June 30, 2014 2014 miscellanea: Time-traveling in Zayante
To see more photos of 2014 miscellanea, click here.
WHERE, EXACTLY, IS IT?
Until 2014, if somebody mentioned Zayante in conversation, I'd have only the vaguest idea of what they were talking about. That’s out in the middle of nowhere, I'd think to myself. Probably near Felton. Then in February I visited my friends Tim and Erin at their Zayante home, and got educated about Zayante. Those two have since moved elsewhere, but my interest in Zayante remains. It's not a real town, at least not anymore, but plenty of people live there. Zayante is what we call the area of Zayante Canyon, the valley through which Zayante Creek runs. There are many such canyons in the Santa Cruz mountains, and some of them have been very important in the history of the central coast region.
To get to Tim and Erin and their quaint house with the sloping floor, I took a bus from downtown Santa Cruz to the Felton Faire stop, where Tim met me with his car. A shot of espresso and ten minutes of meandering mountain roads later, we were greeting Erin at the door and trading news. It was an ideal day for relaxing under the redwoods with the doors of the house open to let in the breeze. Blue sky showed through the swaying treetops. Caffeine and lively conversation made us restless, and soon we were setting out for our hike, laden with tuna sandwiches and a thermos full of tea.
That day my camera carried the Sigma 10-22mm wide-angle lens, still damaged from its time in the Utah desert. The zoom ring was stuck at 16 mm until expert help could be acquired. More recently, the focus ring had stopped working, and the auto-focus had become unreliable. But did I stop using it? Not at all. I accepted its defects, figured out how to make it take pictures. In the process realized that I have unconditional love for this piece of equipment. Even when it needs repair, the wide-angle is still my favorite lens. There is something about the way it frames the world that I always find interesting, like the perspective of a brilliant, eccentric friend.
EVOLVING STATES OF DETERIORATION
Tim and Erin led me over Zayante Creek, with its dark water ripple-smooth as church window glass. We started up the trail’s first steep switchback. Looking down at the creek from the mossy slope above it, I felt as if I’d crossed some invisible boundary. This feeling grew even stronger when the trail crested on an unpaved road. To my left an abandoned car lurked, resplendently rusty and full of woodland debris. Its colors perfectly matched the palette of the forest, as if it had grown out of the ground.
We followed this road past the rusty old car to where it ended at a chain-link fence enclosing a mysterious white building. “What is this place?” we asked each other. My companions had seen it before, but they didn’t know the answer. There were no signs, no clues about its identity. Baffled, we turned and walked in the other direction, to where the unpaved road continued under tall trees. An entwined Tim and Erin moved fast on the trail. I lingered to take photos of the local foliage, and was soon left behind.
Left to my own devices, I let my imagination carry me away. I am always ready to give in to any temptation to fantasize about the place I’m visiting. That day I imagined traveling forward in time to a post-human world. The earth had reclaimed the decomposing car, but it had yet to take over the fenced-in building. Those glass windows will shatter soon, I thought. And it won’t be long before vines grow around the bricks and break them apart. I pictured myself returning here frequently to document the process of decay, hundreds of years from now, ruins greeting me in evolving states of deterioration as I stepped out of my time machine, wide-angle lens still fastened to my camera.
OLD KENVILLE ROAD, ECCLES TUNNEL, AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC COAST RAILROAD
What I learned about this place later aligned in many ways with my daydreams. By walking on this wide trail, I was visiting the ruins of 19th century endeavors. Called Old Kenville Road, it’s a former railroad right-of-way, where tracks of the South Pacific Coast Railroad once lay. Beginning in 1880, the SPCRR’s Mountain Route ran from Los Gatos through the Santa Cruz mountains to the beach in Santa Cruz. This branch was part of a longer line that started with a ferry ride from San Francisco to Alameda. SPCRR trains rode on narrow-gauge tracks not found here anymore, transporting people and freight from Alameda to Santa Cruz in under 4 hours.
This railroad was ardently wished for by many individuals, and its arrival changed life in the region forever. The shortened travel time was a massive improvement over the several days of stagecoach riding once required for the trip. Communities profited from the chance to transport goods such as redwood lumber, slaked lime, and fruit. Tourism got a tremendous boost from the frequently running excursion trains to Santa Cruz and other points of interest. Towns sprang up in the mountains. A whole way of life grew around the trains, one that most people are unaware of today. I certainly knew nothing about the SPCRR before I walked on Old Kenville Road, and I soon became fascinated with this bygone era of transportation. Now I understand why people get obsessed with railroads, I found myself thinking, as I spent the next few weeks reading about trains.
The South Pacific Coast Railroad blasted eight tunnels through the rocks of the Santa Cruz Range. Two of the route’s tunnels were over a mile long, and the longest lay right over the San Andreas Fault. The mysterious white building I mentioned earlier, pictured below, covers the south entrance to Eccles Tunnel. At 240 feet in length, it's the shortest tunnel on the Mountain Route. Eccles Tunnel in its original state allowed passage of trains down Zayante Canyon to Felton and then Santa Cruz. The reverse side of Eccles Tunnel saw the Mountain Route continuing up out of Zayante Canyon to travel under the summit of Mountain Charlie and upward to Glenwood, Wright’s, Los Gatos, San Jose, and points north.
