Locomotoring

Yesterday, we visited Henry Coe State Park, after a span of nearly 18 years. It was a deeply satisfying early spring hike, with seasonal creek crossings, lunch by a lake, and sighting of abundant early blooms.

Henry Coe is second largest State Park in California at 89,000 acres. The bigger one, Anza Borrego, is over six times larger at 600,000 acres. Starting from Henry Coe HQ, we followed the Monument trail to Hobb’s road, met with the seasonal Little Coyote Creek for the first time on our way to Frog lake, had lunch at Frog lake while watching a large family fishing, then followed the Frog lake trail to Middle Ridge trail, then Fish trail to another Little Coyote Creek crossing, all the way to Corral trail and back to HQ.

The bulk of the early spring flowers were on the Middle Ridge and the Fish trail. They were the usual suspects like the lupines, milkmaids, hound’s tongue, the yellow buttercups, poppies, golden violets, vetches, woodland shooting star and warrior’s plumes (link). Middle Ridge got the bulk of the warrior’s plumes and the Fish trail got the bulk of shooting stars and milkmaids. A particular section of the Middle Ridge trail was simply Bay Area hills at its best. Imagine a picture perfect manzanita tree lined trail, their smooth gnarly barks beckoning to be touched, scattered pine cones decorating the edges of the trail and the bright magenta of the warrior’s plumes as far as eyes can see.

Warrior’s plumes (Pedicularis densiflora) make for an interesting story. Native to California and Oregon, they grow in low elevation oak woodlands. They are root parasitic (hemi-parasitic), preferring to live off the manzanitas and madrones. And like most native plants, they are hard to grow in your backyard without their preferred host plants. It is considered a natural herbal remedy, used as tea or tincture for its powerful muscle relaxant and pain relieving properties (link). It may even be a little psychoactive. Next time I am in the Henry Coe wilderness, where there is minimal foot traffic, I should forage it, shouldn’t I?

The tiny Frog lake is known to have frogs. We heard frogs closer to the Coyote Creek crossing on Hobb’s road. A large group was fishing there – lots of grandpas and teenagers. It was clearly more camaraderie than catch, we saw one gentleman with a little six inch fish. Everyone else was just enjoying the act of fishing. We had our lunch there, by the pond, sitting on a felled oak. The Frog trail made me wonder if what I was seeing is what the indigenous community, Amuh Mutsun and Northern Valley Yokuts Indians, saw once upon a time – oak woodlands. The feral pigs of the land had left their mark on the soft moisture laden soil of the hills.

We do not have a record of our first hike out there, all we have is a memory of the day being hot and us having run out of water within the first mile or so. Soon after that hike, the Lick fire of 2007, named after the nearby Lick Observatory, had burnt 48,000 acres of the park down. That might have been our first experience of a significant fire in the vicinity of Bay Area. Then the SCU fire in 2020, also burned two-thirds of its land. The SCU fire, described as an extensive prescribed fire, had burned for 44 days and it took out the undergrowth and chapparal across 55,000 acres, leaving the area to thrive (link). The parts we were exploring weren’t the parts that had burned, at least not extensively. When I become a seasoned hiker, I would love to explore the rugged Orestimba Wilderness, the part that has burned twice.

It had taken us nearly 3 hours to get there and back. It had taken an additional four hours to hike the 6.5 miles and climb 1600 ft. During the last hour of the hike, my legs didn’t want to walk anymore and I knew I would remember the physicality of the walk for at least another couple of days. I was walking a beautiful land that I loved, on a cool early spring day, with my beloved partner. Mentally, I was more rejuvenated than I have been in a while.