I agree with everything columnist Ron Erskine wrote about
backpacking in the Sierras. The Sierras are magnificent, especially
where the bare granite bones of the mountain exhibit spauling or
glaciation.
I agree with everything columnist Ron Erskine wrote about backpacking in the Sierras. The Sierras are magnificent, especially where the bare granite bones of the mountain exhibit spauling or glaciation.
But there are several advantages to backpacking in the Coast Range: it is close and uncrowded, the vegetation and geology are varied, and unlike in the giardia-infested Sierra, I can drink the water. (Not that I or The Dispatch recommend that anyone else drink the water. Stay home. Drink tap. Be safe.)
Our family – well, most of us – just returned from a Coast Range backpacking trip. Nick wanted to go to Pico Blanco for his last weekend home before he flies off to Tyndall Air Force Base for his ROTC field training.
His request made me feel terribly sentimental. We have taken Nick backpacking since he was six months old and barely old enough to sit up in my backpack. Now he is a gangly 20 year old who can carry twice my pack at twice my pace.
Anne had to go backpacking in the Sierras with the rest of White Stag’s phase I youth staff, to plan next August’s camp. Oliver wanted to stay home with his friends. So in addition to Nick, my husband and I took Nick’s friend Kyle, who is Army ROTC, and our terrier mutt, Zay.
We drove south on U.S. 101, west on Highway 156, south on Highway 1 to Andrew Molera State Park, then turned left and drove 3.8 miles up the dirt Coast Road: two hours from Gilroy to trailhead, and no altitude sickness. Sierra backpackers, eat your hearts out.
Nick and Kyle threw their packs on and took off. We didn’t see them again till we got to camp. Stuart and I moved at a much slower pace, partly because of Zay.
Zay is almost blind from cataracts, but he still loves to hike. Fortunately, he is also a very smart dog. Anne long ago taught him to sit, stay, come, lie down, say please, bow, sing, and shut the door. He never would learn how to heel, though.
Now we have taught him a new trick. If he is running down the trail ahead of us, and is about to run into a fallen log or a rock or a creek, or over the edge of a cliff, we say, “Zay! Bump!” He has learned, remarkably quickly, to stop, and nose forward cautiously to determine whether to go under, over, or through, or to avoid the obstacle altogether.
The three of us hiked two miles through the sun-dappled shade of redwoods, over soil carpeted with duff, banked by ferns and sorrel and strawberries. We forded Little Sur and switch-backed up a hill, through bay and madrone and tanoak and poison oak.
The going got tough: chaparral. The trail was crowded by bush lupine and chemise, sage and sticky monkey flower and Indian paintbrush. The sun blazed in a cerulean sky. Little puffs of breeze cooled us even more than the far-off vistas of ocean. Chunks of marble began to appear among the heterogeneous metamorphic Coast Range rocks.
Zay could no longer follow the overgrown trail, so he taught himself, and me, a new trick. He glued himself to my right boot-heel and allowed me to call out obstructions for him.
“Bump!” for a rock. “Up! and over.”
“Bump!” for a log. “You can crawl under this one.”
“Bump!” for a washed out section of trail. “Come, Zay. This way, good … hup!”
As we neared camp, traversing a grassy hillside where scores of yuccas held their Lord’s candles to the sky, I called back to my husband, “Hey, Stuart! I’m a seeing-eye human!”
We found Nick and Kyle dozing in camp. They had already jumped from the high rock walls that flank the 15-foot waterfall, straight into the grotto carved from Pico Blanco marble: jumped in and swarmed out. The water is a chilly fifty degrees.
Toward sunset another couple arrived, setting up camp at another of the other two campsites. They shared their wine with us; we loaned them our saw. They were the only people we saw till we got back to the trailhead the next day. Most backpackers prefer the Sierras. Thank God.
