hiking &pictures ranjeet on 07 Sep 2009 10:04 pm
Purisma Creek Redwoods, July 2009
Even though I have been concentrating on parks in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I have nowhere near exhausted all my options. For the weekend of July 26th, I chose the Purisma Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve, a patch of protected redwood forest on the western slope of the Santa Cruz mountains, right near Half Moon Bay. In a theme that has been shared with a lot of places that I’ve visited, this preserve is centered around a creek (Purisma Creek) and the canyon that surrounds it.
One thing I liked about this park is that for me, it had a good balance of ease-of-access and getting-awayness. It was about 50 minutes to an hour away, taking I-280 North to Hwy 92 West to Half Moon Bay, then getting on Hwy 1 going south for only a mile or so before making a left onto Higgins Canyon road for the final 4 miles or so. In other words, I spent a minimum of time on narrow, unmarked roads. But I still felt fairly secluded, even though this trailhead was relatively popular.
I started out on Purisma Creek Trail, which climbs gradually as it follows the creek farther into the canyon. This multi-purpose trail meets up with the Soda Gulch Trail at about the 2.3 mile mark. This trail is refreshingly hiker-only, and it weaves through the forest and into hillside quasi-meadows for another 2.5 miles before hitting the Harkins Ridge Trail. The suggested trail plan calls for heading back to the trailhead to complete the loop at this point, but I decided to extend the hike and headed uphill, to the northeast. I had to watch for a bunch of mountain bikers on this trail, but I found myself up by Skyline Blvd before heading back down to the trailhead on Whittemore Gulch Trail. Overall, I estimate my hike to be between 9.5 and 10 miles.
This hike was suggested to me by Jane Hubers “60 Hikes Within 60 Miles of San Francisco”, who preferred this place to most other redwood parks. And for the most part, I would have to agree with her. I really enjoyed this hike, for reasons not quite definable. It did not have fantastic vistas, and indeed few places where I could see much beyond trees. But I seem to value varied landscapes, a nice mix of steep climb and gradual grades, and nice trees, and this trail delivered. I just remember getting back to my car and thinking “Gee, that was an enjoyable hike”. I give it an A.
Not much pictures of this hike. Well, I took a number of pictures, but a greater than average number of them turned out to be not worth posting (and as you have seen, I have pretty low standards for what I end up posting) due to redundancy or horrible composition. I did come across a family of quail bustling across the trail. They were actually really funny, because they seemed to be panicking due to my sudden arrival. Since quail don’t really fly, though, they didn’t burst up into the air, but mainly tried to scatter into the brush. But some of the baby quail couldn’t really decide which side of the trail they wanted to be at, so they zig-zagged back and forth like a trailside version of pinball, until they sorted themselves out. Unfortunately, by the time I had the presence of mind to turn my camera to video mode, they had scattered, so no proof. Sorry.
Flick set here.
Slideshow below.
Pictures and descriptions after the jump.
Yet another picture of redwoods being tall. The thing I liked about this picture is seeing the two redwoods (which are actually probably clones of each other) so close to each other, and seeing their branches extend out only on one side of their trunks. This probably developed over hundreds of years, but still, I enjoy anthropomorphizing them as having special awareness of their surroundings.
Burls often form at the bottom of trees; these knobby growths can eventually become trees of their own if needed. Every once in a while you’ll see burls a few feet up the trunk on a tree. This usually implies that the ground level was once way up there, but soil erosion has removed soil around the trunk. This might be a redwood, but it seems a little bit…mossy…to be a redwood. But after I took this picture, I noticed something a little strange….
One common game that older peoples played with trees is to see what animals and humans they could see within the burls. Their knobbiness and jaggedness allows one to use their imagination to see almost whatever they want. Kids are often very good in this game. I mean, I know it’s just anthropomorphizing some more, but I swear I can see a smiley face within this burl.
This is another example of a picture that is a mystery, in retrospect. Someday, I’m sure it will come to me.
Scouting ahead to the opposite side of the gully that this trail encircles, I see some obstacles in my future. As it turns out, there was enough room to comfortably sneak under this fallen tree. Its also at times like this that I realize that I could use a better camera…but I also realize that if I had a heavier camera, I probably wouldn’t take it.
By the time the trail poked out of the trees, the fog that had been prevalent in the morning had just about retreated to the ocean in the distance. The interesting thing about this hike was that I could feel the coolness of the coast and the warmth of the inner valley battle it out as I hiked along the ridge, with the temperature cycling up and down 10 or more degrees at a time as the wind shifted.
This is the next installment of Proof That I Was There. I’m suffering a bit from hat-head, but there’s not much I can do about that. That one tree probably looks more gigantic than it is, being surrounded by brush, but it’s still pretty huge – almost the size of my head.
Somewhere over those hills is Half Moon Bay. It looks like it must still be partly cloudy over there.