Walking in the Redwoods Near San Francisco

My son and I took a roughly ten mile hike in the Purisima Creek Redwoods, an open space preserve mid-peninsula below San Francisco.  To get there you take 92, which cuts East – West across the peninsula about half-way down from the city to the bottom of the bay.  If you were to take 92 to the coast you would be in Half Moon Bay but if you make the difficult (due to traffic) turn to the South when you are at the top of the ridge line on 92, turning onto Skyline Boulevard, you can then drive along the ridge between the ocean and the bay and in a few miles you will come to several dirt parking pockets aside the west side of the road.  

Pick one, park, and start walking back in time, back into nature.  The trees make their own climate and sounds and suddenly you are immersed in it and rush of driving is drowned, leaving silence, the rhythms of the winds in the treetops approaching and then traveling on, little things scurrying away in the undergrowth – the land speaks to you of the millions of years we have spent there and you are home.

  

We ended up hiking perhaps farther than we had originally imagined but we did not regret a moment of it.  We took what was probably an old logging road down, heading towards the ocean, and then after descending from the approximate 2,000 ft. elevation of Skyline down to around 1,000 feet, we turned onto a narrow path with steep drops off the side (don’t slip!), wandering along the side of the ridge and then climbed up into sunlight before we turned again and descended towards the creek floor at the other end of the park.  From there it was a long uphill walk back to the car.

Along the way there were lots of “fairy circles” of second growth redwoods gathered around the remaining traces of the original forest which was probably harvested to build San Francisco.  It was sad to see how the giants were felled and lost to us.

A Walk In The Second Growth

cow nipple roots hang out of the hillside cut open by

a logging road the straight lines of the giants crossing

down to ferns among the fallen near where the sons

are gathered in circles mourning the cut and burned

stumps of their ancestors who now reside

in the cross beams of your old house

and you wonder if their arms are raised to the sun

in a prayer against another slaughter.