4 more from the Lost Coast

I'm kind of glad this one was a bit out of focus. This is Bethany coming back up from the ocean on our first night out on pt. 2 of the Lost Coast. We'd just walked out of civilization without the legally required bear canisters to protect our food. The late afternoon miles had gone slow in the sand. The trees weren't big enough to hang our food as high and securely as I'd like so there was this worry in the air that we'd wake to the rummaging of 300 pound scavengers working out a way to drop our next 5 days worth of food and spoil our unspoiled coast adventure before it really began. The walk up the beach with fog hiding civilization from us kind of flicked the awareness switch required to live well without plumbing, supermarkets, walls and doors, etc. It was nice.



Some great rock the next day.



So, the proverbial snake in the grass eh? We walked near, or right over several of these in the last 10 miles of Lost Coast. I still don't know if these are young rattlers of some sort or some faker species. I gently prodded one of them with my trekking pole and it shook its non existent rattler and coiled up like it was going to do something. None of us stuck around for that.



So... at the Mattole River Campground we learned that some people like to come out and camp with the whole family. This means, Mom, Dad, two precious little girls scampering around, the parakeet shivering in its cage on top of the car on the windswept beach, and of course the hamster that never once poked its nose out of the shavings on the cage bottom. I also learned that there is a segment of rap music that could be accurately described as 'death rap'. It's not uplifting at all!

Okay, signing off for a bit.

continuing on

First, in the Little River Cemetery, this gravestone totally caught me, I think because of the hand. Telitha E. died in 1885 at the age of 35.




What's not to love?



This is us outside the Shelter Cove General Store. This is the morning we embarked northward up the second half of the "Lost Coast". Bethany is practicing fencing to defend us from bears. She was tested many times, and at all hours, we came away unscathed.




This is "Nick". She got dropped off at the General Store while we sat out on the porch. She had one wet foot, hence the removal pictured here. After a little conversation she told us how she'd been on a magic mushroom diet for the last 4 or 5 days, and had eaten little else. Bethany gave her some salmon jerky, an apple, and some electrolyte hydration. When she was in our world we had a lot of fun talking, and when she was in her world it wasn't as fun, at least for us.


These peacable looking animals are Roosevelt Elk. They've been reintroduced to the area. We've had several experiences with them along the Lost Coast. These males were relaxed, the next three times we ran into the males it wasn't so mellow. We weren't charged or anything, there was just a lot of tension crackling as we were forced to walk in much closer quarters than they preferred, which in turn scares me/us. Bethany made wild noises that helped us get through successfully.

more mini stories

Haaaaaallo! How about mostly pictures?



Named Ft. Ross, this is a Russian built outpost, still sturdy after I think 150 years or so. It was done up to look inhabited, and bussed school children were participating in some mock ceremony at the flag pole inside the walls of the fort. It was fun to see it all happening in a rainy foggy morning. Bethany spotted our first wild boars running through a creek bed about a 150 feet below us in a gulch on the way to Ft. Ross.



So if you climb down that wet rocky slope in the deep end of this picture you get to see this:



A sinkhole is apparently created when the ocean erodes a hole through solid rock and then sucks out the earth behind it leaving a hole. The sound of the water bellowing down this opening to the ocean is unpredictable and really loud. It was like standing in a musical instrument the ocean was playing. I spent a half hour or so in there alone listening. When the ocean lines up just so and really smacks the rock wall you're on the other side of, it puts you in the midst of a vibration unparalleled in my life experience.


A millipede I watched walk for a while. I think they're beautiful.


This is Lu and Adrian. Lu was once married to the mayor of Point Arena, and Adrian is her cool, smart 15 year old son. The four of us spent the night at their house mixing it up and having a good time. We watched basketball and talked about everything under the sun. Lu might be the coolest Cuban kindergarten teacher on the planet. Adrian was wicked smart and got me into working out again.

After many miles of quietude

Greetings to all on Bethany's birthday! She is taking an afternoon nap, along with everyone else in the household, and I'm trying to wrap my thought processes around the expanse of multitudinous events that have transpired since I've sat and typed here for any and all to scroll through.

