We got up early(ish) Sunday morning and drove to Big Basin, out in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was my second trip to California’s oldest state park since I moved to San Jose. The first was my second day in town; I went there because I’d missed it more than anywhere else since I’d left. I used to spend at least a day or two a month there, because it’s so full of the awesome.
Big Basin is northwest of Santa Cruz, in the Santa Cruz mountains. It gets its name from its shape, a big bowl of mountain ridges surrounding a bowl-like valley carved out by mountain streams.
The low-lying center of the Valley is dominated by giant sequoias, so tall they keep the valley floor in perpetual shade and cool to the point of chilliness.
We started out at park headquarters and hiked five and a half miles miles along winding canyon walls about halfway to the ocean, to the Sunset trail camp. At the top of the ridge the redwoods fall away and are replaced by chaparral and knobcone pines.
From there we met up with the Berry Creek trail, which follows, oddly enough, Berry Creek as it flows over a series of spectacular waterfalls.
You can’t see a lot of wildlife in the park, because the huge trees tend to limit visibility. There are a lot of very large yellow banana slugs around, and small brown spiny lizards called western fence lizards.
What the place lacks in visible wildlife, however, it damned sure makes up for in plant life; not only the enormous variety of enormous trees and ground-hugging shrubs, but a wide variety of mushrooms as well, which also range from tiny and orange to large and, uh, white.
After that, we met up with the Skyline-to-the-Sea trail, then followed it back to Sunset and to the trail head. It was really long and a lot of fun. If my prose makes it sounds less than that, it’s only because I’d rather be hiking.
