WEEK 10 OF 2019 ||| NASHVILLE, TN & MENLO PARK, CA
[The view Southeast from Windy Hill, looking across the Coastal Range foothills, to the Pacific Ocean and the wide horizon.]
I grew up looking west at the Coastal Range, a series of mountains in California which run along the plate boundary, roughly parallel to the coast, all the way up into British Columbia. I could not, back then, imagine how tall they were.
They are the final geographical hurdle between the Bay Area and the coast. To go over them is to go over the last mountain range before endless water. I have lived elsewhere since then, and could always picture, in my mind, the mountains between myself and these ones, and then the coast beyond.
What's behind mountains? Mountains. More mountains. Mountains beyond mountains. And then my mountains. And then the sea.
The Coastal Range has amazing biodiversity - it's one of the few biomes where Redwoods and other sequoias grow (on this continent), and its slopes are home to unique flowers, newts, ferns, and grasses, as well as hundreds of introduced species.
California's environment has been exploited and disrupted by United States settlers since Pre-Victorian times. The history of the state is a history of water diversion, biological innovations, crop research, labor exploitation, and Victorian civic folly on a grand scale.
Eucalyptus trees, whose oil presents an enormous fire hazard, were introduced to be railroad-tie timber. After its wood was found to be unsuitable for rail (too twisted and too easily cracked), the tree grew freely in rights-of-way up and down the state, crowding out native trees with its soaring canopy, and covering the ground with its dry peeling bark and oily leaves.
Iceplants, a mat-like succulent species, were imported to stabilized the bases of man-made slopes, but have gone on to swamp and cover-over the coast's natural dunes and cliffsides.
That all said, the state has also seen wave after wave of eager and active environmentalists, who have systematically stabilized and preserved huge swathes of open land.
One of those people was Betsy Crowder. A longtime Bay Area resident, she spent the 70s as an environmental planner for the cities of Palo Alto and Portola Valley. In the 80s, she pushed for trail building and conservation efforts. In the 90s, she served the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, as their president and then as a board member.
She was killed by a drunk driver in 2000. She was 74, on her way back from a meeting of the Explorer's Club. That fatal crash occurred less than a mile from where her husband had been slain 30 years earlier, in an eerily similar drunk driver incident. That tragedy occured back in 1970, before Mrs. Crowder's career as a planner and manager of place.
I've hiked a lot of trails in the open spaces she stewarded. Rancho San Antonio. Crystal Springs Reservoir. Los Trancos. Coal Creek. Yesterday, I went to the mountains of my youth - Windy Hill Open Space Preserve, the very preserve that she lived by, and walked often.
I hiked the Betsy Crowder Trail, named in her honor, and then the Spring Ridge Trail, and I found myself, after an hour and a half, 1350 feet higher up, at the coastal ridgeline around 1900' above sea level. See the picture above for the view that welcomed me. I had summited Windy Hill. I could see the ocean. I could see where the mountains had no mountains beyond them.
What's behind mountains? Mountains. More mountains. Mountains beyond mountains. And then her mountains. And then the sea.
I grew up looking west at the Coastal Range. I could not, back then, imagine how tall they were.
