“An adventure is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.” —Tom Cahill
For the past 15 years, every three or four weeks I’ve hiked with Ben Rice, Sleepy John Sandidge and Laurence Bedford. In five-mile increments, we have walked the beaches and cliffs from Santa Cruz to the Golden Gate Bridge and back, three times.
When beach hiking, the game is to walk as close to the ocean as possible—in it if necessary. Today is Oct. 23, 2018, and we are eager to return to the northern overlook of the Devil’s Slide Trail, off Highway 1 up in San Mateo County, between Montara and Pacifica.
We had walked the old Highway 1—the part that has been abandoned and turned into a hiking trail—but today we want to climb over the top, to scale the heights of Montara Mountain, above the Devil’s Slide Tunnels, looking over the Pacific Ocean.
Ben announces that Katherine Beiers is joining us. An 86-year-old Santa Cruz political legend, she is famous for standing up to developers and led the fight to save Lighthouse Field. She is a former two-time mayor of Santa Cruz, serving a total of 15 years on the Santa Cruz City Council, 11 of them consecutively in what remains a city record.
The woman knows how to go the distance; she is a marathon legend, running the Boston Marathon 14 times. Laurence, Sleepy John and I would have done well to take her achievements into account, but we look at Ben.
“An 86-year-old? Really, Ben? Will she be all right?”
Ben laughs and says, “Gentlemen, on the trail she will kick your ass.”
As the five of us climb higher and higher over the mountain up into the Pedro Point Headlands, Katherine proves Ben right: the slight-of-build lady has no difficultly with our pace. Sleepy John and I are gasping and wheezing, and Katherine just keeps smiling, clicking along with her poles. Jokes flow around her stamina, “Say, Katherine, would you give me the number of your drug dealer?”
We make it to the top of the ridge and the views of the Pacific Coast below are stunning.
“A mountaintop is not simply an elevation, but an island, a world within a world, a place out of place.” —conservationist Paul Gruchow
We wander on top, trails diverge and suddenly we are guessing where we are. I am relieved; if the boys and I don’t get lost, I don’t feel like we really went hiking. The good news: the Rebels Without a Compass are lost again, a type of hiking we call “trying to remember where we parked our car.”
After wandering on top of the Pedro Point Headlands, we realize that we’ve got to find a way down. We start trail blazing and the hills get steeper and steeper as we slide down the slopes towards the community of Shelter Cove. Ben, Laurence and Sleepy John split off: Laurence goes south; Ben and Sleepy John go north to look for a trail. Katherine and I continue to inch our way straight down.
Katherine tells me that hiking, for her, is about not falling, and now we are sliding down the vertiginous Montara Mountain.
One of my physical attributes is my bulk. I am big and stiff, not much range of motion, I’m like a big slab of congealed protoplasm. My density affords my comrades endless amusement. They make videos of me trying to put on a coat; while getting an arm in the first sleeve is easy, it’s that second sleeve hole that can be elusive. But my mass comes in handy today.
The hill becomes steep, and I see Katherine struggling to stop her slides with her hiking poles. I’m concerned that she will tumble down the mountain and so is she, so I place my body downhill from her, in case her slides turn into a fall. And she does slide into me. At first, she starts to apologize but I say, “No, no. Being solid is my thing.”
She reaches out and holds onto my backpack. Together we inch down the mountain in tandem, and to be honest having her attached to my backpack feels safer. She turns into an anchor for me as the slope feels like it’s surely going to become vertical. We turn into a slowly-sliding-four-legged creature. The drop-off gets even steeper, and Katherine holds on to my belt. We slide down out of a thicket and can see the incline run down into the back of a house on the eastern side of the community of Shelter Cove.
While our hiking group believes in hiking wherever our bootheels might wander, we are very strict about not walking in on someone’s residence. We feel that signs, fences and streams are all meant for us to traverse, but a private residence is something we respect and stay clear of. And here Katherine and I are, 100 yards above someone’s house with no other way to go but down. It occurs to me that there are rural homeowners who protect their houses with firearms. What if an angry homeowner is having a Remember-the-Alamo moment?
We brainstorm on what we could say. Katherine says, “One of us could claim that they are the other’s caretaker; one of us has dementia and wandered off and the other found them lost in the wilderness.” I agree, “Yeah, I play insane pretty well. Maybe you’re taking me back to a mental hospital. That might make them eager to get us off their property.”
We watch the house. No lights, no movement, no sounds. Walking alongside a residence out in the woods may not be the safest way to get off a mountain but we see no alternative. We inch toward the house, our concern about the slope turning into fear of meeting the homeowner. Then Laurence calls out a way to get around the house, and Katherine and I are out into the road and we step spritely downhill toward Highway 1. Finding Sleepy John, Laurence and Ben has never felt like such a relief.
More about the trail: Pedro Point Headlands Park is on a high point above the city of Pacifica, Shelter Cove Beach and San Pedro Rock. The trails along the headlands offer stellar views. Pedro Point Headlands shares the same parking lot as the northern trailhead of the Devils Slide Trail; restrooms are available there.This is a 2.8-mile out-and-back trail near Pacifica. (We were lucky to find our cars and get home before dark.) For further details, see californiabeaches.com and alltrails.com.
How to get there: It is ½ mile north of Montara State Beach. The trailhead is immediately south of the Tom Lantos Tunnel, south of Pacifica on Highway 1. The route from the lower lots to the trailhead is uphill. These lots fill quickly…there is also a free shuttle from Pacifica that runs 9am–4pm on Sat.-Sun.
“A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.” —Tim Cahill
Happy trails, Richard.
Keep it wild!