by Jim Ringland on Sat May 12, 2018 3:11 pm
Date Hiked: May 8, 2018
General Condition: Difficult (brushy and/or many deadfalls, faint tread)
I did this north to south. I’d rate most as Difficult, but for different reasons in different sections. I’m fundamentally in agreement with the report from Ryland (4/2018), and mostly with the those of pantilat, Rowan Hyland, and Betsy M (all from 12/2017) with the proviso that there's been more growth since December. For the most part, what I saw was way worse than what RSIBryce described back in September. Big Sur vegetation moves fast!
Northern Burned Sections: Difficult.
Some might find this impassible. Without trail work, it will be in a year or two.
There are modest route finding problems in the first 500 feet or so. It’s flat and partially open immediately south from the junction, so it’s not always clear which openings are the trail. I had help from my GPS and Dr. Jack’s maps, but even without I’d think one could poke around enough to find their way. Note the trail gently aims south and down from that flat rather than maintaining elevation. I didn’t see the markers Rowan Hyland described.
What comes next is 1-1/2 miles of brush that has rebounded very well since the 2008 Basin Fire. One is almost always scraping again shrubbery: sometimes just a bit, sometimes pushing through branches that have all but closed the trail but have yet to interlock (except perhaps very occasionally). Much is manzanita so it isn’t too scratchy. The other good news is that the shrubs define the trail well: route finding problems are over for now. The bad news is that some of this is uphill (southbound) so one gets to push against both shrubbery and gravity. The burnt post is still there at the Mosquito Springs Trail junction, but there’s not much trail going off.
(1-1/2 miles in, at a rocky point, the trail enters 1/3 mile that burned. See the next section.)
After that 1/3 mile of burnt trail, there’s another 1 mile of unburnt chaparral. Conditions here are a little worse than earlier. There are more sections with interlocked branches. As pantilat noted, this stuff is scratchier too. On the plus side, at least for the southbound hiker, though, it’s mostly downhill.
There’s actually a third section of unburnt trail a little farther on, but it’s avoidable if you wish. Right by Venturi Use Camp there is a couple hundred feet where the original trail routing is through unburnt chaparral. The fire boundary is only a few tens of feet away and there’s a faint use path in the clear, up along the boundary. If you choose to hike the original trail (I did), you’ll scrape against branches but they are not, for the most part, interlocking across the trail. Venturi Use Camp is unusable, but the old metal chair is still there.
Burnt sections north of where the ACE Crew worked before the fire: Difficult.
Betsy notes the ACE crews worked the trail to a point 3.2 miles north of Strawberry. That distance, about half way between White Cone Spring and Black Cone Spring, aligns well with a waypoint I set on my GPS to note a location where trail conditions seemed to be improving. (I remembered they had done the trail work but, in the field, had forgotten exactly how far they had gone.) The discussion here is for the trail before I reached that. It includes that 1/3 mile between the two unburnt sections and not quite 1-1/2 miles south of second.
The 2016 fire removed all the big brush, but the little stuff is coming in fast. Sometimes it's wildflowers. There are a few sections where the trailbed was dense with popcorn flower. Even more fun was one section where the trail was covered in wallflowers. It’s no trouble smashing through that stuff if you have the heart. Rather too often, though, the plant in question is the semi-woody yerba santa. There were lots of sections where I wading through moderately dense knee to thigh-high stands of that stuff filling the trail. That’s a bit more work to bash through.
A trail full of 2-year-old knee-high yerba santa would be marginally Passable were it not for the the issue RSIBryce raised: the sometimes wretched trailbed. Sometimes it’s just the sideways slope or slumped trail. Worse are fallen rocks, especially cube-like chunks fallen from the cut above. That sort of stuff is manageable if you can see it. But bury it under knee-high yerba buena stalks (or even under a cover of popcorn flower dense enough that you can't see the trail below) and you’ve got to slow way down to avoid a fall or twisted ankle. Quite a bit of trail is like that. That combination, admittedly an obstacle of an unusual sort, is enough for me to rate this section as Difficult. Those lighter on their feet than I, or with ankles of steel, may up the rating Passable.
There are places here where I found myself scraping against or ducking under old burnt brush. I ended the hike with several swaths of black carbon on my shirt.
No significant route finding problems here.
Water at White Cone Spring was flowing well … and was much appreciated.
Section worked by the ACE Crew but north of the Big Sur / Zigzag Creek Divide: Passible.
This covers the section that begins about half way between White Cone Spring and Black Cone Spring and ends at the high point (about 3600’) where the trail exits the drainage of the North Fork of the Big Sur, enters the drainage of Zigzag Creek, and begins its descent toward Strawberry Valley.
Reduce the trailbed problems described above and the trail is no longer Difficult. There are still places where there are things growing in the trail, still places with overhanging burnt out stubs, and still places where the trailbed isn’t perfect, but this is easier. Some stretches could even claim a Clear rating.
No water at Black Cone Spring but it was there recently: there are still seep monkeyflowers (Mimulus guttatus) in bloom. There's water at the Woodwardia Spring (actually a creek) just before the Black Cone Camp Trail turnoff, but it is pretty well buried under ferns and blackberries. I didn’t need water but if I did, I would have searched downstream. Water in the North Fork of the Big Sur too.
Descent into the ZigZag Creek: Difficult.
This issue here is faint to non-existent tread due to soft seasonal growth. Flagging helps, but there's not enough of it. As the seasonal growth dies down, more of the trail may be visible, so it's not impossible that by autumn this will be back to Passable. But for right now, I think there are enough route finding challenges to call this Difficult. Those already familiar with the trail alignment will find this section easily Passable. Nothing is physically difficult.
From the high point, the route follows an old firebreak/roadway. So much has grown in that, in many places, no trail shows in the roadbed. It can be a beautiful problem: one such obscured section was a sea of lupines! Nothing woody. All one needs to do here is follow what looks like a flat roadcut and avoid any beckoning animal tracks down the hill. There are a few switchback turns to maneuver and it would be possible to shoot right past on a few. Two of the worst are flagged, with the flag positioned on the downhill leg below the turn. So armed with some knowledge, either by having been here before or knowing what to look for, this isn’t that hard. But without calling on that foreknowledge, I can imagine this section could be problematic. For example, what do you do when you make it to a flag, not see another, and see no path forward (or worse, see more than one possibility)?
About 2/3 mile down from the top, the trail makes a hard right turn onto a small hillside path, under trees, that contours for a while then descends to Zigzag Creek. The turn is marked with a flag, right at the point of the turn. Unfortunately, there’s not much visible as a trail off to the right. Understanding roughly what the flag meant and having a GPS, I still made the turn wrong, aiming down the slope toward the creek. I should have turned a harder right, stepping up and around some sort of snag. When it was clear – rather quickly – that where I was wasn’t right, I retreated to the flag and tried again. On that second try, I found a faint trail, again filled largely in by recent seasonal growth, behind the snag. With just a little clambering around downed branches, it was then straightforward to make it down to the creek’s bottomlands.
From there, the general idea is to head downstream the quarter mile to Strawberry Valley Camp. You can't get lost, but the right way through is not always evident. The path is faint and there are enticing animal tracks up on the slopes just above. There are a few flags, but, as before, rarely enough that you can see your way from one to the next. I think I was sometimes on the trail and sometimes off as I made my way down to camp. Only a little PO along the way. There’s a little clambering, but not that much.