.

There are a few graffitis around; stickers and a couple of tags. We have entered the territory of HTF and KOSE EVICT, whoever they are. There are others too, I can’t make them out.

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The Mill Pond is a “nature spot” near my MIL’s house on Long Island. A trail circumnavigates the preserve, looping around the large pond and up the Bellmore Creek that both feeds and drains the pond. The northern boundary is the Sunrise Highway, a large road, 3 lanes in each direction with a few stop lights and cross roads; the LIRR is parallel and on the other side of the highway. The east edge of the preserve runs against the Wantagh Parkway, a busy freeway that leads to Jones Beach. And the south edge is Merrick Road, a very busy four-lane arterial with many stop lights, lots of honking horns, and revving engines. JFK is not far off either, so planes pass overhead frequently too. There are not many quiet places. The western edge, up against the backs of dense neighborhood housing is the quietest place, the most “distant” from urbanity. There are birds and mushrooms and fallen trees, and people seem to think there are fish in the creek because sometimes I see them with fishing tackle. I find it hard to believe, but the pond drains into the South Shore Estuary, an Atlantic bay behind the Jones Beach barrier islands, after a short culvert under Merrick Road. It’s ocean right across the street.

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Miles and miles of mountains that fall into the sea, and just a narrow shelf at the edge that is sometimes submerged by the tide.

This was a short notice trip, Tony spotted the permits available on recreation.gov, available in about a week. We went for it, committed and reserved them, made it happen. The drive takes hours and just leads deeper into the north coast outback beyond on highways through city and enormous trees, over deep canyons and rural logging mountains. It all fades away, coastal farming valleys filled with summer grasses, low water levels and steel bridges. The coastline here is completely undeveloped.

Making this hike is all about timing and getting from point A to point B before the tide comes in and washes away all traces. There are only a few safe harbors to overnight in, especially in the last southern stretch of it, so you’d better be sure and you better have your tide chart.

There are miles of various sized gravels which can be fairly cruised over, and other than the unevenness and the off-camber angles they’re always pitched at, there isn’t much to complain about. The tide’s still coming in, but it always is doing that.

And there are miles of soft sandy beach to walk on, a beautiful misery when you have somewhere to be by some time. The sand, it drags your feet, especially near the end.

Deer tracks lead down to the ocean’s edge. A couple of bear tracks too. Even the wildlife is playing games in the water.

Then there are miles of head-sized wet boulders to carefully trod. These rocks, they’ll break your ankles if you aren’t careful. What a sound that stretch must make under the surf.

And finally, there are miles of trail up on the coastal plateau, soft dirt track that after the shore-miles make you fly so fast that you would rather slow down a little.

Except at the main camps. During the day, when everyone is transiting, they are empty. But toward day’s end, hikers begin to accumulate and collect, to find a spot to pitch their tent for the night under tree or log, in any hollow space, waiting for the next leg.

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Ali and I went for a hike yesterday, the first time for her in years. We went along with friends on their usual weekend route. I had never been into Almaden Quicksilver park from the east before, the New Almaden town side. It used to be a mine, which is what “Almaden” means and is named for, a famous mine in Spain since antiquity. The hike is up a road grade, wide and even and well maintained. Mountain bikers (several passed us) and horses (didn’t see any) can use it too. These mountain bikers were quite polite, honestly the first ones since moving to California that I’ve met that followed the etiquette of announcing “on your left” with enough warning and “two more” as they pass. We saw a few other hikers too.

There were lots of plants, native ones like monkey flower and non-native ones like spanish broom, and toxic ones that we argued over the colors useful for identifying them like poison oak that is sometimes red and sometimes not, but “leaves of three, leave me be” and so on. And regular valley or live or some other kind of oak mixed in just to throw some of us off.

When we got to the top, I could see out over the part of the park that I had been to numerous times before,¹ the west side, the Wood Road entrance. You can see it in the photo below. We rested a while there, at the highest level that the trail (road) attains. There is a horse watering trough, and a picnic bench.

The road skirts the back side of the ridge for a bit, and while we were crossing the saddle, if it could be called that, a large turkey vulture crested the hill, barely higher than our heads, did a double-take at our unexpected presence, and continued over to the east side. Might have been the closest to one of those that I’ve been. They’re big! Especially with their wings open. For a moment it was one of those times when something that is usually just an abstracted concept of an animal becomes very real and detailed and a strong presence. Then it continued its aerodynamic path and receded back into the hypothetical and symbolic realm that turkey vultures and most other wildlife normally occupy.

The route down is past some of the mining ruins. They’re ok, I guess. It’s all kind of underwhelming for being the most productive mercury mine in North America. They extracted nearly 84 mega-pounds of it out of the ground over the life of the mine. So many people lived and worked and I’m sure died here. I don’t understand why these ruins don’t engage my interest as much as the desert ruins do. Those are often much smaller or much more wrecked. Much less likely to have produced much of anything. Maybe the fences have something to do with it, the more museum-like presentation. I shall have to ponder it some more.

But the landscape has lots of interest, and feels very close and intricate and there are a lot of very real things to see around every next corner. Birds and trees, and sticks and stones. Rocks are cool, man. Even the lost gouges in the ground, filled with old forest matter, are interesting and surprising when you find them; must be some forgotten mining things. The unprepared, the not set out, the natural as nature stuff, that’s what I want out of these tiny adventures. Unexpected birds that change rapidly from an idea to the incarnate and back just as quick into a symbol, receding over the saddle into the other valley yet still eyeing us over its shoulder.

A couple of other resources:

• Ronald Horii’s site on the park.³
• The Santa Clara County Parks page.
• Hidalgo cemetery, which is supposedly now empty, but I bet it has ghosts. I’d like to see that.

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I’ve always been struck by the middle view, the “middle airs,”¹ of the Redwood trees. From a steep hillside trail in the Santa Cruz mountain forests, one is both high above the gully bottom and far below the canopy top. Sometimes the trunks are near, right off the trail, and you can appreciate the bark’s stretched and growing nature, the outer skin of the tree literally ripping and separating in long vertical gashes as the enormous organism continues, unbelievably, to grow. Glancing down, the floor far below. The tree is a mostly straight cylinder, flaring out only slightly at the base. Looking above, it rises up up up in an un-shrinking round far above to the beginnings of a few branches here and there, and the full crown at the top. The view is both a calm examination of the stately middle of these great trees and a dramatic edge-on view of their stupendous heights.

I have sometimes seen this view in a Douglas Fir forest, which might be the only other tree on the west coast that can rival the Redwood in terms of height and size, but the native habitat of that tree is arranged much differently. The necessary verticality is hard to find, and even harder to find is the long term stability necessary to grow trees to such a great height.

So I savor the Santa Cruz mountain’s middle airs, and the rare beauty of the strong straight vertical lines of these trees. The middle part is high above the floor and has much higher to go. I hope they grow even higher in the years to come.

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Eleven monarch caterpillars on the neighbor’s milkweed this morning, and a dozen or so bees tending the flowers. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen caterpillars grow and disappear to somewhere. We haven’t seen any chrysalis; they’re either still invisible to us or they’ve been taken by the birds.

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