Mendocino

Started: 2024-07-28 16:57:36

Submitted: 2024-07-28 22:06:28

Visibility: World-readable

Camping at Van Damme State Park and visiting the town of Mendocino

California is blessed with an abundance of space and a variety of scenery, covered by a massive state park system (as well as a collection of first-rate national parks), but the development of campgrounds in the state has not kept up with population. Every winter I see news articles reminding me to reserve campsites for the upcoming summer, because state park campsites come available six months in advance, so if one wants to camp for Memorial Day one ought to start planning on Thanksgiving the previous year. In January I reserved a campsite for a long weekend in July at Van Damme State Park in Mendocino County, on the northern California coast.

Friday

We left Santa Cruz on the morning of the 12th of July to drive to the Mendocino coast. This involved a long drive up I-880 in the East Bay, crossing the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, driving up US-101 through Marin into Sonoma, lunch at Mod Pizza in Santa Rosa, then an hour on state highway 128 climbing out of the Sonoma Valley, descending Anderson Valley, and winding through a narrow valley flanked by towering redwood trees (with some evidence of logging, just out of sight of the state highway), then a brief drive north on state highway 1 on bluffs and slopes towering above the Pacific Ocean.

I had reserved campsite #27 on the "Little River" spur at Van Damme State Park, a tent-only site with our own piece of creek on a quiet dead-end spur. (This spur proved easier to access than the rest of the campsite, because a winter storm had damaged a key bridge in the campground to the point where it had been replaced by a one-lane prefabricated steel temporary bridge placed right on top of the old bridge. This temporary bridge disrupted the flow of traffic inside the campground, requiring everyone who needed to access the upper loop to make an awkward u-turn after crossing the bridge.)

Our campsite had its own temporary bridge over the creek, formed by a log that neatly bridged the gap.

We set up the tent and I picked up a bundle of firewood from the camp host to make a fire to roast hot dogs for supper, followed by marshmallows for dessert. (This firewood was properly dried, unlike the firewood I tried to use last year at San Simeon, so I had little trouble lighting a fire using only kindling I made from the firewood. Lighting this fire finally used up the fuel in the lighter I bought four years ago at the top of Loma Prieta when I needed a lighter to use the propane stove in the kitchen.)

After supper we walked down the main road in the campground to the amphitheater, where a park ranger gave an entertaining presentation about the animals living in the state park on this particular part of the northern California coast. The presentation was followed by more marshmallows, with an important improvement: chocolate-coated cookies instead of stand-alone chocolate, which made the smores easier to manage.

Saturday

On Saturday morning, after breakfast at our campsite, we set out to hike up Fern Canyon from the end of the road leading through the campsite. The morning was cool and foggy. The trail led up the bottom of a narrow valley carrying the Little River. Calling the babbling brook that ran down the middle of the valley a "river" was a stretch, though presumably the name was to distinguish this stream from the "Big River" next to the town of Mendocino. The trail climbed gently up the valley, and the walls of the valley climbed steeply on each side. There were ferns in the valley, as its name indicated; and there were towering second-growth redwoods standing all around us.

We saw dozens of banana slugs on the trail and next to the trail, in a variety of sizes and patterns. Some looked like week-old bananas, with large brown splotches on the yellow bodies. I saw more banana slugs in one short hike than I've seen at any one time in Santa Cruz.

As we walked up the valley, the trail crossed the little river multiple times on a series of sturdy attractive wooden arch bridges, built with what looked like laminated arching beams mounted on either side of the bridge with the bridge deck suspended between the beams. All of the bridges looked the same, so they must have been installed at the same time as the result of a large project to replace all of the bridges on the trail at once.

Then we came to a river crossing where the bridge had been washed out. The laminated beams had been recovered and stacked next to the trail. The concrete piers of the bridge were still present, with bolts sticking out of the pier where the bridge had been attached, but the piers had been damaged and there were clear signs that water had run around the piers, eroding the fill behind the pier where a smaller beam had formed the approach to the bridge. A narrow aluminum span formed a temporary bridge over the lowest part of the creek; it looked exactly like what one would get if one asked for a two-meter-long temporary bridge. The temporary bridge spanned the gap between two concrete banks, which looked like they were the remnant of an older bridge, perhaps dating from when the park was first developed.

