Big Sur Backpacking - February 10-11, 2019

[lizolas]

Big Sur Backpacking

February 10-11, 2019

“I don’t know why the NOAA forecast said it was going to snow here. We’re right next to the ocean and only at like 3000’.”


I think the reason my hips are so flexible is because I put my foot in my mouth so damn much.

I had planned what I thought was a foolproof moderate weekend of backpacking: leave Sunday morning and do half of what the internet called a 3-day loop, camp at one of 3 campsites that were near the midpoint of the track, then do the remaining half on Monday. We had sufficient clothing and gear to deal with a bit of rain; everything was going to be fine.

After thinking to myself that I was finally wearing few enough layers that I could easily check my watch for the time, I promptly lost my Fitbit on the first stretch of the trail. It’s had a broken latch on one side for a while, and previously whenever it disconnected it ended up in my sleeve where I could find it. Since we took a different way down, I didn’t look for it on the way back.

Shortly after we got through the snowy part of the trail, we came across a man sitting at the base of a tree along the trail. We stopped to talk to him and found out he was a volunteer wilderness ranger working to clear fallen trees and branches from the trail after the recent storm. He asked what route we were taking, and we showed him our topo maps. He confidently assured us that we should have no problem with that path, although there were 5 river crossings between Mocho Camp and Strawberry Camp, with water potentially up to mid-thigh level. I wasn’t expecting that. Ben is one of the only activity partners I have who’s exactly my age and as such, played Oregon Trail as a kid. We have a running joke of deciding whether to “ford the river” or “caulk the wagons and float” when we come to a creek along a trail. I joked that maybe we’d finally get to caulk the wagons and float.

Before any of the crossings that was supposed to be problematic, I slipped off a slightly damp log crossing and fell in the creek, soaking the paper map in my pocket. Fortunately, the Pixel 2™ is waterproof, and I’d loaded our intended route’s GPX to Gaia. If anyone ever makes a movie of my life, there better be a montage of me falling while Ben or Ian looks at me like “did you skip Walking 101 as a toddler?”

The first of the major river crossings had a tree with branches spanning most of the water making it a fairly secure crossing in water a lot faster than I’d expected. Caulk the wagons and float, indeed. Given how fast-drying Zions are, I wasn’t 100% convinced of Ben’s idea that this crossing required pants removal, but it’s not like I’ll turn down an excuse to be less clad. After that we decided that maybe pants removal was in fact not needed and just rolled our pants up for the next crossing. It was shallower but felt less secure, as it was wider and had nothing for support but our own hiking poles. Shortly thereafter, we came to the third crossing. As I caught up with Ben, I took in the situation with high-velocity flow - too deep to see the bottom of - above a waterfall. Like the bold adventurer I am, I said, “I don’t like this.” He immediately agreed, “Yep, me either. This is certain death if you fall.” We turned around and headed back for Rainbow Camp, with the idea that we might press on to Cold Springs Camp and be about half the way out in the morning.

Rainbow Camp is just a mile from where we turned around, but it felt longer having to reverse the 2 crossings I’d just been glad we wouldn’t have to do again since we were hiking a loop. We got there late in the afternoon and decided to stay there for the night, as it had a fire pit and picnic table, and we didn’t remember seeing those at the other camps we’d passed through. I don’t do a whole lot of backpacking, but a picnic table - however dilapidated - 10 miles in from the trailhead seems unusually luxurious.

I was experimenting with DIY freeze-dried backpacking meals. Or halfway DIY, since I haven’t started dehydrating my own ingredients yet, just using dried beans from Harmony House. The raspberry, date, and almond “paleo bites” worked well although I need a better food processor than my mom’s Nutri-Bullet and maybe a bit less oil. For dinner I had 2 options: a mix of lentils, garbanzos, and rice with curry sauce, or just rice with the option to add a package of chicken - an idea stolen from Brad and without any idea how good it actually tasted. Although he was vegetarian when I met him, Ben has recently started eating meat again, so I experimented on him with the chicken. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the guy who lives in a tent in a backyard is not terribly high maintenance when it comes to backpacking dinner. Ben said his food was good, and I thought mine was good - definitely better than the Backpacker’s Pantry Katmandu Curry I couldn’t force myself to eat more than 3 bites of on Shasta (I hated it so much I ended up packing it back out).

My dinner.

Our shoes and socks were sort of dried by the fire when we decided to stop putting more wood on and go to bed at 7:30. It felt a lot later since it had been dark for a couple hours. We slept in until 6:30 and were packed and leaving camp at 7:30. At the log crossing where I’d fallen in the day before, I was planning to take the “to hell with dignity” route and scoot across. Everything was damp and frosty, and Ben also didn’t want to walk across the log. We took a different log a few dozen feet downstream that had other trees to hold onto, but it involved crawling through some blackberries on the other side. Our assessment was that a few minutes of misery to avoid potentially a few hours of misery was worth it.

