Since the Masters of Mud brought us way out toward the coast anyway, we thought we'd take a trip into the Ventana Wilderness afterward. We originally planned to hike six days south-to-north through the heart of the wilderness.
However, the Ventana has always had a reputation for poorly maintained trails. On this trip I was disappointed to see that some trails I'd hiked in the 1980s and early 1990s were in bad to very bad shape and that one such trail had literally disappeared (as in gone - no detectable sign of it left from either end).
Fortunately I did some last minute internet research on recent trail conditions before we left. What I learned caused us to scale back the distance we intended to travel (bad trails equal much slower and harder hiking; Vicki isn't so much into harder hiking these days). The scaled back plan, in turn, allowed me to stay happy and married through the trip and up to the present.
In this case, "scaled back" was a nice, 24.2 mile, four day loop trip from China Camp trailhead (approached by an hour and a half drive from Santa Cruz).
First though, at the trailhead, we had to repack. Car camping stuff sorted from backpacking stuff, and packs packed:
By the way, Tricia is now tall enough to carry Vicki's old backpack. We keep it light for Vicki on these trips, so Tricia used the bigger pack to carry Vic's sleeping bag for her (Tricia also carried all the other stuff that she normally carries, including some of our water and stove fuel):
We started just after noon. The first day's hike was a short, but pretty 5.2 miles along the Pine Ridge Trail to Church Creek Divide and then down to lovely Pine Valley:
This part of the trail is well used and fairly well maintained. In a few places only, the trail is a little brushy. In a few others the trail tread needs some repair. But this was definitely the best and easiest hiking of the trip:
The first three quarters of this trail stays up high, with views in all directions:
Parts of the hike were through fields of lupine. The smell was instant, very strong and quite wonderful:
We got our first view of Pine Valley, our intended destination for the night:
From Church Creek Divide the trail continues gently downhill to Pine Valley. Although Pine Valley is a popular backpacking destination, we were there on a weekday and we saw no-one (in fact, car to car, we didn't see another soul on the whole trip). This camping location would make an absolutely perfect, easy weekend destination for, say, a Santa Cruz resident who, maybe for example, wanted to hike the whole John Muir Trail next summer, and was looking for a relatively nearby trip for training and to get "systems" in order:
The Carmel River flows through this valley, and six or seven established backpacking camps are spaced along the river every several hundred feet. We had first (and only) pick; we chose the one closest to the most water (two out of five votes were very very strong on this issue):
We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing (I hiked around and explored a little):
Our youngest dog, Halifax, went particularly nuts. She was just so thrilled to be loose, free and unrestrained. Vicki couldn't stop laughing at her antics:
Tricia took this photo of a pine tree riddled with woodpecker holes:
We enjoyed a very quite night that night, except that is for the owls who began hooting back and forth an hour or so before dawn (that was about when we'd slept a full night anyway, since we went to bed at about dark). Really cool.