Category Archives: April

Humboldt Redwoods Grasshopper Peak backpack

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Friday

Elizabeth and I set out for Humboldt Redwoods State Park with Jenny on Friday night, getting to the Burlington Campground at 9 PM. We were on a group trip, and our plan was to hike to the top of 3,379-foot Grasshopper Peak on Saturday, camp there, then hike back down on Sunday.

We set up our tent in the dark. Beside us were big swordferns (Polystichum munitum) and towering redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens). It was a damp 45 degrees and low clouds drifted past the moon. We fell asleep easily.

Saturday

The next morning we met the other group members: Rita, Val, Craig, and Ilya. We broke camp at 9 ready to hike, but quickly found out that we couldn’t do our planned hike. The trail crossed a swift, deep river, and the pedestrian bridge across it wouldn’t be in place for another month. We brainstormed for other ideas and decided on another backpacking loop up to Grasshopper Peak:  take the Grasshopper Multi-Use Trail (Grasshopper M.U.T.) up, camp at Grasshopper Trail Camp, then take the Johnson Camp Trail back down—an 18-mile loop with about 3,000 feet of elevation gain. We got our permits and were on our way.

We started our hike at noon, up a steady grade on the Grasshopper M.U.T., a dirt road to the fire lookout on Grasshopper Peak. Around us were redwoods, huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum), poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum), and irises (Iris sp.). I even spotted a few calypso orchids (Calypso bulbosa).

The Grasshopper M.U.T climbs from 300 to 3,379 feet over six miles. Since Humboldt Redwoods State Park is well-known for protecting the largest single tract of old-growth redwood forest in the world, I had imagined that the Grasshopper M.U.T. would take me through a variety of pristine habitats as it ascended. The reality was anything but.

It turns out that not all of the forests in Humboldt Redwoods are old-growth. Indeed, the secondary forest on the Grasshopper M.U.T. was notable only for its monotony. Redwoods and Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) emerged from a midstory of tanoak (Lithocarpus densiflorus) and madrone (Arbutus menziesii). In the understory grew huckleberry and salal (Gaultheria shallon). Huge stumps of redwoods, logged long ago, loomed next to the trail. The horizontal slots loggers had cut into them for platforms were still visible. Some exceptionally large redwoods and Douglas-firs, those too twisted or too burled to be valuable as lumber or those whose trunks had holes burned into them by forest fires, had been spared. The only interesting aspect of the forest was that redwoods grew up to an elevation of 3,000 feet, by far the highest I’d ever seen them growing.

Near the top of Grasshopper Peak, the forest became sparse and stunted. The redwoods disappeared, the Douglas-firs became scattered, and the forest gave way to a woodland of canyon oak (Quercus chrysolepis), manzanita, (Arctostaphylos sp.), and madrone. This offered us our first views from the hike: forested green hills all around us.

We got to the Grasshopper Trail Camp at 3:30 and rejected it immediately. Sure, it was on a ridge overlooking a pretty meadow. It even had an outhouse and bear box. But it was the coldest, windiest place we’d encountered all day.

We walked downhill and checked the meadow for better campsites. It was a little sloped and lumpy, but it was sheltered from the wind, which was good enough for us. We set up our tents and then shared snacks and vodka.

I looked around. The meadow bore hundreds of small, five-petaled white baby blue eyes (Nemophila menziesii var. atomaria).  It was also popular with mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus): their scats littered the grass.

The condition of the trees around it revealed the meadow as a battleground in the ancient war between forest and grassland. The grass was strewn with the charred trunks of Douglas-firs that had been killed by fire before they were 20 feet tall. The taller, older Douglas-firs beyond the meadow were burned and clinging to life.

Before sunset, we walked the half mile to the top of Grasshopper Peak. On the way we found a big scat filled with fur and bones. Was it a mountain lion’s (Puma concolor)? I scanned the shadows for a large, tawny, long-tailed cat.

From the summit, we saw mountains in every direction fading into a blue haze. To the east were dark, snow-capped peaks in the Mendocino National Forest. To the west, below the setting sun, we could just make out the Pacific Ocean beyond the King Range. Around us were scrubby manzanita, ceanothus (Ceanothus sp.), and gooseberry (Ribes californicum).

A tall fire tower, its doors and windows boarded up, occupied the summit. We didn’t know if it was permanently closed or if it had just been shut down for the wet season. A sign at the campground had promised water at the summit, but we found everything shut off. We would have no water except what we had brought up with us for dinner and breakfast.

We walked back to camp and ate dinner together as the sun set. Fires were not allowed at the camp, so we huddled around a small candle made from a tin of paraffin wax with a wick in it instead. It was cold and breezy, so Elizabeth and I returned to our tent once we had shivered enough. It was 9 o’clock and 41 degrees.

The moon cast shadows on the walls of our tent. Inside, it was warm and still. The ground wasn’t too sloped, either. It didn’t take long for me to fall asleep.

Sunday

We left camp the next morning at 9. It was sunny, cool, and the wind had softened to a breeze. Through the trees we saw distant ridges and foggy valleys.

On the way down, we left the Grasshopper M.U.T. and took the Johnson Camp Trail.