I've kept a journal since our time with Bethany's family in Sunnyvale and considered simply transcribing it onto the blog and inserting pictures where they fit in the log, and I'm not going to do that. I've written 78 pages and taken hundreds of pictures. I'd be blogging for days not hours, and you'd be sleeping, not reading. I can't help but catalogue the minutiae for myself so that I can reference the mental catalogue later down the path, and I'm hoping that somehow I can rise from that and pick some formative periods to write about here that somehow will come close to summing up some of what's been happening in the last 30 or 40 days... Lordy it's been awhile. How about this: Welcome to the world of mini super-condensed stories, sometimes accompanied by some pictures. I'll start in Half Moon Bay where Sarah shuttled us after the splendid Sunnyvale visit.

1. We talked with an off duty SF cop who told us the best sneaky place to camp in McNee State Park, north of Half Moon Bay, and then warned us to be "alert and careful" if we ended up camping in Golden Gate Park. He's seen some things...

2. We met Ron and Bill, the self proclaimed "Tired Teachers" in Daly City California. To date they are the only other hikers we've met with a goal to walk a great length of coast. Though not continuous, they've nearly completed all parts of the California Coastal Trail in their spare time. Good guys in good spirits still adventurous in their 60s!

3. We stayed at the famed Green Tortoise Hostel, est. 1974, in NE San Francisco. Bottomline: Beer competition loving single people stay in the main hostel, cozy couples and singles arriving too late sleep in an "annex" a block away. Perfect.

4. Bethany and I circled down into central SF, then up to the Golden Gate Bridge, then across it, then walked 6 miles in the dark on our way to the Marin Headlands Hostel. With bad directions, we overshot it by a mile and a half and arrived after going temporarily insane and jogging with packs on at 11pm.

5. The next day we met a happy, energetic, encouraging and insatiably curious man who called himself Butter. We spent the next 2 1/2 days with him, learning about our surroundings and exploring our outlook on life, all while feeling loved and loving a great, great guy. This is one of my favorites of him.

6. We took the wrong trail on our way Stinson Beach and ended up at a small coastal ranch called Slide Ranch. After offering a little work we were welcomed heartily by one of the caretakers of the ranch named Ryan. We ate chard and greens from their gardens, I swam in the ocean for at least two full minutes, I milked a goat, saw installation mud art, listened to a teacher sing old Clapton into the ocean wind, learned about composting, fed chickens, and so much more. Slide Ranch was great, it's people were kindred, and they felt good. I would go back there if given the chance.

7. We walked through Bolinas, around Bolinas on the beach and up the coast into the Point Reyes wilderness. I met a kid named Brandon outside the food coop that shook hands with me and then told me he thought he had a staph (sp?) infection... grrrreat. We saw a lady that couldn't speak and wore burlap clothes, people with vortex eyes, and people that were sick on las drugas. : ( An old surf board maker gave Bethany some thick pink wool socks that were supposed to be white, and gave me a cool Bolinas Bay t-shirt with an octopus on it.

8. The Pt. Reyes wilderness was beautiful. I got to bathe in a waterfall that overlooked the ocean.

9. We met a Jew named Andy in the general store in Pt. Reyes Station that insisted that he find us the best sneaky camping that he would personally find and direct us to. In his car on the way back down the road Bethany found "Christian Dialogue" cds, and a Hulk Hogan doll, random. We ended up walking for a mile and a quarter in the dark through a cow pasture and setting up a camp on an old road that he promised would afford us a spectacular view in the morning. We weren't disturbed, and the view of the slough on the north side of the Pt. Reyes park was quite beautiful in the morning fog.

10. I mailed home my laptop in Marshall CA and we ate BBQ'd oysters across the road that had been freshly yanked that morning from Tomales Bay, a stone's throw away. Mmmm.

11. We ate some "country cookin" in Tomales and ate some pastries at a bakery next door that Andy swore was the best in California. It didn't blow our minds, and the country cooking left us bloated as we trekked north. We fought the wind for many a mile and tucked ourselves in for a siesta on a sunny hillside. We walked to a hamlet called Valley Ford and got carted from there to Bodega Bay by a couple with a dog named Benji eating Drumsticks (the ice cream ones) in their little Honda while they stayed out of the wind.

12. Bodega Bay was our meeting point for friends living in Santa Rosa to snatch us from the coast and let us hang out for a few days inland. Alex, Meg, and their exuberant pup Flash, treated us like royalty. We watched Alex whale on some other team in softball, played constantly with Flash, watched hockey and basketball together, went to a farmer's market and a head shop, to a brewery and a breakfast joint, to a great local grocer and Mexican joint. We chilled. We slept. We saw some wine country. We BBQ'd more oysters and ate fudge cake. Good times. Alex made sure we had gear to succeed. Holy cow, could we be doing this without his and other's help? Doubtful.

