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I was having issues with the camera and then with Flickr, so I didn’t get this posted back when it happened (about a month ago), but since my hard drive died and removed the option of going back and posting the remaining photos and trail map, I might as well go ahead with what I’ve got.
Relying (perhaps foolishly) on my ten years out-of-date trail guide, I headed for Pogonip, and chunk parkland owned by the City of Santa Cruz. That’s one thing I like about this area–everyone gets in on the game. We’ve got the federal government with national parks (Yosemite), national monuments (Pinnacles), and National Forests (Los Padres), the California government with state parks (Nisene Marks, Garrapata, Wilder Ranch, Henry Cowell, etc), state forests (Soquel), county parks (Mount Madonna, and Uvas Canyon in Santa Clara, Moore Creek in Santa Cruz, and Jack’s Peak in Monterey, for examples) and even university campuses (more on this later). Pogonip is the only sizeable chunk of wilderness parkland I’ve encountered that’s city owned, but I think the city of Palo Alto has one too.
My guide said there was a pull-out with parking along one of the roads leading up into the UC campus, where one could enter Pogonip, which lies along the eastern edge of the UCSC campus. The pullout was there, but so were signs saying “no parking”, so I kept driving, actually almost hitting a large herd of deer. My sense of geography in this part of Santa Cruz is next to nil, so rather than trying to find alternate means of entrance to Pogonip, I just drove up into UCSC.
This was my first time on the UCSC campus, and I was absolutely blown away. Originally part of the same giant land bequest that became Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park (which borders the campus’ northeast corner) it’s more like a redwood forest than a campus. The buildings are hidden among the trees, no more than a few visible at any time, and aside from a few main roads, it’s clear most of the foot traffic meanders through woodland paths. The upper half of the campus is all forest, no buildings, with a system of trails linking it to Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, Wilder Ranch State Park, and Pogonip.
It was summer, and a weekend, so the campus was next to deserted. I cruised around for a while to get my bearings, then pulled into a parking lot and wandered around for a while on various unnamed trails.
Following a trail on the UC-Santa Cruz campus
Having been burned by the trail book maps before, I was pleased to find a map of the upper campus trails on the gate across the trail. I headed up West Road, towards Chinquapin Road which connects with Wilder Ranch and Pogonip. Eventually I reached the Chinquapin Road and slanted southeast. For some reason I didn’t take many pictures until I got near the edge of campus, when I snapped this shot, looking out across Monterey Bay through a break in the trees.
A glimpse of the ocean
Finally, through a slightly convoluted little backtracking and snaking about, I made it down the U-Con Trail and into Pogonip. Pogonip definitely has a distinct feel from UCSC, being much more meadow and oak intensive compared to redwoods, and the breaks of light make for a lot of really pretty scenes. I don’t know how much of the clearings is natural and how much was cut down (I’d guess that’s most of it). The place was at one point a country club, and actually the clubhouse is still there, derelict and boarded up (or so I’m told, I didn’t get that far down to see it).
One of Pogonip's meadows
Above is what a lot of Pogonip was like. Although this looks a bit similar to Wilder Ranch, in some ways it was the inverse: little patches of grassland interspersed within forest, rather than the opposite. Made me worry a bit about ticks, but not too much.
Probably my favorite areas were those where the trees twisted overhead, which looked like something out of a fantasy novel, such as below:
Twisted trees at Pogonip
It’s just got a magical quality to it…just looking at the pictures right now made me long to go back.
Words to live by...
Anyway, after coming across an appealing piece of graffiti, I decided maybe it was time to start thinking about heading back. I didn’t have a real good sense of where I was relative to where I left the car (in fact, I didn’t really have a great idea where I’d left the car, period, having been distracted at the time by a young man with Buzzo-esque hair and Jello Biafra shirt.)
Having made a circuit of the upper part of Pogonip, I caught the Spring Box trail, strangely on my old, inaccurate map but not on any other one I’ve seen, which I would think might mean it was no longer a valid trail, except that I’m pretty sure I saw signs. Anyway, the name didn’t really register with me…it was just a name. Actually I was picturing box springs, like on a bed…I figured maybe somebody had found an old rusted set of box springs rusting out there in the woods.
However, though it should have shocked me perhaps, the trail was clearly so-called because of the spring, which flowed down the hillside into a series of boxes, full of goldfish.
One of the spring boxes on the Spring Box Trail
I made my way up the hill to the main path, headed back towards UCSC. However I wanted to see the lime kilns, marked on my map, but of course my map was wrong, so it took me several tries and several trails to find it. It was still pretty cool, though to my disappointment they had put grates over the holes to keep people from crawling into them, which I have to confess I might have done.
Lime kilns in Pogonip
Pretty cool.
I made it back to campus, chilled out for a while in the library, read a corpus of Egyptian astronomical texts, then headed home.
Octoploid 