We stopped at the Johnson Trail Camp, a former cabin site for tie hackers, who once lived there while making railroad ties from redwoods. The cabins were decrepit, with doors that wouldn’t open and roofs full of holes. Elizabeth thought they were frightening, but I thought they were picturesque. It’s also a nice camp site: it’s in a sheltered cove, it has running water right next to it, and it has an outhouse and a bear box.

After leaving the camp, we immediately entered a fine old growth forest. There were no more stumps. The trees grew in a variety of sizes and ages. Sunlight came through the gaps in the forest canopy and dappled the understory.

As if to welcome us to this enchanted forest, a spotted owl (Strix occidentalis) landed on a tree in front of us. It seemed as interested in us as we were in it, cocking its head to the side as we took photos. It hopped off its perch, spread its huge wings, then glided silently onto another branch, this time closer to us. We watched it some more, then walked on. The owl flew one more time, following us down the trail. We said our goodbyes.

The Johnson Camp Trail passed through 5 miles of beautiful old-growth forest on its way down the mountain. To compare it with the Grasshopper M.U.T. is to tell the tale of two trails. The Grasshopper M.U.T. was wide, the Johnson Camp Trail was narrow. The Grasshopper M.U.T. plowed straight through the landscape, the Johnson Camp Trail caressed it. The Grasshopper M.U.T. was monotonous, the Johnson Camp Trail was varied.

The forest changed character as we descended. Sometimes giant redwoods dominated the forest, other times they shared it with Douglas-fir. The forest became open and sunny and the air became warmer. The midstory became a place of tanoak and madrone, the understory a place of huckleberry, salal, and swordfern.

We took the Bull Creek Trail back to our cars. It led us through a remarkable bottomland redwood forest with some of the largest trees I’d ever seen. The redwoods were over ten feet in diameter. Their trunks were perfectly straight columns rising hundreds of feet into the air. The ground was filled with starflower (Trientalis latifolia), fairy bells (Disporum smithii), trilliums (Trillium ovatum), and sorrel (Oxalis oregana). It was a great finish to the hike.

We got to the cars at 3:30. On the way home, Jenny, Elizabeth, and I ate some great burgers at Buster’s Burgers and Brew in Willits.

Don’t miss:

Jenny’s account of the Humboldt Redwoods Grasshopper Peak backpack.

Ilya’s account of the Humboldt Redwoods Grasshopper Peak backpack.

Mount Diablo three-peaks loop

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It’s peak wildflower season in the Bay Area and I wanted a hike with lots of views and lots of blooms. A loop over three peaks around Mount Diablo promised a little challenge, some big views, and tons of wildflowers, so I decided on that.

Elizabeth and I got to the trailhead at the Juniper Campground at 9. It was a sunny morning with a crisp, cool breeze. We had an excellent view of the sprawl-filled San Ramon Valley and the broad green hills that bordered it.

We didn’t hike for long before we found wedgeleaf ceanothus (Ceanothus cuneatus) covering entire hillsides with white blooms.

An hour and a half later, we got to our first summit of the day: 3,849-foot Mount Diablo. There were no cars on the summit parking lot yet, only some cyclists and a trail runner. The summit was cold and windy and Elizabeth and I took shelter behind the walls of the visitor center for a snack.

The flowers had been just OK so far, but as we descended onto the north side of Mount Diablo on the North Peak Trail, they became great.

We found bright yellow Goldfields (Lasthenia sp.) all over the ground, and orange wallflowers (Erysimum capitatum), fiddlenecks (Amsinckia sp.), and California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) shooting up above them. Red larkspur (Delphinium nudicaule) grew from the rocks.

Our next stop was North Peak, a 3,557-foot summit northwest of Mount Diablo. The road to it was so steep, Elizabeth and I had trouble climbing it—I couldn’t believe it was used by wheeled vehicles. But the summit bristled with radio antennas, so they must make it up there. We enjoyed the views, then made our way back down. On the way I noticed that the road was lined with pink-blooming gypsum springbeauty (Claytonia gypsophiloides).

Our last stop was 2,369-foot Eagle Peak. I wanted to get there via the Bald Ridge and Eagle Peak trails, a route I first thought of on my direct hike up Mount Diablo a year ago. The Bald Ridge Trail was brushy, and we had to dodge poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) and wade through clouds of bugs, but the views and wildflowers were excellent. There were beautiful bird’s eye gilia (Gilia tricolor ssp. diffusa), purple larkspur (Delphinium sp.), and lovely but inconspicuous checker lily (Fritillaria affinis). Indian warrior (Pedicularis densiflora) lurked in the shadows.

It was warm now and the tall chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum) on the trail to Eagle Peak blocked the wind, making us hot. Once on the summit, we stopped for snacks and a rest.

All that remained was the walk back to Juniper Campground. The best part of this was a huge patch of blooming white wedgeleaf and blueblossom (Ceanothus thyrsiflorus) ceanothus near Deer Flat Creek on Meridian Ridge Road.

Their flowers mottled the hillsides with blue and white and scented the air. We finished at 4, wrapping up our excellent hike in seven hours.

Butano State Park Hike

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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.

West from Butano State Park Canyon Trail

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.

Sticky monkey flower (Mimulus aurantiacus) on Butano State Park Canyon Trail

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.

Redwood canyon on Butano State Park Canyon Trail

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.