13. After an early AM dropoff in Bodega Bay by Alex we walked north for awhile and found an Indian Restaurant in the middle of nowhere on the banks of the Russian River. Reasonably priced and so amazingly delicious! We made our way onwards to Jenner CA, which we'd been warned was the start of a territory where we shouldn't camp due to an unsolved and pointless murder of a camping couple in recent times. Boy was that a great feeling hanging over our day! We ended up camping quietly in a river bed, and obviously came away unscathed. Here's a picture of Jenner's Post Office. It's about the person inside, not the facility!

















14. Next we hiked "Sonoma's Lost Coast". With our newly acquired trekking poles in hand we walked/hiked/scrambled/scampered/traversed/trudged through 8 miles of tough shoreline. 1 mile an hour. We saw black oystercatchers, we ate lunch a 100 feet from harbor seals and their pups, we rescued stranded crabs and starfish, we saw the remains of many cars and motorcycles that had made the fatal plunge down from highway 1, hundreds of feet above us. A stellar an exhausting day. Here's a picture of Bethany in typical terrain that day and another of a luxury BMW wrecked a rusted gold.

I'm signing off for now because it's nearly evening and tonight we get to celebrate my Dearest coming into her 29th year! (Meaning she's 28...) Love to you!!

The whirlwind

Greetings!  Oh it's been too long, much too long.  Much has transpired, many miles have been plod, risks have been taken, rains have fallen, boars have howled in the still of the night... we're here, we're safe, we're recharging, eager to get moving along.  The constancy we count on is change.  Life is grand.  Some recollections of the last little while to follow:

We left lovely Morro Bay early early one morning and took our last look at their magnificent lava rock, quiet and stern in the harbor.  This isn't edited light...

And up the coast we went through the beautiful village of Cayucos, then Harmony and on to San Simeon.  San Simeon has Hearst roots, and is nestled on the coast below the famous and utterly opulent Hearst Castle.  We opted not to tour the castle at the $22/person tour rate and instead stopped into San Simeon, viewing it as our last supply stop before the famed Big Sur.  We popped into the final outpost, "Sebastian's Store", and fueled and watered up before continuing up the coast.  Just as a side note:  The best, absolute best, veggie sandwich I've ever had was made in this quaint little store.  I'm not exaggerating when I say the sandwich was as big as my head.  ANYWAYS, off we went into the unknown.  The coast was beautiful as always and fenced perfectly with 5 level barb wire fencing that seemed to have been strung up yesterday.  Signs every few hundred feet stated the obvious, "No Trespassing, Violators will be prosecuted.  --The Hearst Corporation"  Ain't they sweet? ;  )  One ponders liability and property ownership significantly more when being channeled onto the pavement of Highway 1 shored up by the deep pocketed "got here first's/hearst's fences" on either side, not knowing where you'll lay your head that night as the feet sing their sore songs and the sun falls on it's steady course towards the horizon line.  Well, we slept somewhere, and woke in the hazy predawn and walked the whole day through.  To our east the rich mountain heights climbed quietly higher, and to our north we saw that the coast would soon meet the mountains and our mellow plodding days on the flats would soon be replaced by moderate grades, sharp corners, and droves of curve sick car passengers exploring the coast the American way, in cars, trucks, trailers, and RVs of varying size!  Vroom!  I'm not trying to pat my own back when I chide the masses on the coast motoring along.  I am saying unequivocally that I'm increasingly cognizant of the fact that we live bubbly lives, exiting one bubble to get in a car bubble and zip through other places to other bubbles, claiming we've experienced something special having done so.  I think that the bubble life denies us a quality of experience that we as a whole aren't beyond sensing somewhere inside of us, but do struggle to grasp is available to us if we only slow down and interact in more natural and intuitive ways with our planet.  In a short time walking I feel increasingly a minority in our society and witness more often the stranglehold truly unreal obligations claim in our thought processes.  I am not above anyone having walked a little ways.  I do appreciate the perspective this slowing period is gleaning for me.  And how quickly it vanishes if I let it!  Yikes!

