Irrelevance Glorified

After my debacle at Diablo, I resolved to better consider the heat as I continued my summer hikes. For the most part, that means East Bay is off limits until Fall arrives. South Bay isn’t all that much better. North Bay is far away and almost certainly requires paying a bridge toll somewhere. So the Peninsula it is! Once you cross over the Santa Cruz mountains, summer temperatures are much milder, and the clouds often don’t retreat until noon approaches. There are quite a few state parks that straddle the crest of the Santa Cruz mountains or lay on it’s western slopes, so I figured now’s a good time to try them. For the weekend of July 18th, I chose Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, near the town of Felton and about 10 miles north of Santa Cruz. There are actually two large separate sections of the park. The southern part is more heavily used by campers, and as such, has parking fees and the like. The northern portion was donated to the California State Park system at a later time, and just has trails and stuff — and parking is free! This portion, the “Fall Creek Unit” used to be a big source of lime; the stuff was mined and calcined in limekilns before being shipped off in redwood barrels. Some of the relics of this legacy is still there in the park.

I started off this hike on the Fall Creek trail, which begins at the entrance and follows the canyon created by Fall Creek. After passing by some barrel-making equipment, I made a right onto Big Ben Trail, which proved to be a decently steep climb up to Truck Trail, an old logging road (now a fire road). This hooked up with the Ridge Trail, which took me back to my starting point, forming a 7 mile clockwise loop trail.

The redwoods are nice, although not old growth by any means. The rangers here seem to want to give this park a bit of an “untamed” feeling, as there are a lot of fallen logs that you have to pick your way around. So, while this hike wasn’t spectacular or anything, the rusticness and the little pieces of history bump this hike up to a B+

Flick set here
Slideshow below.
Pictures after the jump.

 

Depending on how lazy I am and how many pockets I’m willing to fill, sometimes I will just take a picture of the trail map so I just need to look at my camera whenever I want to consult the map, rather than rifle through my pack.

 

As has been well documented from previous hikes, I like taking pictures of bridges, whether they are simple or extraordinary. This one, crossing Fall Creek, lies somewhere in between.

 

California State Parks are managed. Things are not allowed to proceed naturally, per se, but people work to keep up the trails, keep out invasive species, repair trails after storms, etc. Oftentimes, you see trees that have fallen across the trail, and many times these are sawn in half to allow passage. But other times, trees are left as they fall, blocking the trail like this. This "archway" was easily navigated by ducking under the tree, but I wonder if they have an actual methodology or quantitative criterion by which they decide to act or in-act.

 

Maybe I’m just not looking in the right place, but I always see impressive webs and never any spiders. It makes me think there’s a Johnny-Appleseed-like spider running through the forest, weaving webs and then moving on.

 

Wind and erosion are probably these trees greatest enemies. It’s only a matter of time before this one bites the dust. You can see how much of the root system is already extending away from the hill.

 

The soil that this tree is living in is quite clay-like and chalky. Poor planning on this fir’s part.

 

Yet another portion of Fall Creek where fallen trees litter the area above the water. I imagine that natural dams form every couple hundred years.

 

I forget why I took this picture. It’s either all the stuff in my way, or the waterfall, or the pleasing zig-zagging of the trail. Whatever.

 

This portion of Howard Cowell State Park was once part of a lime mine. To transport the lime out of there, they put them in barrels. But where could they get wood for all those barrels. Hey, what about all these redwoods lying around?! This portion of the trail commemorated the activities of the barrel makers.

 

The display near this machine identified it as a stave-maker, for producing barrels. To be honest, I have no idea how this machine turned redwoods into barrel staves. It actually looked like it could be a medieval torture device.

 

Here’s a look inside the stave making machine. I hope this sheds some light on the matter for you.

 

Just to prove that I didn’t get all those picture off of Google Image Search or something, here’s me showcasing all those antiquities.

 

I’m all for leaving things be when trees block the path, but I was impressed at this section of the trail, where three trees in quick succession made for a little bit of an obstacle court.

 

It’s a little bit hard to make out in this picture, but this region of the forest was littered with spider webs. It reminded me of the part in *Nerd Alert* The Hobbit where Bilbo and his cohorts are captured by a pack of spiders in Mirkwood. I moved quickly through this portion.

 

I’m not exactly sure what prompted this tree to go all twisty on us, but I hope it was worth the whiplash.

 

There was a better, more precarious log just a bit up this stream that I could have perched myself on, but there was no way I could have made it across that log in 10 seconds without greatly increasing my chances of falling and cracking my skull. While that instance would have been lovingly documented, I decided to go for the low-hanging fruit, and just sit on this log which slung low over the creek.

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