Secret Sky Island Cloud Forest

[Ride stats: 28.8 miles, 3,783 feet, 3hrs 33mins moving time. Radness: Eco funk.]

We were high up on a ridge in California’s Central Coast, maybe a mile from the Pacific, when we saw the signpost, abandoned and ignorable, just a few yards off the fire road.

Whatever wayfinding placard it once supported was long gone, and the trail that ran out beyond it was barely visible, narrow, overgrown.

It was a gray day, windy, the sky invisible and the slopes across the various valleys and dells hidden behind big drifting fog banks. Spring was waning, but the land was still quite lush, the last flowers of the season flaring up in little spashes of color amidst the dense, mottled shades of chaparral green and dun that blanketed the steep, sweeping landscape.

We took a little while to scope things out. While the trail had clearly been abandoned, there was evidence of a certain sort of maintenance … right at the start, for example, there was a conveniently sloping rock, just at the right angle to properly set up a rad jump.

There wasn’t really a proper ridearound, however, and the landing would be a little bit technical: The trail beyond the rock was narrow and descending; hit it the wrong way and you could splorp onto your side in a small cascade of humiliation and inconvenience, wheels sideways, shoulder down, late season grass and coyote bush in your face, brambles sticking in your socks, nice worm’s-eye view of the orange, buttery-petaled California poppies trailside.

There were other rocks like it further down the trail, all covered with lichens and lapped by soil and grass, looking like they were organic features of the landscape — like they had emerged out of the soil over hundreds or thousands of years through a gradual process of erosion (millions, actually; all this terrain was once ancient sea floor) … except that these rocks were all perfectly placed for radness. Each one formed a ramp that set a rider up for several feet of gleeful air time above the trail before reconnecting with Mother Earth.

How designed was this course, anyway?

Rad or not, I took the “chicken line” every time and either rolled or dabbed awkwardly around each of these rock features. (To roll a feature that is normally jumped, you drop the seatpost, throw your weight back, pitch the front wheel down the steep side opposite, and let the bike flow back down to the trail. To dab it, you put your foot down briefly and hork the wheels around or over whatever it is you don’t want to navigate directly.)

It usually takes me two or three rides before I’m comfortable on all the features of a new, more challenging trail — until I learn how the trail moves, and how it requires me to move. It’s a constant process of learning, testing, looking for the line, trying to figure how to do it right, how to do it better next time, and erring on the side of caution.

Besides, the real point for me was just being up there, immersed in the immensity of the landscape. That’s the real radness.

It’s an amazing landscape. This was all California coastal chaparral — that combination of shrubs and bushes and small trees ranging from shin-high to, occasionally, a good six to eight feet or more, at which height there’s a curious tunnel effect as you follow a trail down through. It’s a unique habitat, blooms abundantly throughout the spring, and stays lush into the dry summer, creating a labyrinthine world apart for small mammals, bugs, birds of all sorts, and hell-of cool predators — bobcats, coyotes, hawks, gray foxes, owls. Probably mountain lions too … not that we really saw any of these animal presences. Just evidence of their passage: Scat on the trail, a rustling sound deep in the brush …

So we’re following this trail — barely a path, really — as it plunged down the shoulder of the ridge, taking us up and down and over a series of dells and knolls and outcrops, then sending us out on a wide arc along some sharply exposed bluffs overlooking the nearest valley, before swinging back hard, away from the steeps and across a small, plummeting meadow.

Ahead was a forest.

It was the sort of thing you’d see from a distance from down on the valley floor, from the commonly traveled trails, from the asphalt itself. You know what I mean: those dense clusters of trees far up in the folds of the hills, off in the distance, tucked into the details of these huge climbs and chaparral vistas that boundary the Pacific coast.

Usually, they’re pretty hard to get to, such that you don’t even really pay attention to them. In a video game race course they’re the landscape details that give the game its sense of verisimilitude. Nice to see, but literally impossible to attain.

Not this time.

Before I knew it — it happened so fast — the landscape had completely changed. We were surrounded by trees, widely spaced, with soft, loamy soil covered with evergreen needles. No eucalyptus anywhere. Seems likely they were Monterey pine (not sure, will try to verify next ride there) — but unlike the ones we see in San Francisco, with the Rec & Parks Dep’t fastidiously cutting the dead branches from the lower trunks, these trees were wild and untended: rambly, brambly, full of jagged spurs from where the branches dropped, and remained on the forest floor.

They were also covered with lichens — and with the fog blowing dense and damp across the hills, the marine layer dragging its saggy, baggy, gray belly across the ridgetops, we could see why. The place was sopping. Under the big trees eating lunch (a large peach, a collection of roasted/salted mixed nuts, and some dried figs), we were getting rained on. Water was dripping off the branches, pattering all around us, leaving you with that damp-butt experience when you rise up off the otherwise soft and inviting forest floor.

We were in a cloud forest, and it was fecund as fuck up there. Tiny pine seedlings were sprouting everywhere. The fallen branches, dropped logs, snags and stumps were all softening, mossy, returning to the soil. There were birds, the wind was muted, the trail rarely traveled, by humans, anyway. There were hoofprints in the mud ahead of us — probably black-tail deer.

Magical.

While I don’t think hikers got up there often, there were definitely bikers who knew the place, and had made it their own. We got back in the saddle and followed the singletrack down, along the side of the ridge, in a brisk descent through the forest. Along the way were trail features built out — little ramps of old logs and branches and packed earth, creating an excellent series of drops and jumps. I rolled them the first time through, but took them proper the next.

The exit options at the end of this secret route through the cloud forest are challenging: Steep black-diamond drops to your left, or a solid blue but rather exposed traverse above a fire road to your right. More on those in a future Dirt Kiss …

This ride, and experiences like it, are magical passages into an enchanted Otherworld — one we’re just visiting.

EPILOGUE:

In researching this article, trying to identify the types of pine in the Secret Sky Island Cloud Forest, I discovered that despite the arboreal enclave’s vivacious fecundity, the Monterey pine is in fact considered invasive, that “understory native cover and species richness decreased linearly as trees increased in size,” and that the entire forest, which was definitely heading toward more mature, is disruptive of the coast scrub and chaparral ecosystem. It surely can’t be as bad as the eucalyptus forests that drip toxic sap around them to prevent competition from other flora — in fact, the Sky Island Cloud Forest interior was pretty lush and full of variety, but what do I know? More when I learn about it …