| VENTANA WILDERNESS ALLIANCE |
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Basin of the South Fork Little Sur river. |
We left the trailhead a little after 9 AM and made it back at 7 PM. 10 hours with only short breaks and we covered 9 miles round trip. We managed to get to within half a mile of Pico Blanco Camp but we lost the trail again at 3 PM and decided to turn around. We had already lost one member of our seven person group on a wild slide down about 200 feet with no injury and we were all very tired. So we don’t know about the conditions at Pico Blanco Public Camp but based on our traverse of two large fields the campsite is probably full of weeds and wildflowers. Many of those weeds bite. The hole below the waterfall is probably silted since the sections of river we passed were silted. The picnic tables may have survived because the ground around them was bare dirt. The trees look fine from the air and what we could see during our hike. The trail along the river and up to the Graniterock road is unchanged and very beautiful with only a few new small downed trees and of course the big slide almost half a mile up the trail. Most of the group traversed the slide but Lee Staley and I went over the top to explore an alternative route.
It would be easy to create new trail for about half of this alternate route but the upsteam side is ugly. We would need roughly a thousand feet of new trail with much chainsaw work on a steep slope full of boulders. I’m no longer considering this route.
David Lautzenheiser believes he sees a way to rework the trail across the slide. That would be our preference.
The burn zone started just beyond the Graniterock road crossing. There are a lot of unburned areas and much greenery within the burn. There is a large deadfall zone with 9 trees down just before the old gate. It is a struggle to get through this area. Lots of work for a saw crew. A couple of redwoods are beyond the VWA’s ability to remove but we can go under. For the rest of the way in both the brush zone and the open fields the trail is covered with vegetation. Unfortunately a good amount of that are morning glory vines that catch your boots and make it a struggle to walk. There are also a lot of thistles and the yucca are back so we had many painful jabs. In the fields the trail was mostly gone and finding it on the other side was difficult. The fields are a sea of over knee high grass and weeds.
The trail tread is a mess. I gave up trying to GPS map the bad spots. The whole wilderness section of the trail needs work. We probably have 1.5 miles of McLeod work to restore it to the condition we left it after our May 2008 trail work trip. Removing the dirt that slid over the tread is easy; there is just so much of it is the problem. We have some additional brush work to do but nothing as big as we’ve done before there. Several of the old wash crossings are MUCH more difficult now. Creating a safe path through them will be complicated. These washes are cliffs and a fall means falling off a cliff. Get it? There was one boot-print sighting to indicate that someone may have gone in before us but no other evidence at all. Now for the good news. The wildflower display was incredible!!!!
The trail from the Old Coast Highway is now open (Old Coast was muddy due to rain, but passable). The entry is now open, but marked with warnings. The path is well cleared for about 1/2 mile, but at that point the trail is obliterated by a steep slide that was unpassable in the wet weather. My two labs bounded down the steep slide but could not return. They were forced (after much coaching and quite reluctantly) to swim through the river.
I believe this slide may not be as treacherous in dry conditions, but it will need work to restore or re-route the trail. Good luck!
