Another Henry Coe backpacking trip
We liked Henry Coe so much that we went back again this past weekend. It's such a huge park (87,000 acres) that it was easy to pick another hike/destination that was in a different area than where we were on the previous trip.
The weather forecast changed every time I looked at it, but it was supposed to be a little rainy on Saturday (forecast varied from light rain to t-showers) and partly cloudy to showers on Sunday. The predicted temperatures were highs of 56 and lows of 36. I was guessing that these predictions were for the visitors center, which is at a lower elevation than our destination, so I was expecting a little wet and very cold.
We left Santa Cruz a bit after 7am Saturday morning; it was raining. As we drove through the Santa Cruz mountains towards San Jose, it started SNOWING! It was actually snowing fairly hard for about 10 minutes of the drive, although the snow wasn't sticking to the road or ground. As we got out of the mountains, the snow stopped. We got to Henry Coe a little before 9am. We saw these as we got close to the parking lot area, we are guessing they are wild turkeys:
We started the hike with our raingear on since it was pretty cold and supposed to be raining on and off. The first 2.3 miles was fairly flat (nothing at Coe is really flat!) with many stream crossings. Then we got to the next trail on our route. This trail is 1.5 miles with 1200' elevation gain: that's VERY steep! We soon got too hot and removed our raingear. An hour or so later, it seemed like it was starting to drizzle, so I stopped to put my raingear back on. As I was putting it on, it started snowing!! The snow only lasted about 30 seconds, and the rest of the day, it varied between sunny, partly cloudy, and lightly raining.
Like I said, Henry Coe is BIG. I guess this is why many of the trails are seldom used. Sometimes it was hard to tell where the trail *was*. This is one of the "trails" we were on (it's the faint line in the grass):
The neat thing about this is that it really gives me the feel of making my way through the wilderness, everything I need carried on my back. Well, that's what it *is*, but it feels even more like that when the trail is barely there.
I took way too many photos to post them all here, but suffice it to say that the scenery at Henry Coe is beautiful. The only other mammals we saw were deer and cows, but we saw lots of indications (ie poop) that there were lots of other animals around.
Around 4 or so we got to where we had planned to camp and Craig found the perfect camping spot - this is wilderness camping so there are no defined campgrounds or campsites, which is nice because we get to camp wherever we want, but it can sometimes take some searching to find a spot thats flat enough! Anyway, Craig found the perfect spot and we got our camp set up. It was raining a bit and getting very cold, so we got set up quickly, got everything we needed unpacked into the tent, to keep it dry, and got everything else under our pack raincovers to keep it dry. We cooked dinner and ate in the tent, then got into our sleeping bags to stay warm. One of the problems we have not yet figured out about winter backpacking is that it gets very cold as soon as the sun starts to go down, so all we feel like doing is getting into our sleeping bags. But, it's way too early to go to sleep, and, if we do go to sleep, we wake up at 3 in the morning, no longer tired. We chatted and read and eventually went to sleep. I think it was a little after 8 when I went to sleep.
Around 1am, we both had to go to the bathroom. Fortunately, it had stopped raining, but it was still very cold. When I got back to the tent, Craig told me he had found my missing thermometer (missing since our last trip) inside my sleeping bag. I can't figure out how this could be, since I had looked everywhere, and I completely opened my sleeping bag and hung it to air out after the last trip! Anyway, this allowed us to check the temperature many times during the rest of the trip. It got down to around 30 inside the tent, and the following day, the temperature varied from 35 to 45 until late in the day when we got to lower elevations and the temp got up to around 50. BRRRR!
Here's our camp with Craig cooking breakfast in the "kitchen":
Most of the pictures with me in them are on Craig's camera, but here's one from my camera of us eating breakfast:
After breakfast we packed up camp and started the extremely long extremely uphill hike out of the valley we were in. It seemed endless! The views were very scenic and we stopped to look at them (and catch our breath and rest our legs) lots :-)
At one point, Craig spotted a footprint. We looked it up on a chart he had with him and determined it was a mountain lion footprint. I had trouble getting it to show up well in a photo, but here's what I got (my foot's in the photo for size comparison:)
We got back to the car at dusk and we were beat. We hiked a total of 17.5 miles over 2 days with over 2500' of elevation gain the first day, and probably about 1000-1500' gain the second day. And, of course, matching downhill elevation losses too, which normally I wouldn't consider a strain, but some of the trails were so steep that even the downhill was strenuous!
