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One Good Thing

A Short Drive to a Long Hike in Wilder Ranch

Alexis Madrigal
A person hikes along a narrow dirt path through a wide golden grass field, with rolling hills, scattered trees, and a partly cloudy sky in the distance.
The best 12-mile-hike ever.

This piece was featured first on May 14 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

Sometimes I forget that Santa Cruz is a real place. When you live on the northern side of the East Bay, anything on the other side of the Peninsula feels so far away.

But then, one day, in fact this past Saturday, we hopped in the car in West Oakland on a Saturday afternoon and an hour and a half later, we were at the beach. And by beach, I don’t mean Crown Beach in Alameda or Keller Beach in Point Richmond, I am talking about a beach-beach, an am-I-in-Los-Angeles beach. Santa Cruz, man, what a surprise.

I was there because my 12-year-old and I had been talking about doing a big hike for months. Neither of us likes camping, but we love hiking. So, we’d been talking about doing some kind of hut-to-hut hike, or as it was more likely to be, a hotel-to-hotel hike.

I’d promised we’d set a date and then make it happen. But, as things go, we could not really clear two days to do such a thing between afterschool activities and work stuff and family stuff. So: we took our ambitions down a notch and settled on a long hike at Wilder Ranch, just north of Santa Cruz.

Neither of us really “does beach,” so we headed out of town to our hotel pretty quickly. I’d booked a room at the Davenport Roadhouse, a fantastic old place that seems like it’s trying to combine the old Santa Cruz Mountains vibe with the newer “cool tech family moves to small town” reality. When we arrived, there were DJs playing to a hip crowd, well-attired small children scattered about the large back yard. Inside, three seasoned blues musicians were setting up to play. The Buffalo Blues Trio, as they are known, totally ripped. The DJs were good, but live music in a roadhouse can’t be beat. After the first set, we ducked upstairs, watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (recommend!) and got to bed early. The next morning, we grabbed some breakfast burritos at the Whale City Bakery (hard recommend!), and grabbed our gear. Right before we left, the German man staying next door to us informed us that he’d spotted a whale from the balcony, and sure enough, we looked out and—boom!—there was a spout. An auspicious start!

Wilder Ranch State Park sits between Davenport and Santa Cruz proper. From the parking lot, we’d head up into the mountains, drift north through some redwood canyons, and then pop out at 4 Mile Beach and take the bluff trail back to Wilder. 12 miles! Probably double the longest the kid had ever hiked. But they felt ready and I had the faith. Plus, I figured, if we really needed to, once we got down to the beach, we’d also be down at Highway 1 and could probably get a ride back to our car.

So, filled with excitement, we headed up a trail through a meadow of waving grass. We saw a hovering kite (the bird!) and our eyes followed it up to an enormous gyre of birds in the distance, rotating on the winds. By the time they’d disappeared, we’d already climbed most of the big early hill. A turkey surprised us on the left (“Back off,” it said, in turkey), roly-polies and stink bugs crossed our path, and soon we were high on a ridge, heading into the forest.

On our way to the redwood trails, we took a cut off that brought us past a gorgeous patch of mariposa lilies—Calochortus albus, in this case, or fairy lanterns—and then we were in the trees. Sorrel carpeted the floor. It was cool and quiet. The highlight for both of us was the Enchanted Loop, which lived up to its name. Trillium about to burst forth dotted the trail, and there was something about the shafts of light falling to the forest floor. They seemed to lead your eyes to perfect scenes: a happy moss covered stump, a western blue iris, a fern-laden clearing.

The whole trail was so peaceful and the hiking so pleasant that it was almost a surprise when we reached the beach.

Which was cold.

And windy.

We ate quickly (the other piece of the burrito and a croissant) and retreated to the bluff trail. Pelicans squadroned overhead. Our feet started to hurt (just a little). We made steady progress winding around beach inlets and talked about whatever was left in our minds. Why some rocks weathered faster than others. What my kid would paint from this trip. California buckeye. The ice cream we were going to eat after we finished. Yes, ice cream, by the last half mile, ice cream was all we could think about (ice cream). And just when we were about to lose patience with the plodding end of the trail, there we were, back at the parking lot, slightly different people than when we’d left.

And yes, we got huge ice cream cones from Marianne’s and put on a Radiolab about medieval cures for infections and drove all the way home to celebrate Mother’s Day. “We gotta do that again,” my kid said. And that was the sweetest part of it all.

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