One exciting thing to write; above San Simeon along the coast we discovered that there are miles of coastline the enormous Elephant Seal calls home for the breeding season!  To our delight we caught many views of these slumbering oafish animals.  They must be tremendously efficient in the cold waters to be as big as they are.  On land however, they are loud, flatulent, lazy, and combative with one another.  Here's one picture of hundreds of them sun bathing.  Please excuse the finger, my automated lens covering mechanism has failed and I had to hold it down with my finger for awhile before I got my Macgyver on and got out the duct tape:

We were much closer to the seals on several occasions than this picture reveals and seeing those doughy eyed 7 foot seal pups made me want to take one home!  I could just imagine taking care of one and watching it grow to 22 feet, adorable!  Without admitting much I will mention that our camping night before our ascent into the more mountainous terrain was on shared space with a lonely elephant seal.  Oh the stories I could tell!  Said night was spent somewhere near the furthest peninsula in the picture below.  This picture was taken from Ragged Point.

   

Then we made the steady climb onward.  Below you can see Ragged Point on the left.

And so it went.  Out to a jutting point, breathtaking coastal view, in towards steep impenetrable mountains, and back out again.  After what seemed like 15 or 16 miles of this, we found the wonderful and penetrable canyon, Salmon Creek.  ( If there are salmon in this creek, they were about six inches long.  I don't have a rod with me so I could merely view them as they swam lazily in the crystalline pools below white waterfalls.  I think they were some sort of trout, no locals asked had any idea what kind though...)   Official camping at Salmon Creek was about 2 1/2 trail miles away from Highway 1.  A welcome treat and a helluva way to end our long day. Here's a view from the climb away from the highway:

If you can't tell by now, I'm quite proud of our increasing ability to knock off tough mileage.  We're getting into a groove I think where bigger numbers are more manageable.  At Salmon Creek the next morning we saw our first banana slug.  It looked as though a big piece of yellow ghostbuster's slime had fallen from the trees into the middle of our little footpath and began edging it's way back to the safety of the dense brush.  It was about 5 inches long.  What a beauty!

 

Salmon Creek was a restful time.  We drank from the streams, we ate our fun little meals and enjoyed being off the pavement for awhile.  I couldn't resist a skinny dip in a nice pool and found myself warming on rocks in the sunlight.  We attempted a departure from Salmon Creek via another trail that would let us venture off pavement northwards and were rebuffed by the ever present and wildly happy Poison Oak.  The trails, which must be vigilantly manicured, weren't.  So after an hour or two of ducking and side stepping, and step overs, and general anxiety over accumulating masses of itching toxins we turned back and spent another night at Salmon Creek.  I really enjoyed the feeling of relief that comes when one knows that the fresh cool water of the creek is neutralizing the mounds of toxins and saving me from another couple of weeks where I wonder if I can tear my skin off thinking that would feel better.

We  made our way through some gorgeous little village hamlets, Gorda, then Lucia, resupplying at inflated coastal hamlet rates, still able to appreciate the quaintness of these little oasis' along our paved trek towards Big Sur.

Ah, Big Sur!  This long awaited, immortal land.  Bethany was asked by a biker traveling south with her husband, "Have you been to Big Sur before?"  "No", was Bethany's reply for the both of us.  She just gasped and shook her head as if to say, "Oh, you're in for the treat of a lifetime!  Bless your fortunate souls!"  The local print constantly reiterates a famous statement I now paraphrase, "The greatest meeting of land and sea on the planet!"  Or the author Henry Miller who said something along the lines of, "This is land as God intended it", like hey, this is where God got it right!  Well, frankly, it's a beautiful place, and if I were to use all of the hype and descriptive for what is technically Big Sur, I can't say that I honestly can distinguish it as somehow being on some other level of beauty than that which we've experienced for many many miles now.   The Big Sur State Park was closed.  It rained hard on us.  We paid $35 for a camp site.  Bethany almost got ran over.  Maybe sometime down the road I'll find a new appreciation for this place.  This time around I was just glad to have it in the figurative rear view mirror.  What's exciting to me is that we've been in redwood country for awhile now.  We slept one night under a bridge in Monterey county, just as Bethany's Dad did as a scout many moons and hair shades ago.  We've mixed with locals in the farmer's markets after a long stretch of carbohydrates and foods laden with preservatives.  Bethany has brand new boots that might actually help her feet survive our ongoing walk.  We've slept on amazing ocean dunes.  We've seen the most graceful and beautiful deer I've ever seen.  We've made it this far!  Hooray.  Signing off for now, feeling tired.  Soon we'll speak of our having made our way up through Monterey and into Cupertino where we've been visiting with Bethany's familia.  :  )