This was our most strenous backpacking trip yet, but we are still enthused about backpacking, so I guess we're just a bit crazy :-)
The weather forecast changed every time I looked at it, but it was supposed to be a little rainy on Saturday (forecast varied from light rain to t-showers) and partly cloudy to showers on Sunday. The predicted temperatures were highs of 56 and lows of 36. I was guessing that these predictions were for the visitors center, which is at a lower elevation than our destination, so I was expecting a little wet and very cold.
We left Santa Cruz a bit after 7am Saturday morning; it was raining. As we drove through the Santa Cruz mountains towards San Jose, it started SNOWING! It was actually snowing fairly hard for about 10 minutes of the drive, although the snow wasn't sticking to the road or ground. As we got out of the mountains, the snow stopped. We got to Henry Coe a little before 9am. We saw these as we got close to the parking lot area, we are guessing they are wild turkeys:
We started the hike with our raingear on since it was pretty cold and supposed to be raining on and off. The first 2.3 miles was fairly flat (nothing at Coe is really flat!) with many stream crossings. Then we got to the next trail on our route. This trail is 1.5 miles with 1200' elevation gain: that's VERY steep! We soon got too hot and removed our raingear. An hour or so later, it seemed like it was starting to drizzle, so I stopped to put my raingear back on. As I was putting it on, it started snowing!! The snow only lasted about 30 seconds, and the rest of the day, it varied between sunny, partly cloudy, and lightly raining.
Like I said, Henry Coe is BIG. I guess this is why many of the trails are seldom used. Sometimes it was hard to tell where the trail *was*. This is one of the "trails" we were on (it's the faint line in the grass):
The neat thing about this is that it really gives me the feel of making my way through the wilderness, everything I need carried on my back. Well, that's what it *is*, but it feels even more like that when the trail is barely there.
I took way too many photos to post them all here, but suffice it to say that the scenery at Henry Coe is beautiful. The only other mammals we saw were deer and cows, but we saw lots of indications (ie poop) that there were lots of other animals around.
Around 4 or so we got to where we had planned to camp and Craig found the perfect camping spot - this is wilderness camping so there are no defined campgrounds or campsites, which is nice because we get to camp wherever we want, but it can sometimes take some searching to find a spot thats flat enough! Anyway, Craig found the perfect spot and we got our camp set up. It was raining a bit and getting very cold, so we got set up quickly, got everything we needed unpacked into the tent, to keep it dry, and got everything else under our pack raincovers to keep it dry. We cooked dinner and ate in the tent, then got into our sleeping bags to stay warm. One of the problems we have not yet figured out about winter backpacking is that it gets very cold as soon as the sun starts to go down, so all we feel like doing is getting into our sleeping bags. But, it's way too early to go to sleep, and, if we do go to sleep, we wake up at 3 in the morning, no longer tired. We chatted and read and eventually went to sleep. I think it was a little after 8 when I went to sleep.
Around 1am, we both had to go to the bathroom. Fortunately, it had stopped raining, but it was still very cold. When I got back to the tent, Craig told me he had found my missing thermometer (missing since our last trip) inside my sleeping bag. I can't figure out how this could be, since I had looked everywhere, and I completely opened my sleeping bag and hung it to air out after the last trip! Anyway, this allowed us to check the temperature many times during the rest of the trip. It got down to around 30 inside the tent, and the following day, the temperature varied from 35 to 45 until late in the day when we got to lower elevations and the temp got up to around 50. BRRRR!
Here's our camp with Craig cooking breakfast in the "kitchen":
Most of the pictures with me in them are on Craig's camera, but here's one from my camera of us eating breakfast:
After breakfast we packed up camp and started the extremely long extremely uphill hike out of the valley we were in. It seemed endless! The views were very scenic and we stopped to look at them (and catch our breath and rest our legs) lots :-)
At one point, Craig spotted a footprint. We looked it up on a chart he had with him and determined it was a mountain lion footprint. I had trouble getting it to show up well in a photo, but here's what I got (my foot's in the photo for size comparison:)
We got back to the car at dusk and we were beat. We hiked a total of 17.5 miles over 2 days with over 2500' of elevation gain the first day, and probably about 1000-1500' gain the second day. And, of course, matching downhill elevation losses too, which normally I wouldn't consider a strain, but some of the trails were so steep that even the downhill was strenuous!
This was our most strenous backpacking trip yet, but we are still enthused about backpacking, so I guess we're just a bit crazy :-)