Part 3 - The Lost Coast Trail - Family Connection

START HERE - LOST COAST PART 1

The Lost Coast trail I was planning to hike (Part 2) lies in the King Range Conservation Area (This area recently had over 42,000 acres designated as Wilderness by the Northern California Coastal Wild Heritage Wilderness Act of 2006).  All the land in the King Range is under the control of the Department of the Interior – Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Arcata, CA office.  They are responsible for managing the entire expanse of some 68,000+ acres.  They can provide up to date trail conditions, great topo maps, tide timetables, and answers to any questions you have regarding the area. They should be your first call if you are planning a trip.

I found the tide timetable book especially entertaining and important, if not disconcerting, as there are areas on the trail where you will need to time your crossing to avoid being sweep out to sea by a rogue wave (It has happened).   I can only imagine the horrors they might experience down the coast at Pebble Beach if some backpack wearing, half-eaten Lost Coast hiker floated up at the 18th hole.

Palos Verdes - Portuguese Bend at Sunset

A few more miles down the coastline is where I grew up - initially in Riverside, CA and then Palos Verdes, CA – they call it Rancho Palos Verdes now.  It was and is apparently a very well to do area of Los Angeles – I had no clue at the time.  It juts out on a steeply walled peninsula into the Pacific Ocean.  In such a utopia, the kids in my neighborhood ran wild from sunup to sundown without any ‘perceived’ adult supervision. The only time a parent came into the picture was for meal disbursement and first aid – both required by the LA County Child Protective Services. Aside from that you were on your own. Interestingly I heard just yesterday, that a woman in NYC is getting paid $350 a session to bring kids to Central Park and leave them there unsupervised for pick up later – they call it Free Range Parenting – look it up!  So yes, we had it good back then – we were free range kids.

As with other typical life patterns of the ‘60s and ‘70s, my mother could be found at Mrs. Bails house having cocktails with the other neighborhood wives in the afternoon until the husbands came home in their usual gruff.  Mom has an outwardly adventurous spirit and never turns down fun – she took up SCUBA diving and would often go disappearing into the surf at the beach with her dive buddy Linda and reappear like sea monsters forty minutes later with tales of life below the waves.   We kids would just ride the waves, float out past the breakers, and watch the smooth contoured backs of the waves rolling in as we drifted north toward Torrance beach. Sometimes we would see who could touch the bottom. We would slip off the rafts, take a few deep breaths and dive down and down until our ears hurt, we ran out of breath, or got too cold. I don’t think we were ever scared (The beauty of pre-JAWs days).  And nobody ever touched the bottom. My mom later informed me it goes down about a mile on the way to Catalina Island – good luck with that.

BLM, as mentioned earlier is actually a household name for me. My father worked for BLM when I was first born in CA and then later on in his career just before and after his unexpected return from a two-year BLM assignment with USAID in Indonesia. When he was in Jakarta he suffered a near life ending brain aneurism at the age of 48. After transport to Singapore and ultimately Canada for surgery, he had a long recovery that took a lot out of him. I had just completed high school so I really only saw him during the summers and breaks from college. He seemed lost and depressed and having a tough go of it – he would sit holding his head on the front porch and not say much. But he got up each day, bad headaches and all, and went off to BLM in Washington, DC.

Being self-absorbed as young people tend to be at that age, I would still notice him at night, reading and working on unknown things (boring office stuff I thought) in his chair while my mother dozed off to Magnum PI on the couch. I never really learned what he was doing or did at that time - we just were never very communicative.  He was a very accomplished and brilliant man with a Masters of Economics from Michigan State.  But oddly enough, and a surprise to me, in Palos Verdes he coached my AYSO soccer team, the Coyotes, to a fantastically miserable 1-10 season. I think he felt his superior intellect could somehow outsmart and out-strategize the more archetype ‘mouth-breather’ coaches of the other teams. But he tried and I thank him for that.

He ultimately moved up the ranks as I got on with my own life. He was put in charge of a new branch of BLM called the Wilderness Resources. This is where he shined. As Chief of this office he had incredible responsibilities; he was a land baron with over 5 million acres. My mom tells me he would sometimes get calls in the night from distant BLM field offices saying the wilderness area was on fire – “What should we do?” ----- Dad - "Natural cause or camper?” ----- “Lightning” -----Dad - “Let it burn.”

Also part of the job was to look at land in the BLM system and deem whether it could or should be designated as wilderness. This often was met with a lot of controversy and push back from the people that have been using these lands. It would mean no more mountain biking, ATV trails, 4 wheel drive roads, or possible cattle grazing.   People often feel that government land should always be available to them since they are paying for it. But the Wilderness Act of 1964 said it best:
 “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Prior to my father retiring from his post, he submitted to Congress a list of BLM lands that he and his team felt should be designated as "Wilderness". The very land I had found so serendipitously – the Lost Coast – was on the list.  Thanks Dad!!!

Next - Part 4 - The Lost Coast of California - Expedition team

Tonight's Lost Coast Pic -  Inn of the Lost Coast Webcam