I found out that I’d made a miscalculation in my food planning for the weekend. In trying to use as much “whole food” as possible, what I’d packed for breakfast were some of the fruit and nut balls and plain roasted almonds. It turns out that what works fine for breakfast in the office does not work very well for backpacking. I spent the first 3 miles of Monday feeling like I was up at 12,000 feet on Whitney again - only this time there was no elevation or sleep deprivation to blame. I’d gotten plenty of calories in the morning, they just weren’t getting digested fast enough. My somewhat heavier pack weight didn’t seem to fully explain how much more slowly I was going than Ben. Near the top of the last steep climb out of a valley onto a ridge, he said he’d meet me at Cold Springs Camp. At that point I decided to actually dig in my pack for better snacks - I’d brilliantly packed my sleeping bag and clothes on top of my food, because I came up with the idea to try to fit my sleeping bag in my pack after I’d put almost everything else in. Fortunately for me, my pre-packed snack bag had a host of sugary things from the stash I assembled when I organized my room at Christmas. I ate some fruit snacks, and the combination of quickly digested calories plus the far less steep trail made the next portion much more pleasant. By the time I met up with Ben I was feeling better, but also couldn’t believe that we’d only traveled 5 miles so far. It was 10:30 - 3 hours after we started - and we knew that we’d only gone 5 miles because at Cold Springs Camp there’s a sign indicating Rainbow Camp is 5 miles away.

The last glimpse of snow at the final ridge out of the canyon.

After that we walked about the same pace - neither of us more than a minute in front of the other. When we got to what was marked on the map as an alternative turn to a shorter trail back to the car, I was a bit skeptical. There was clearly a worn path in the grass, but it looked more like an illicit use trail than anything that would be marked on a topo map. We ended up bushwhacking through a substantial amount of chest-high or taller brush, ending up on what turned out to be private property. We only found this out when the trail spit us out right into someone’s backyard. After we explained ourselves - that we’d come in on a trail and thought we were avoiding the signs that said private property, we hadn’t come bushwhacking down from the hill directly above - the guy was pretty polite and explained that where we thought we’d avoided one off-limits trail, both sides of the fork were actually private property. As we hopped over the gate at the end of that road, another woman called out from her car, “You guys are trespassing!” Yeah well, what exactly do you expect us to do, having found ourselves unexpectedly in a yard we couldn’t easily get around? Had there been any safe way to avoid passing through the neighborhood (short of reversing that entire portion of the hike), we would have.

A short walk on Highway 1 got us back to the car by 1 pm. We drove to Santa Cruz to get burritos for lunch and then back home. We encountered less traffic than I expected, but I guess at 2-3 pm on a Monday, there isn’t yet commute traffic on 17 like there would be beach tourist traffic on a weekend. Having read a warning about ticks in the area we were hiking, I checked when I got home and did in fact find one on my shoulder. The next morning I found one that I’d apparently missed on the back of my thigh - both rather in the middle of nowhere compared to the areas you’re told to check carefully. I might end up with Lyme disease, but at least nobody died of dysentery.

I did look up incidence of Lyme Disease and per a chart on the CDC’s website for 2017 data there were few instances of infection in the Bay Area and none in Monterey County (by county of home residence of the infected person).

When I got home I mapped our actual route as closely as I could estimate. We went about 11.5 miles to the turn-around point, plus a mile back to Rainbow Camp on the first day. The second day’s trails weren’t all marked, but I think it was probably about the same distance as the route in - 10 to 11 miles through some less passable terrain. Of course in hindsight I would simply take the longer but main trail down and do the extra half mile of hiking along the road. If I’d been alone, I definitely wouldn’t have been convinced of the “cross-country” route once I descended the first hill and saw no traces of even a faint use trail after a few hundred feet. At the time, though, all the information we had indicated that we were where we should have been (or at the very least, where we were allowed to be). Throughout the bushwhacking, we followed what the GPS indicated was the trail. Maybe I should have been more insistent that we keep following that track rather than cross a gated fence to a developed trail (which turned out to be the private property) but from the orientation of the lock, I thought we were exiting private land we’d accidentally entered, not vice versa. At the end of the day neither of us felt like we’d ignored any clear signage telling us to keep out. Maybe in the future, in areas with private property scattered throughout public lands, it would be a good idea to research that a bit more.

Maybe next time no bushwhacking through tick country, either.

DIY Recipes Used:

• Raspberry-Almond Bites
• Lentil-Chickpea Curry
• Chicken Curry