Irrelevance Glorified

Merry Christmas everybody! I’m not Christian myself, but I do enjoy myself a day off. For all my loyal readers out there, I have a special treat for you, one that’s been on all your wishlists : a new post about a hiking trip I took in September! Yeah, towards the end of — wait, what? That wasn’t on your Christmas wishlist at all? Well, I don’t know, I have the whole list right here, and it clearly shows “A new hiking post from Ranjeet” for all of you. I don’t know what to say, take it up with Santa. At least it’s not a lump of coal.

Back towards the end of September, I visited The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, a redwood-centric state park a little bit southeast of Santa Cruz. It’s pretty much the southest I’ve traveled for hiking, although the trip took less than an hour, thanks to its proximity to major highways. Although the area stopped being a logging camp in the 1920’s, it only became a state park in the 60’s. Compared to a lot of the other state parks, that’s pretty young. This park is close enough to “civilization” that many people eschew the Park’s parking lot. They park at businesses that exist right outside the park and then bike or run inside, thus avoiding the daily park fee. I kinda think this is a rude move, because they are using the park while not supporting it. It’s also a tiring move, because even if you park right outside the park, it’s a long, windy, uphill climb to the park interior. Basically, if you park outside, it’s a 5k just to get to anything worth seeing.

Nisene Parks State Park was sorta disappointing. Not too much signage, so I often didn’t know where I was. This is especially true near the park entrance, where the trails meander and I found myself back-tracking quite a bit. There are some very long hikes available here, but I found myself wanting to hit trails that were really far apart, so I ended up driving between trailheads. The first trails I hit included really old growth trees, including some real monsters, while the later trails were ridgeline trails through previously logged areas.

Alongside the issues with trail signs, there was a real dearth of historical information as well. The pictures I show pretty much detail the entirety of the documentation on site, which was disappointing, because I like to think that I’m learning while I’m hiking. Also, one of the main reasons I picked this park was that the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake is actually close to one of the trails! There is even a sign! Imagine my horror when I got there to find out that the Aptos Creek trail was closed! A great disappointment. Whatever. Overall, I grade this place a C. Again, no one punched me in the face.

Anyways, enjoy the pictures, and Merry Christmas to everyone! I successfully ordered a Bag of Random Crap from Woot today!

Flickr Set Here.
Slideshow Below.
Pictures & Descriptions after the jump.

 

Walking around the parking lot of the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, I tried to follow some meandering paths to find some Old Growth redwoods. These paths were ummarked and quite confusing. And in the end, it turns out I was nowhere near where I needed to be. But I did find this overturned, vandalized, overgrown car. Not sure what the story is here.

 

Again, while wandering, I came across this bamboo grove. First of all….bamboo? Seriously? I do not think that is a native Californian plant. When I’m near Santa Cruz, I’m expecting artsy hippies, not deadly ninjas. Anyways, this path was too forboding for me to dare follow it. I’ve seen enough horror movies to know what’s up.

 

In the redwood groves near the entrance station, there were a lot of extremely large stumps like this. I think that the original loggers cut down the giant tree in the middle, but since redwoods are a lot like vampires, that didn’t really kill them. In the intervening 80 years or so, a protective grove of smaller redwoods have grown up, like bodyguards. At least, that is my interpretation of history. I’m not going to bother checking up on the verity of all that.

 

I spent quite a bit of time trudging through the park in search for the Old Growth Forest Trail. I knew I was on the right track when I came across this creek and this bridge. Oddly enough I managed to make this all look miniature when I took this picture.

 

As labeled on the maps, this is the twisted grove. Quite freaky, not only because the trees are slanted, but because they appear to be slanted in a clockwise direction.

 

Frankly, I’m just impressed that I took a movie that I can watch without feeling nauseous. Not sure if it’s any more illustrative than the previous picture.

 

Again, it’s difficult to take pictures of very large redwoods unless I get very far away, and if I do that….I can’t see the tree. This ain’t no Avenue of the Giants. So this is pretty much the best I can do. Timed shots of me near the trunk. I checked out that gap in the bole, just to make sure there wasn’t something terrifying in there. The phrasing of this was weird, because it was called "The Advocates Tree", rather than "The Advocate Tree". Now, there was another really large tree nearby (that might be it in the background), so maybe they meant "The Advocate Trees" or just "The Advocates". With a name like that, I think that these trees are like the Godfather of the forest, making lumberjacks offers they can’t refuse.

 

After wandering around down near the entrance station, I got back in the car and drove up about a mile and a half to the location of the second part of my hike. I’m taking the West Ridge Trail out to Hoffman’s Historic Site, more or less.

 

Coming across power lines in the middle of a giant state park is somewhat jarring. Way to break the illusion, guys.

 

I can only imagine the amount of tedious maintenance that goes on to keep these power lines free of entanglement. I mean, you can see the path from Google Maps! Maybe they do the whole cutting-via-helicopter thing. I hope it’s not just some dudes with a ladder.

 

To be honest, I’m not quite sure why I took this picture. But I think I can make a decent guess. As I was following the trail, I was surrounded by redwood trees. But then the trail took a sharp turn and started walking along a different ridge, and I noticed I was now surrounded by Douglas Firs. As nearest as I can tell, this is approximately the transition point. Roughly speaking, to the right is redwood land and to the left is Douglas Fir-town. I find it interesting that such little changes in the environment (the fog probably comes over differently relative to these two ridges) can make such a large difference on what kinds of trees grow.

 

This tree was strange in that it looked like the bark was shredded vertically, but clearly the tree was still alive. I think that perhaps there’s a giant, mutant bear running around the forest, sharpening his claws on redwoods. I mean, just based on the empirical data here.

 

I don’t normally see redwoods go this buckwild in limb formation, but this park is full of all sort of mutant redwoods.

 

This was the entire extent of the explanation. There were no buildings around, no other signs. Just this marker. I have to say, a bit of a let down.

 

Along the way back, there was this display memorializing Porter House, a small residential area where the loggers lived. Again, this was the only thing around.

 

I saw a number of these faded scratchings along the trail. I figure that there must have been some sort of cross-country race going on, with these markings letting the runners know which way to go. I have to wonder, though, how fast these runners are going, because it shouldn’t have been that confusing. I mean, there are a bunch of trees to the left, and a bunch of trees to the right, and and a relatively open space in the middle. This isn’t rocket science. There aren’t a bunch of intersecting trails. There’s like, one. All this arrow did was make me feel vaguely wrong for going in the opposite direction. And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s feeling vaguely wrong.

 

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