I spent about an hour last night looking for a new place to hike. After a month of spotting wildflowers on Mount Diablo’s sunny trails, Elizabeth and I wanted to go somewhere different, somewhere shady, so I used parkinfo.org to look for a park on the deeply forested western slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains. I found Butano Creek State Park, and a quick search showed lots of trails and a few patches of old-growth redwoods, which are always an enjoyable sight, so we decided to go there. There is a park map available online, but since I didn’t have a printer, I did the next best thing and turned up the brightness on my laptop, put a sheet of paper over the screen, and traced over all the trails. The final product looked great. I marked the intersections, trail names, and distances and picked out a route. As a final touch I also added some old-growth areas in the park, courtesy of California State Parks.
- Start/End: 37.2032, -122.3375
- Route: Six Bridges Trail, Olmo Fire Road, Goat Hill Trail, Gazo’s Trail, Olmo Fire Road, Indian Trail, Canyon Trail, Jackson Flats Trail, Mill Ox Trail
- Distance: about 10 miles
- Elevation Gain: 1,700 feet
- Highlights: Ridge-top views, old-growth redwood and Douglas-fir
Elizabeth and I picked up our friend Brendan in the Outer Richmond and drove south along the coast on Highway 1. We got to the park past noon, so we had a quick lunch before starting. We ate under the shade of a bigleaf maple with a pair of Stellar’s jays in it who watched for us to finish so they could pick though whatever we happened to drop. Once on the Six Bridges Trail we followed Little Butano Creek, which was lined with lush vegetation, many of whose members were unknown to me. We hiked uphill through a second-growth forest of Douglas-fir, redwood, sword fern, and sorrel, until we reached the park road. I checked my hand-drawn map to figure out where we were, and then we took the road south toward Olmo Fire Road.
We crossed Olmo Fire Road to Gazo’s Trail, a nice single-track through a ridge of Douglas-fir and tanoak. Douglas irises, white and purple flowers so outrageous I thought they were some kind of garden escapee when I first saw them, grew throughout the understory. Through gaps in the forest we could see madrones with their thick, glossy leaves and peeling burgundy bark rising out of the shrubbery, silhouetted against endless blue ridges. Puffy white clouds drifted over the mountains, their diffuse outlines making the sky look as if it had been drawn in pastels. Beyond them the ocean’s horizon disappeared in the haze.
Back on Olmo Fire Road, we took it past the intersection with the Doe Trail, spotting some large redwoods to our south. But they soon gave way to manzanita bushes and scrubby knobcone pine as the road went over Santa Margarita sandstone. We were out in the sun now, and the low vegetation offered views all around us: the Pacific Ocean, the thickly forested canyon we’d just left, and nearby hills with sandy roads just like ours, white streaks through a dark forest.
We were getting hot from the road’s glare, so we were glad to return to the shade of an ancient forest by taking the Indian Trail, which led toward the headwaters of Little Butano Creek. Beneath the Douglas-firs were twisted little oaks that were absolutely covered in Usnea lichen that hung from their branches like pale-green hair, taking advantage of the constant supply of clean, moist air funneled up the canyon from the ocean.
The trail crossed Little Butano Creek, where we admired some impressive redwoods and Douglas-fir before turning onto the Canyon Trail. We contoured along the canyon, curving out for hillsides and in for gullies. The hillsides, exposed to more wind and sun, were covered in chaparral of chamise, manzanita, bush poppy, and bush monkeyflower. The manzanitas (whose name means ‘little apple’ in Spanish) had fruits that indeed looked like tiny Fuji apples. A few knobcone pines grew out of the shrubs and little orange Allen’s hummingbirds flew around emitting high-pitched buzzes, perhaps drawn by the monkeyflowers whose orange flowers looked well-suited to their bills. Usnea lichen encrusted the trunks and branches here, too. On the other hand, when the trail curved in toward gullies, they were shady and cool, generally more hospitable to plant life. As we approached their streambeds, dry in this season, the vegetation became more dense and the trees became taller, including madrone, tanoak, and Douglas-fir.
At length we turned into a more substantial gully, one filled with a deep redwood forest, and the change in landscape was dramatic. The light under the foliage was dim and blue-green, as if we had gone underwater; we had to let our eyes adjust. The air was cool. Elizabeth, far ahead of me, looked incongruously small among the giant trees. Yellow banana slugs, several inches long, crossed the trail and climbed the enormous tree trunks.
Leaving the canyon, we came out of the redwoods and were back in the dappled shade of Douglas-fir and tanoak. But when I reached for the map in my pocket, it was gone. It must have fallen out somewhere on the trail, probably into a mess of poison oak. I told Elizabeth and Brendan to wait for me while I went to look for it. I jogged back along the trail and scanned the hillsides. What if I couldn’t find it? Could we still get back? How much did I remember from sketching it the night before? Would it take more energy to find the map than it would to find our way back to the car without it? I stopped running and looked down the canyon. The puffy clouds were still blowing in with the ocean breeze and the hummingbirds were still buzzing through the chaparral. I knew there were several trails to the bottom of the canyon and that as long as we kept going west and downhill, we’d eventually hit the park road. There, we could easily find our way to the car. I jogged back and apologized to Elizabeth and Brendan for losing the map and for not being able to find it. But, I explained and hoped, we’d probably be OK without it.
A chilly breeze came in from the ocean and the shade of the redwoods slowly deepened. It was about 5 in the afternoon and by my estimate we had something like 2 miles to go. We made it to the intersection with Jackson Flat Trail, which I knew we had to take, but we had to choose whether to go left or right. The trail to the left went toward the canyon bottom, ever so slightly downhill, so we went that way. I was concerned about the dwindling daylight and our route, but I still marveled at the huge redwoods near the trail. So did Brendan and Elizabeth, who were blissfully unconcerned that we were walking through unfamiliar woods near sunset without a map.
The understory grew denser as we descended, but now it was filling in with plants I remembered from the creek, from when we first started hiking. By the time we got to the Mill Ox Trail, I knew we were on the right track and that we’d be back within an hour. We’d been walking for a while, so now we took a well-deserved break. We sat down on a redwood root and Elizabeth shared a bag of dark-chocolate covered almonds from Trader Joe’s with us. Everyone loved them and we finished them all before we got on our way.
We walked downhill and we were back at Little Butano Creek in no time. We hopped over the creek and got back on the park road. We didn’t know which way to go, but since the forest was taller here than where we started and we knew it thinned toward the ocean, we went west. We were right again – in a few minutes we were back at the car. It was 6:20 and I was amazed that, at first without a proper map and later with no map at all, we’d completed the exact route I’d planned the night before. We got in the car and stopped for dinner at the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company. We had burgers and beer while the sun set over the ocean outside the windows. I hadn’t been there before but I’ll remember to stop there the next time I explore the Santa Cruz Mountains.
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