We left behind New Jersey’s interstates and suburbs and parked at the Otter Hole trailhead. The air was hazy and, even at 9:30 in the morning, already warm.

The forest canopy was filled with fresh, green, deciduous leaves that cast dark, humid shadows. We are in the New Jersey Highlands, the hilly northern third of New Jersey. Contrary to most people’s perception of the state, the New Jersey Highlands are still heavily forested, and these forests are generally well protected by parks and preserves.

We crossed Posts Brook, skipping from boulder to boulder over several small waterfalls, then followed it east. We passed Otter Hole, a cool, dark pool below one of Posts Brook’s waterfalls, perfect for dipping on hot days like today.

We turned away from the brook and climbed a hill into the interior of the forest. Rocks and boulders jutted out of the thin soil. Soon we were on top of the hill, following a ridge through alternating views and forests.

Elizabeth and I have been spoiled by California, where we can hike for an entire summer day without breaking a sweat. But here, the warmth and moisture gave rise to a fecund landscape of vegetation and bugs. As we hiked, sweat wet our faces and clothes, flies buzzed around us, mosquitoes bit us, inchworms landed on us, and spiderwebs clung to us.

Getting higher, the rocks became extensive outcrops with only small trees and bushes growing between their cracks. We saw the tops of the trees we had just walked through and the forested hills beyond them. As we climbed higher, we got more outcrops and more views. We couldn’t see very far through the hazy air, however; we could hardly make out the shapes of the clouds in the sky.

From a break in the forest we saw a knob of rock jutting out from the hill ahead of us. I hadn’t planned on hiking to it, but it was too alluring to resist. We dipped back into the forest, then contoured around the base of the high point, scrambling over and around big boulders. Soon, we had left the forest and were walking up round, polished rock. We were sweaty from the climb, and the sun, humidity, and 85-degree heat combined to microwave us. We were on Wyanokie High Point.

We sat down in the shade of a pine and enjoyed the warm breeze. I looked around as we ate our lunch. Even though I’d been hiking in New Jersey for over a decade, the continuous expanse of forest I saw astonished me. There were rocky ridges and summits with scrappy trees and shrubs clinging to the thin soil. Below them were thickly forested valleys split by tumbling streams.

The expanse of forest was beautiful from our high point, but in truth it was not healthy. Deer are abundant–too abundant–and their browsing is keeping the forest from regenerating. The only new plants growing are those that the deer refuse to eat. Why has this happened? Because the deer’s natural predators, wolves and cougars, were hunted to extinction here centuries ago.

Forester Aldo Leopold observed this phenomenon as long ago as 1949, when wolves were being extirpated from America’s western states:

I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise.

The deer population won’t decrease, and the forest won’t be healthy, until we allow its predators to return. How do we know that predators will do the job? Consider my home state of California. From the 1960s to today, the deer population in California dropped from 2 million to 440,000. Why? In 1963, the cougar in California went from being a “bountied predator”, where the government paid for killed animals, to being a “game animal”. In 1990 it became a “special protected animal” and hunting of it was outlawed. As the cougar population increased, the deer population fell.

We walked down from Wyanokie High Point and back into the forest. Our sweat had dried in the wind and we were cool from resting. We got back to our car and finished our hike at 1:30.

Here are the details for the loop we took:

R on Hewitt-Butler Trail (blue)
R on Posts Brook Trail (white)
L on Carris Hill Trail (yellow)
R on Hewitt-Butler Trail (blue)
Stop at Wyanokie High Point
continue on Hewitt-Butler Trail (blue)
L on Macopin Trail (white)
L on Otter Hole Trail (green)

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1. High Sierra Trail backpack

To start our hike, we just followed a cobblestone street out of the village until it turned into a dirt track. It was 10:30 in the morning and cool with a bright sun and a strong breeze: perfect weather for hiking. The elevation of the village was 3,300 feet, and we would be hiking a loop to the barragem da Serra Serrada, a small reservoir at an elevation of 4,100 feet.

