Misadventures in Big Basin Redwood Forest

On Sunday July 21st, we executed our long-planned adventure hike from the redwood forest in the coastal range all the way to the beach, a distance actually of only 12 miles or so. But the point of the journey was to give Dusty a positive outdoor experience and a sense of accomplishment of having walked from near our home all the way to the ocean.

The trip was a comedy of errors. First, we misjudged the time it would take to get a borrowed car down to the beach on California's windy back roads. The car shuffle consumed 5 hours of driving before and after the hike, a bit much for what turned out to be itself just a 5 hour hike.

Late start on hike

Since we didn't get moving from our house until 11:00, this meant we started on the trail at 4:00 in the afternoon, a bit late, but still feasible, since we were headed for a camping area about 10 miles away, and we had just enough daylight. The hike there through the redwoods was superb. Bobbi and I had done the bit to the waterfalls just a few weeks before and we knew it was a beautiful walk. Imagine our surprise though to find that just a few hundred meters beyond what we had thought was a waterfall in the wilderness, we came to a bike road which led all the rest of the way to the beach. We hiked the road to the campground still impressed with the forest and the gurgling sounds of the creek, but disappointed in the way the wilderness had turned out.

Camping out

We had done the walk on Sunday because the campground had been full Saturday night, but when we arrived, it was deserted. So we picked the choicest campsite right off Waddel Creek and set to boiling creek water for tea and saimin, which the kids ate reflexively till it was gone. It had already turned cool, but we needed extra clothes more for mosquitoes than for chill. Dusty opened his bedroll and got himself comfortable and seemed anxious for dark to set in so we could tell ghost stories.

Strangers in the night

But what materialized out of the forests was not ghosts but raccoons. We'd been in Oman too long, where you could sleep on the ground undisturbed wherever you like. We hadn't anticipated that we would need a tent to keep the critters out. They came right up to our things. We'd be poking flashlight beams into the forest looking to see where they were and discover there was one right behind us rummaging in our packs. Dusty was thrilled to see forest mammals so close at hand, but we could see we'd get no sleep there without a tent.

So we decided we'd had the best of the experience, the walk down, the food by the fire, the anticipation of ghosts stories (none of us actually knew any, to tell the truth). And we decided to just finish the walk right then and sleep at home. So we moved off down the road in the dark, Dusty clutching my hand, but enjoying the pleasant walk down the road in the night until we reached our car at the beach.

Keystone car capers

We still had a two-hour drive to Big Basin Redwoods Park headquarters where we'd left the other car. When we finally arrived there, around midnight, frazzled from the worst of the driving, and started to head out with the two cars, the borrowed one decided it was being stolen and started honking repetitively and flashing its lights. There was no way to stop it, and part of its routine was to refuse to start in that state. After several frantic minutes it quit, but when I tried again to start it, it went right back to pretending it was being stolen. This is midnight at park headquarters in a state park and we're trying to get our cars out of a secured parking area. And the amazing thing is that for the entire 15 minutes we were dealing with this incessant noise and activity, not a soul came to investigate, see what was going on, ask us what we were doing there. Eventually, the car stopped, I locked the door, unlocked it properly, turned the car on, it started up, and we drove outta there.

Still worth it

To tell you frankly, we laughed about it all the way home. And Dusty said later the whole thing was the best time he'd had yet in California, so I guess the trip was a success after all.

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