Lost Coast

Last weekend I headed to the Lost Coast with a portion of the usual hiking crowd. We drove up on Friday night. Put down some tarps on the beach and slept in our sleeping bags looking up at the stars. Saturday morning we drove to the start of the trail. We did the 24 miles from Mattole to Blacksands Beach over the course of Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Hiking 24 miles with basically no elevation over 3 days was sounding pretty easy so we had planned out some extra hikes we could do. Well, we didn't have to hike on the sand for very long to realize this wasn't the cake walk we expected. Then we hit the segments where the sand was replaced by piles of rocks and we started wishing for the sand. The creek crossings threw in another bit of unexpected challenge, especially with backpacks and heavy wind - I wish I had spent more time practicing balancing on the Wii Fit. While the creeks weren't that deep, none of us wanted to hike with wet feet. The trip did have some time pressure because there were sections that became impassible during high tide. The added challenge was cool, but my knees did not appreciate the constant tilt of the path due to walking in one direction next to the ocean, they weren't too thrilled about me slipping in one of the creeks either.

It was a cool adventure. We were next to the ocean the whole time and got fairly close to some seals and birds. Also there was a bunch of drift wood and people had built some amazing shelters out of them (according to the ranger a lot of the building was done by boy scouts), unfortunately they were all claimed by time we got to them. Another cool thing is this area is owned by the bureau of land management. Unlike most parks where you can't have fires and have to register for labeled campsites, the BLM is fine with fires and you just camp anywhere on the trail you feel like (although there are some obvious spots where people tend to cluster). So we did get to make use of some of the drift wood and had fires going Saturday and Sunday nights. An added bit of adventure is there are some bears in the area so we had to keep all the food in hard plastic bear boxes and place them a good distance from camp. That way even if the bears find the food all they can do is knock the boxes around. Unfortunately we didn't get to see any bears, fortunately we didn't have any bear encounters and the boxes didn't get moved at night.

The driving itself was a bit of an adventure, especially between the ends of the trail. Luckily only the other car took the dirt road with small creeks running through it. I'm pretty sure if a prius was bottoming out, the mustang would have just been stuck. It was also quite a shock to see the 101 become a 35 mph main street through small towns.

Jeremy was the offical photographer of the trip and all his pictures along with captions are up here.

I think the full set of pictures is worth checking out, but here's a smaller selection: