San Simeon
Started: 2023-07-06 19:49:53
Submitted: 2023-07-06 20:50:19
Visibility: World-readable
Camping on the central California coast
Six months ago, on New Year's Day, while sitting at our gate at Denver International Airport waiting to fly home after skiing, I picked up a campground reservation for San Simeon State Park for the Fourth of July. In California, most state park camping reservations go live six months in advance, so the window had just opened for the very beginning of the long weekend. That was enough of a window to get four nights' camping, giving us plenty of time to see the adjacent Hearst Castle and the central California coast.
I camped at San Simeon as a kid growing up in California for my tenth birthday. My very vague memory includes camping where we had a long walk to the beach, which I'm now interpreting to mean that we camped at Washburn Campground, further to the east of the San Simeon Creek campground we camped at this time.
We took Friday, the 30th of June off work to drive to the campground. We left after lunch (after I managed to fit all of our clothing and camping gear in the car, with the help of the roof-top carrier for the sleeping bags and tent). Our route took us down US-101 through the Salinas Valley on what turned out to be a hot summer day. (It was hot for most of the rest of California, but the forecast high for Santa Cruz was still in the 70s.) As we drove south, gradually climbing the valley and crossing back and forth over the Salinas River, I gradually cranked the air conditioning up in the car to fight off the summer heat. In King City (with a forecast high of 105°F) the car's windows were noticeably hot to touch. Kiesa began to worry about the heat when we turned off 101 in Paso Robles and began to climb the coast range. The temperature remained high past the highway's high point through our descent to the coast. It only cooled off when we were within sight of highway 1, running in a broad valley just inland of the ocean.
We drove past the little town of Cambria and pulled into the campground. Based on the recommendation of a random website, we reserved site #25, on the upper loop. This tent-only site was the last site on the far end of the loop, perched on the edge of a gentle hill overlooking the campground and San Simeon Creek. I gave it credit for the modest view, though there were other tent sites in the lower portion of the campground that were fully embedded in the trees.
(My other critique of the campsite was that the flat space available to pitch our tent was not actually level. I ended up on the downhill side of the tent, so everyone's sleeping bags slid downwards towards me every night.)
After pitching the tent we took a walk down to the beach, accessible by a trail leading under the highway next to the creek. The creek had formed a lagoon for the summer, and the fog blowing in from ocean was backlit by the late afternoon sun. This was rugged, wind-swept coast, strewn with driftwood that had been fashioned into small lean-to forts on the beach. We'd driven hours to visit a different beach, beautiful in its own special way.
On our way back to our campsite, we dropped by the camp host to buy a bundle of firewood for $10. I set out to split the wood to prepare kindling for a camp fire and soon grew concerned about how green the wood was. Splinters of wood that I should have been able to snap with my fingers bent in half; I had to cut them to get the small fire-starters I needed. My concern grew when I actually tried to light the fire and the fire-starting splinters wouldn't burn for long enough to catch the next-biggest pieces of kindling. The kitchen matches and pocket-sized disposable lighters were not up to the challenge of lighting the kindling; I ended up singing my fingers instead. Kiesa brought a battery-powered arc lighter, which is perfectly adequate for lighting gas stoves and candles, but was not suited to producing enough heat over a large enough area to light the fire. I really wanted the long-handled lighter suitable for lighting actual wood fires, but we'd left it at home. We turned to paper towels to bootstrap the first stage of the fire, which was just barely enough to get enough of a fire going through the green kindling to start a meager blaze on the larger logs. The fire, though small, was adequate to cook veggie dogs for supper and marshmallows for dessert.
What may not be obvious from the picture of the fire above is that the logs on the fire had been sitting in the flame for an hour without being fully engulfed in flames. I have never had firewood that was this green, even when I collected wood from the forest myself. At least I got to tell my kids about the importance of drying firewood, framing it as a survival lesson for one's apocalypse of choice.
Kiesa and the kids retired to the tent to watch a movie on an iPad while I stayed to tend the fire. The central part of the fire was hot enough that I could shave kindling-sized chunks of wood with my hatchet and dump them into the fire and they'd burn after a few minutes, and if I did that enough the fire would eventually catch the larger logs. By the time I was ready to go to bed the fire had eventually burned the logs down to coals, after considerably more work on my part to babysit the fire than I had expected.