We walked through plantations of chestnut trees (Castanea sativa) near the village and then a natural forest of Pyrenean oaks (Quercus pyrenaica) farther out. The latter, with deeply-lobed deciduous leaves, reminded me of California’s valley oaks (Quercus lobata) in both habitat and form. It was spring in the mountains, and the tree leaves were still pale and young, and shook in the steady breeze.

We left the forested valley and entered a landscape of round, fuzzy hills covered in shoulder-high shrubs. The shrubs were all blooming, painting the hillsides with patches of yellow (probably Cytisus scoparius or C. striatus), white (Cytisus multiflorus), and violet (Erica sp.). The scene was as pretty as any display of spring wildflowers or autumn foliage I’d seen. The huge granite boulders piled on top of the ridges added a nice touch of contrast. This was a heath, an ecological community associated with the hills of the British Isles, but which also grows in the highlands near the Atlantic coasts of Spain, France, and Portugal.

The shrubs were occasionally broken by soft green meadows. Their borders were oddly rectangular and seemed to follow the contours of the terrain. They looked natural, but were they man-made? As I would later find out, they were.

The meadows were actually lameiros, an ancient method of terrace-building that creates pastures on otherwise inhospitable terrain. In the valleys, lameiros are irrigated year-round by weirs and an intricate system of channels, but here in the uplands, they are simply irrigated by rain and snow. Because they are colonized by native plants, they don’t need pesticides, and because they are fertilized by the manure of the animals that graze them, they don’t need fertilizer.

But as Portugal’s economy improves and its countryside is depopulated by emigration to cities, the lameiros are being abandoned. Their maintenance requires a substantial amount of work; without it, they are drying up and being invaded by generalist bird and plant species. The distinct plants and animals they once supported are disappearing: the landscape is becoming more uniform, and biodiversity is decreasing.

This should give us pause. It’s common knowledge that the conversion of wild land — into a city or farm, say — decreases biodiversity. But here in the heath, the creation of lameiros has done the opposite. The same phenomenon is occurring in the highlands of Mexico, where the return of forests to abandoned fields has decreased biodiversity. The idea that wilderness supports more biodiversity than human-modified landscapes is often used to argue for its creation and protection; but it should be used carefully, because it is not always true.

We reached the highpoint of the loop, the barragem da Serra Serrada, a small reservoir of clear, deep-blue water. We stopped for lunch, then hiked down.

Below us was the village of Montesinho, nestled in a valley surrounded by a patchwork of native heaths and forests, chestnut and pine plantations, and lameiros. The landscape wasn’t pristine and wild like those I usually write about, but the patchwork of small, lightly tended agricultural lands harbored a greater diversity of native plant and animal life than would an untouched wilderness.

Here’s a map of the Porto Furado hike.

Here’s a topographic map of the area around the Porto Furado hike.

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The plan was to start from the meadows near the visitor center, hike through the ancient Douglas-fir forests on the leeward side of Inverness Ridge, then descend through Bishop pine and ceanothus to the coastal scrub and the Pacific Ocean. We’d stop at Arch Rock on the coast, then come back through the densely forested Bear Valley.

Elizabeth and I started our hike at 9:20. We walked across the meadows surrounding the Bear Valley visitor center and then climbed the forested east side of Inverness Ridge. The air was cool and fresh. Sunlight came in through the trees at a low angle. Elizabeth and I had both been a little cranky from waking up to an alarm early on a Sunday morning, but being out in the mountains quickly improved our mood.

Blue and white forget-me-nots (Myosotis latifolia) lined the trail. In the understory were California hazel (Corylus cornuta var. californica), California bay (Umbellularia californica), and tanoak (Lithocarpus densiflorus). Douglas-firs (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. menziesii) grew above everything else. Showy irises (Iris spp.) and huge cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum) grew in the forest clearings.

We stopped in a meadow for a break once we reached the top of Inverness Ridge. In the distance, the golden cliffs of Point Reyes’s western boundary dropped into the Pacific Ocean.

I looked behind us at the short spur trail to the summit of 1,407-foot Mount Wittenberg. I must have walked by it a dozen times, ignoring it each time. But not this time. We hiked to the top, but I’m sorry to report that it was not worth the effort. The summit was indistinct and covered with patches of dense Douglas-fir that blocked any views. I don’t think I’ll be going back.

We hiked north to the Fire Lane Trail. Two years ago, I’d hiked it too late to see all the blueblossom ceanothus (Ceanothus thyrsiflorus) blooming on it. Would we catch them blooming today?

Through the gaps in the trees I saw the dark green hillsides ahead of us dusted with blue. The blueblossoms were blooming! Their boughs were weighed down by masses of blue flowers. Tiny blue petals completely covered the trail.

As we approached the ocean, the forest thinned into Bishop pine (Pinus muricata) scattered between clumps of California blackberry (Rubus ursinus), coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis), poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum), and bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum). Fluorescent-orange scarlet pimpernel (Anagallis arvensis) and bright yellow bird’s-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) lined the trail.

When we got to the beach we sat in the sand below the cliffs. We had lunch and watched the surf. The wind blowing off the water was cold enough for me to put on my jacket.

After lunch we walked for miles along the ocean on the Coast Trail. We were in coastal scrub, a plant community that bears some resemblance to chaparral, but that I’ve never been able to bring myself to like. Maybe that’s because it’s usually choked with poison oak.

Lovely creeks trickled from Inverness Ridge down into the ocean. The combination of a sheltered ravine and fresh water supported surprisingly lush vegetation: alders (Alnus rubra), willows (Salix sp.), horsetails (Equisetum sp.), cow parsnips, big yellow monkeyflowers (Mimulus guttatus), and ferns stumbled all over each other above the creeks.

Next to one of the creeks a small, inconspicuous flower caught my eye. A closer look revealed it to be a species of Calochortus I’d never seen before: pussy ears (C. tolmiei). Their three petals were a dusty lilac covered with fine hairs on the inside.

Our last stop was Arch Rock, a popular headland with excellent views of the ocean. As usual, it was crowded, so I had to ask two guys if we could sit next to them. One of them looked familiar. Then I realized it was Stuart, whom I’d met on a hike with a mutual friend years ago. He was there with his friend Dave. We talked out for a while, and then walked back to the Bear Valley visitor center together.

We all talked and joked, a welcome break from the solitude Elizabeth and I had had all day. We finished at 6:15—Elizabeth and I were out for nearly 9 hours! A great day in the wilderness. We all stopped at the Marin Brewing Company on the way home for an excellent dinner.

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• Start/End: Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park Visitor Center, 41.3641, -124.0231
• Route: Nature Trail, Miners’ Ridge Trail, Davidson Road, Fern Canyon Trail, James Irvine Trail, Nature Trail
• Distance: 11.5 miles
• Elevation gain: 2,000 feet
• Highlights: old-growth redwood and Sitka spruce forests, fern canyon, beach, wild Roosevelt elk

Once the rest of our group, from the San Francisco Sierra Club, arrived, we started our hike. We walked past the azaleas and into the forest on the Nature Trail, which began as a boardwalk whose sides wrapped around 6-foot redwood trunks. Below the boardwalk was the meandering Prairie Creek, its banks lined with bushes, ferns, and small trees. Above the boardwalk, but still well below the redwood canopy, were bigleaf maples with moss-covered branches and big light-green leaves.

We left the creek on the Miners’ Ridge Trail and headed uphill.

Small wildflowers like redwood sorrel, deer foot, starflower, trillium, and wild lily of the valley filled the forest floor, joined by great bursts of ferns.

I also saw false Solomon’s seal, salal, and Smith’s and Hooker’s fairy bells. These all looked generally the same: creeping plants with alternate, oval leaves ending in sharp tips. But they did have distinct flowers that helped me tell them apart: false Solomon’s seal had white bursts of flowers on panicles; salal had pearly urn-shaped flowers hanging from racemes; the fairy bells had flowers hanging directly from their stems, but Smith’s flowers were white and cylindrical, whereas Hooker’s flowers were greenish and spreading at their bottoms.