Along the trail we passed the hike-in backcountry campsites (which they called "environmental campsites" for reasons that weren't obvious to me), laid out along both sides of the trail at a point where the valley grew wide enough for a linear campground. The sites were closed due to damage from winter flooding. It wasn't obvious that the sites were themselves damaged, but I would also believe that the state park had its hands full with damage elsewhere in the park, so this was one thing they hadn't quite gotten to yet.

After hiking 2.5 miles up the valley, the trail split to climb up the side of the valley to reach the Pygmy Forest at the edge of the state park. This would have been an interesting addition to the hike, but the fully lollypop loop would be an 8.5-mile round-trip, so I decided this was a reasonable point to stop for a snack and turn around to head back to our campsite.

We ate lunch at our campsite (toasting bread on the camp stove, which mostly worked) and walked to the park's visitor's center, located in a little building near the park entrance that dated from the early development of the state park as a WPA project in the 1930s. Inside the visitor's center was a walk-through dry diorama that was supposed to look like an underwater scene just off the coast, with the front of a small boat suspended above us as if it were floating in the water. Various below-the-tide-line marine life clung to the rock walls of the display, including abalone. (Until 2017 it was legal to dive and catch abalone on this part of the coast, but the fishery is currently closed because the abalone population is stressed by the crash of the kelp forests on the north coast.)

We drove north into the town of Mendocino, a cute town perched on a bluff sticking out into the Pacific Ocean that was founded in the nineteenth century to harvest lumber from the north coast for San Francisco and has kept its historic buildings and now runs on tourism. (One of the displays in one of the museums indicated that the town's lumber industry struggled with overproduction and ultimately closed when steam ships started delivering cheaper lumber from larger ports in Oregon and Washington.) Fog hung over the town like a cool gray blanket.

We started our visit at the Kelley House Museum, a grand old house set up with period furniture and displays about the Kelley family who lived in the house. There was a clock-sized music box and a large map of the United States, partially faded so only some of the original map colors remained, showing oversized territories where smaller states now exist.

Upstairs were rooms set up as bedrooms, set up so we could walk around inside the rooms and see the period furniture (including chamber pots) and other decorations up close.

We went across the street to the Ford House, which was built by a guy named Ford who is now credited for founding the town, and is now occupied by the visitor's center for the Mendocino Headlands State Park. It had displays covering the history of the town, which was dominated by the lumber industry, including a bunch of old pictures of logging and ships anchored in the harbor below the bluffs, and a large model of the town in the nineteenth century.

Julian arrived in Mendocino without a jacket so Kiesa let him use her fleece, but she wanted her own fleece, so she went shopping in Mendocino and picked up a replacement. We went to Gallery Bookshop for additional reading material and Calvin picked up a stack of four or five history books, starting with Rome, and convinced Kiesa to buy them for him.

It was in the bookshop that I overheard people discussing what sounded like a major news event, including the idea of pulling out a TV to try to watch live news coverage. I couldn't tell what the event actually was until I checked my phone and learned that former president Trump had been shot at a rally in Pennsylvania but was apparently unhurt.

We returned to our campsite and I took a walk to the beach, which was still covered in fog so I could barely see the trees less than a hundred meters away. I had marginal cell coverage here so I tried to catch up on the news, but there wasn't a lot of actual news about the afternoon's events.

I lit a fire in the evening but I had apparently left out the wood in the fog and it didn't burn as well as the day before. I still got a fire going without artificial kindling, but it required more kindling and more effort to get the wood to burn. The kids roasted cherries over the campfire, which seemed weird but they seemed to enjoy it.

I have a few more pictures from Van Damme State Park and Mendocino at Photos on 2024-07-13.