Crest of Piedra Blanca Trail Trail, August 15, 2011

Crest of Piedra Blanca Trail, November, 1983.

What do you do when you crest the familiar climb to the home of your youth and find yourself on an unfamiliar tread to a place you do not recognize save for the old sign that insists you are home?

Thomas Wolfe said “You can’t go home again.” To be sure, he said a lot of things, as the book exceeds 700 pages, but he did say that. To quote Forest Gump “I don’t know anything about that” but I do know my cognitive dissonance was severe as I looked at the now grounded Pine Mountain Lodge sign. I expected a Rod Serling voiceover; I had clearly entered the Twilight Zone. I thought of the words purported to have been uttered by Daniel Boone “I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks.” I was confused. And out of quotes.

The strangeness of the day was foreshadowed by my arrival at a place I knew well: Lion campground. But it wasn’t Lion campground it was the Piedra Blanca trail head. The place was eerily quite and empty, not noisy and crowded as I knew it. I remember when the road through Rose Valley was a shooting gallery. Once in the mid 1980s someone was arrested for firing some sort of home made bazooka into what I knew as “glass mountain” but others called “sparkle hill” due to all the ordnance-shattered glass. The shooters lining the road are as much a thing of the past as is Lion campground.

There is now a formal trail across the Sespe to the combined start of the Sespe trail (to me the Sespe road route) and the Piedra Blanca-Gene Marshall trail (the Gene Marshall part is new to me). I rather liked it. When I frequented the area, once the vestiges of the Sespe road had washed away, you simply dropped into the creek at a convenient spot and picked a way across to the stalwart sign at the start of the trail. The sign has changed; in fact, the signage has multiplied. A new sign sits up above and east of the old trail start, more on the Sespe trail side of the intersection. It barely mentions the Piedra Blanca route, concerned as it is with sites along the Sespe.

A short distance north along the trail at the junction with the Middle Sespe trail is a new sign referencing specifically the Gene Marshall – Piedra Blanca route. A bit further north is a sign, again new to me as the designation did not exist last I hiked here, declaring that one is in the Sespe Wilderness.

Signs north of the traditional start of the Piedra Blanca trail, August 15, 2011.

The hike remained the same as it ever was, however. I crossed the Piedra Blanca formation and saw the two old snags near the point where the route drops to the creek and eventually traverses to Piedra Blanca and Twin Falls camps. I passed by the camps as my goal was much higher up on Pine Mountain.

Snags on Piedra Blanca, August 15, 2011

The hike up and above the North Fork of Piedra Blanca Creek is still steep and still a reasonable physical and mental challenge on a hot day such as this day was. I came to a spot I recognized and which indicated that I was making good progress to the top. I was in my comfort zone of familiarity.

Piedra Blanca trail climb landmark, August 15, 2011

My conditioned expectation was to pass the sign at the trail crest and descend gently to the bowl of Pine Mountain Lodge. I used to jog in. Instead, I crossed the creek and veered to the northeast and intersected a very short spur trail that dropped into the camp where the old Pine Mountain Lodge sign was located. The main trail continued to Three Mile camp while another trail headed northeast directly from this “Pine Mountain Lodge” to Cedar Creek and Fishbowls camp. This configuration did not match the template burned in my memory from a million or so trips this way before 1987.

I should have been prepared for this as two recent excellent blog posts by Jack Elliot and Ventura County Canyoneering reviewed the area. My head was prepared, I guess, but my gut obviously was not. The trail to Three Mile should not swoop by the camp and continue; instead, one should enter Pine Mountain Lodge from the south, pass through the camp, and exit across a creek through some brush with no signage. The Fishbowls trail sign should not be at the edge of the camp, but a walk northeast from the camp along the trail. I stood looking at the “Pine Mountain Lodge” sign on the ground instead of in the tree and reviewed my alternatives. I considered panic but rejected that strategy; I wasn’t lost by any means, just confused. So I went off in search of my PIne Mountain Lodge.

On the far left is the exit to the route to Three Mile Camp.

Home of the Pine Mountain Lodge Sign, August 15, 2011

And I found it and was greatly relieved. I will not say I have the entire “before and after” map clear in my head; I don’t. I will have to return, old prints in hand, and stay a night or two to build a complete schematic. But that’s OK. I’m glad to do it in the service of history; or to be more accurate, in the service of pure self indulgence.

Pine Mountain Lodge, August 15, 2011.

I sat at the old, familiar picnic table that, as far as I can tell, I never managed to photograph before August 15, 2011 and meditated about this day in this place in the heart of my old country. When I was in my 20s and 30s I perceived each day in the forest as a link in an endless chain of days in the Los Padres.  That perception has been replaced by a disquieting feeling of the finite. I had my time living the forest and it ended.  Now I will return to visit but suspect I will experience each visit in the moment as unique entity. It is tempting to flatter myself and say I have passed the torch to a new generation. But that is not the case; they discovered this back country without my help and have accomplished much more than I did or anyone I knew. It is they who have inspired me to act on my long held vague intention to revisit this place that meant so much to me. They took the torch I never held and handed it to me. Now I hike in their footsteps as mine washed away long ago.

For years I wondered how the Pine Mountain Lodge sign came to be attached to a wire looped around a nail in the tree above. There is a group in Ojai I call the “guru brigade” that is comprised of sage elders who assemble regularly in the early morning to confer on topics lofty and subtle. And drink black coffee. I have had the opportunity to sit in with this group, as a supplicant I hasten to add, not a peer. I could not hope to aspire to membership in this wise order. One of the group is a former forest service ranger who is nothing less than legendary. As I found out recently, he put the sign in the tree. It had been on the vanished Lodge structure from which derives the name of the camp. This ranger removed it from the ground and placed it in the tree to keep it safe from rough handling. Now it is back on the ground, which I think is sad.

Finally it was time to head back to Lion camp; excuse me, the Piedra Blanca trail head. Perhaps the me of 25 years ago would have felt compelled to push on to Three Mile. But there was time to return to Ojai and grab a Mayan burrito at Rueben’s. That is what I did. Three Mile will wait until next time. Let’s call it enlightenment.

Pine Mountain Lodge Panorama, August 15, 2011