The forest was open enough for us to see giant trunks rising out of the understory for a considerable distance. These were redwood and Douglas-fir, which looked incongruously large among the other, normal-sized plants. From unseen corners of the forest we heard the chattering song of the diminutive winter wren. We also heard the songs of both the varied and hermit thrushes, the former’s song mechanical, the latter’s ethereal.

We passed the intersection with the Clintonia Trail, where we did in fact see some red clintonia, and turned downhill to begin our descent toward the ocean. This took us into the Squashan Creek canyon, whose steep sides and dense forest darkened the trail. Fallen trees hundreds of feet long, their trunks thicker than a man is tall, lay shattered and rotting on the mountainsides, slowly sinking into a sea of ferns. We had to use hands and feet to climb over them.

I felt as if I were walking backwards in time through a forest primeval. How long ago had these trees fallen? Months? Years? Decades? Centuries? And why? From a landslide, old age, the winds of a storm? Their life events occur on a timescale entirely unlike my own. A sapling might wait for centuries in the shade before one of its elders falls to leave a gap of light where it can grow. The length of time between their generations can be greater than the age of the United States.

We dropped lower as we neared Squashan Creek’s outlet to the Pacific Ocean. Thick bushes of thimbleberry and salmonberry, over 6 feet tall, lined the trail. There were also coltsfoot and cow parsnip, weedy-looking plants with huge leaves. We crossed a small feeder stream choked with horsetails and ferns and lined with yellow monkey flowers. Down here there were no longer many redwoods. Instead, the salty ocean air that blows through the canyon favored Sitka spruce. We could feel a breeze coming off the ocean as we walked: the same air that gave an advantage to the spruce. And as we got closer, we could also hear the surf.

There was no dramatic view of the ocean as we left the forest. Instead, we were greeted by a broad seaside meadow populated with scattered spruce, most of them barely 10 feet tall. The wind and salt spray near the ocean were just too harsh for them to grow any higher. Behind us, as further evidence of this, half the spruces near the exit from the canyon were lying on the ground, their tops pointing inland, probably flattened by blasts from a winter storm.

We followed Davidson Road to the Fern Canyon parking area and then walked through the meadow to have lunch on the shore. Behind us were the beach’s namesake gold bluffs, their tops covered in dark spruces. A herd of elk trotted away to the north as we walked by them. The ground was marshy and we tried to keep our feet dry with little success. Sand flies landed on our hands and faces, but a pleasant on-shore breeze kept most of them away.

Once at the beach, we sat on the warm, dark sand and ate lunch, watching black cormorants and flocks of pelicans fly over the surf.

After lunch we returned to the forest through Fern Canyon, a 20-foot wide gravel stream bed bounded by 40-foot cliffs. These cliffs have combined with the constant flow of moist air coming from the ocean to create a perfect habitat for ferns. Out of the dark muddy cliffs grew five-fingered and sword ferns along with deer, lady, bracken, and chain ferns, their fronds rocking slowly in the breeze.

Rivulets of water trickled down the cliffs over mossy rocks and into the pebble banks of Fern Creek. It was a slow, meandering creek and we crossed it several times, often on logs that had fallen into the canyon from the forest above.

The sky was beginning to clear and sunlight made its way through the trees, bouncing off the cliffs and illuminating the ferns. We made our way through the canyon like this, walking on gravel and balancing on polished logs to cross the stream, for twenty minutes before we turned uphill and back into the forest on the James Irvine Trail.

As we hiked out of the canyon, we entered an old-growth Sitka spruce forest where the maroon spruce trunks grew from a thick green understory. The tree trunks had old branch stubs sticking straight out from them like broken bicycle spokes, moss hanging from their tips. The Sitka spruce didn’t quite have the girth of the redwoods, but they could hold their own when it came to height: a few of the park’s Sitka spruce are over 300 feet tall. One Sitka spruce grew from the side of a fallen redwood, its roots wrapping around the trunk of the fallen tree like constricting snake.

By now the sun was coming out, changing the forest’s character as we walked back on the James Irvine Trail. Scenery that had been cool and gloomy in the morning had become warm and inviting.

As we walked back, I watched the forest gradually return to the redwood and Douglas-fir mix from the morning.

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