Creating wilderness

One of the most personally satisfying things I’ve ever done was to help create wilderness. I hiked in beautiful, unspoiled country, took pictures and notes, drew lines on a map, and a few months later we had new wilderness.

I was volunteering with the Ventana Wilderness Alliance and The California Wilderness Coalition on the Wilderness 2000 program. We were concentrating our efforts in the northern Santa Lucias, a land of mixed oversight. These mountains above the Big Sur coast have BLM, National Forest, and Wilderness lands, plus scattered private lands. One can walk among the various federal designations and not see the difference.

Our plan was to survey wild public land, put it in a big bill, and send it to Congress, followed up with a public support campaign, along with lobbying. The result was Congressman Farr’s, “Big Sur Wilderness and Conservation Act of 2002," which created over 50,000 acres of new Wilderness. So, with a map, a notebook and a camera, I got to “play God” and help create new Gardens of Eden.

Late December seemed more like summer as I climbed the Coast Ridge Road out of the Ventana Resort in Big Sur. It’s a steep, dirt road that’s used by the Forest Service and the few land owners. You can’t drive or bike it, but you are free to hike it for twenty miles along the ridge. About four miles up the road is an unspoiled piece of forest nicknamed Outlaw.

The walk to Outlaw passes through cool, second growth redwoods before it opens to the grassland hills. The ground undulates away to forested canyons, down to the highway and the sea.

Outlaw sits between the Coast Ridge Road and the Ventana Wilderness. The Terrace Creek Trail descends into Outlaw and drops two impressive miles to the Pine Ridge trail in the Wilderness. It begins in hillside meadows studded with oak and madrone and drops into redwood groves with cascading waterfalls.

The few homes on the ridge were deserted, and without other hikers I was alone with the sounds of nature. The air was thin and clear in a way peculiar to sunny winter days. The smallest details from miles up the coast seemed only yards away. The dirt road undulated along the corrugated ridge. I took photos down toward the Big Sur Gorge below. Then I walked most of the way down the Terrace Creek Trail, almost to the campground and the wilderness.

Terrace Creek Trail was in disrepair. Downed trees requiring climbing and scrambling. In the wooded canyon, the terraces in the creek became visible, long cascading waterfalls that dropped to the Big Sur River below.

Outlaw wasn’t the only parcel I surveyed. Logwood, another, larger parcel, was a bit further up Coast Ridge Road. It also extended down toward the Big Sur Gorge from the road and had all the qualities of a wilderness.

At the Boronda Ridge trailhead, the rain and wind almost changed my mind. I lacked rain gear, and there might not be enough visibility to survey and photograph. But, the rain was stopping, and I could turn back if things got uncomfortable.

Within minutes the sun started to break through the clouds. Before long I was so warm I had to remove my sweater.

The ridge was vivid green from the rains, and along the trail were tiny violet flowers. Too small to survive in the meadow, they’d found a niche on the abandoned roadway. The trail occasionally turned from the exposed ridge to stands of oaks and a brief respite from the wind.

An hour up the trail, I stood on a rocky outcropping. The wind had whipped the ocean to a silver-gray meringue. A couple of hundred feet below me two deer looked up and watched me until I moved on.

Coast Ridge Road was deserted. Walking north, I looked east toward Logwood Creek. I found an abandoned road going east, down toward the creek. I followed it until I was sure it was impassable. The large fallen tree and young madrones in the roadway convinced me.

Having hiked almost to Outlaw, I turned back south, towards Cold Springs Camp, at the southern extreme of Logwood. The wind in the trees was so loud that I turned around often, thinking a truck was coming. The pines were leaning and shaking, and I was concerned about falling branches. The solitude and the howling of the wind gave an eerie, surreal quality to the five mile walk.

The wind was getting stronger, and the temperature was dropping, and I was anxious to find the De Angulo trail. The first part of the trail was treacherous, a steep trail bed of loose rock. Even below the rocky section, the piles of leaves, freshly wet from the rain, made the trail slippery, and in places the trail had broken away leaving it the width of a single boot. The dark stillness of occasional wooded patches was a welcome change.

I stopped to enjoy the view. The cloud cover was cumulonimbus piles rushing by. The shadows of the clouds on the ocean were like lines of ghostly, gray, giant amoebae marching southward across a mirrored sea. Sunlight streamed through the clouds in fan-like rays. I might have stood there the rest of the afternoon, but the moments of sunshine ended suddenly with gusts that almost knocked me off my feet.

I was almost seven and a half hours into the hike before I saw other humans, a young couple coming up the trail.

On the last two miles of the way down, I experienced hail, rain and even snow. And at that point I was greeted by two dogs, who walked up as if they knew me and took it upon themselves to escort me the rest of the way to the highway, as if I were somehow expected, as if this entire drama was staged for my enjoyment or education.

It was an exhilarating and satisfying way to help the environment.