Some friends and I went out to the Santa Cruz Mountains for a 13 mile hike on Sunday. The hike is well known in two forms as a 2-3 day hike called Skyline-to-the-Sea or a one day BBHQ-to-the-sea. The latter version involves dropping a car at the Ocean and hiking down to the dropped car from the trailhead. I had planned on doing the hike as a 2-day from Skyline Blvd with the Geocachers of the Bay Area in August. As the trip approached, I continued to experience sciatica too difficult to do one day, let alone two.
So, I decided to organize my own trip to burn off those Thanksgiving pounds as long as the rain was still staying away. I found out that a controlled burn was happening, which would slightly detour our route. It also cut out one of the twelve caches required for getting to a final cache 50sumtin’s Big Basin Park HQ to Sea Baker’s Dozen! . Luckily, we picked up another cache on our detour and Bud was kind enough to let us count it towards our 12…we missed a clue, but it didn’t prove to affect our deduction of the correct coordinates for the final.
I expected it to be a really long day because of the mileage and because we would be stopping frequently for geocaches along the way. So, we met at Waddell Beach at 6:30 am, just as th sun was rising. It took just under an hour to get to the trailhead. Google maps routed me on a gated, dirt road. Luckily, I checked my facts and saw that the only accessible route was way over through Bonny Doon.
We left our car just after 7:30 am. There was a controlled burn happening and soon things got pretty smokey. The rangers kept commenting on what an early start we got. I was surprised since we are getting into the shortest days of the year.
As we walked along the fire road, we were shocked at how much smoke we saw and then we started actually seeing flames. As we turned off the fire road, we were greeted by a whole group of good looking, hairy twenty-something fire crew members. We descended the very steep trail (I believe that it was Sunset trail) and were within feet of burning redwoods.
For me, there were three major highlights of the trip. First off, This may be only the second time (the first being the first time that I did this hike) that I have been in so much contiguous redwood forest, including some old growth. I would get moments that my focus on whatever I was doing would just break and I would have a perfect picture in front of me. Everything still, except for a small creek moving next to me. The goliath trees just everywhere providing shelter, warmth and a soft forest floor of their needles.
The second highlight was Berry Creek Falls. Although the water was certainly not high at this time of year after a very dry fall, it was absolutely jaw-dropping nonetheless. There is something primordially peaceful about watching a waterfall…a place where the beauty and force of nature overcomes anything manmade.
The final highlight was up to the western ridge of the park. We had to go up there for our final cache in the Baker’s Dozen. We debated for a while at a previous fork that we had seen that had confusing signs. It turns out that the trail is only used seasonally and we were off season, so we had to do an out and back from close to the end of the trail. After doing 12 miles, it is not an easy thing to be at the end of the trail and look back and up at where you need to go. We took a nice break and regained our energy. The trip up was well worth it.
It was a narrow, canyon side trail that made a slow ascent and brought us through a completely different eco-system than we had seen during the rest of that day. We took an unmarked turnoff into a memorial grove that had simply stunning views out the canyon opening to the ocean.
We arrived back to the car at Waddell Beach at about 3:45, I think. Being intrepid cachers, we decided to cache along the ocean on our way back and also check out a cache that had been recommended to us along Empire Grade Rd. our cache total was 21.
The last one was off a very rough trail with steep terrain. We had a short sweet view of the valley below (Scott’s Valley?) and scrambled back up with our headlamps blazing. I think that I was the last one over the guard-rail entrance, my leg swinging over, literally, as we lost our last bit of light. We had a challenging drive back to pick up the second vehicle and drove out into Saratoga on the super-windy and narro 236. We were happily greeted by a holiday-lit and bustling downtown Saratoga.