Eccles Tunnel now serves as a records storage facility. As one website informed me, “during the height of the Cold War, some of California's most important documents were stored in this tunnel, including the original journals of the State Legislature, the State Constitution, and microfilms of Spanish archives.” This interesting bit of information is just one of many available at Santa Cruz Trains, and I highly recommend that valuable resource to anyone who wants to know more about the history of railroads in Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz Trains helped me understand where the places I'd walked fit into the larger picture of a transportation revolution. What a wonderful world we live in where people will offer detailed information like that for free.
THE FATE OF THE MOUNTAIN ROUTE
Built mostly by thousands of Chinese workers, the entire Mountain Route was an engineering marvel, a beautiful example of innovative narrow-gauge design on rough terrain. Narrow-gauge railroads were cheaper to build and operate, making them a frequent choice for places like the Santa Cruz mountains where larger standard-gauge corporations wouldn’t venture. The success of this route eventually attracted the predatory interest of the same company that had refused to build here for so many years. In 1887, the South Pacific Coast Railroad was purchased by the much larger Southern Pacific Railroad, and slowly converted from narrow to standard gauge.
In the middle of this effort, during which trains still ran regularly, natural disaster struck. The same Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 that destroyed 80% of San Francisco also damaged crucial sections of this railroad. The earthquake was caused by movement along the San Andreas Fault, and the tunnel that crossed the fault was sliced in half by the jolt. Landslides and tunnel warping elsewhere along the line called for daunting repair efforts. But this wasn’t the end of the Mountain Route. Repairs were made, conversion to standard gauge continued, and three years later trains were running on time. What finally killed this railroad was more subtle than an earthquake. Ridership decreased when the Southern Pacific opened the Coast Line, the Great Depression brought revenues down even more, and a series of heavy winter storms in 1939 and 1940 destroyed sections of the track in ways that proved too expensive to fix. It was one damn thing after another for the Mountain Route until 1940, when the final train made its trip.
Remembering the many bus rides I’d taken on Highway 17 to San Jose, a road which roughly parallels the Mountain Route, I decided that the train ride must have offered a superior scenic experience to the road. On the train there would have been no unsightly highway pavement, no oncoming cars, no jostling for position in the lanes. It's a shame this railroad doesn't run through the mountains anymore. I would love to ride it now.
THE SCURRYING RESUMED IMMEDIATELY: PRESENT CONTACTING THE PAST
I caught up with Tim and Erin where tall trees parted to show a sky had grown hazy with incoming fog. We walked together in watery sunlight for a moment and our feet touched iron edges of old tracks. We were standing on the site of Olympia Station, which first opened in 1915 and operated until the route closed in 1940. Tracks were taken up by a railroad salvage firm from here all the way to Los Gatos after the railroad shut down, but parts of the station remain. A short way down the tracks I spotted a dilapidated structure hiding behind a thicket of Scotch broom. I darted over to it and then stopped and stared, awed by its bedraggled ancient lineaments.
The clicking of my camera’s shutter triggered a mad scurrying somewhere above my head. Startled, I jumped back and looked up to see a wood rat nest on the roof, perhaps the rampart of a massive fortress of wood rats. I imagined hundreds of rodents in the dark corners of this ruin, every one of them angry about being disturbed, and took a few careful steps back. You’re being silly, I told myself, jumping forward again with my camera raised. The scurrying resumed immediately. It had a purposeful sound to it, with an edge of indignant surprise. Intimidated now, I took a few quick pictures of the strange contraption looming from the top of the building. The ominous rustling continued. I didn’t stay long.
Walking south along the tracks a few minutes later, we reached several abandoned train cars, one stacked on top of the other. Here was an obvious picnic spot. We sat next to these relics, which were magnificent in their disintegration. Tea was produced from the thermos while I admired the rusty painted metal and the dry, splintering redwood boards that spilled out of the belly of the bottom car like matchsticks. We ate our tuna sandwiches and looked around. Not a soul was visible in this rail-bisected clearing.
I still find it amazing that the same middle-of-nowhere spot where I ate a tuna sandwich in peace once had a vital artery of transit running through it. For sixty years trains steamed past this point, picking up speed after the stop at Olympia Station, a place that was once important enough to also function as a post office. It feels like time-traveling again to orient my mind to this forgotten world, in which these tracks were the fastest, most direct way to reach San Francisco from Santa Cruz. It was a world in which residents of Zayante would hear train after train go by, day after day, the sound a constant reminder that their once-remote homes were now on the path of progress.
Later that afternoon, we turned around and did our walk in reverse, seeing marvels (a pig, metal sculptures, the Zayante sandhills) and ending up back at Zayante Creek. We crossed the dark water again, and it felt like it had been years, not hours, since we'd made our first crossing. I let my imagination run away with me again, pretending that the moss had grown shaggier, the switchbacked trail more overgrown. As we climbed up the hill to Zayante Road, I felt that we were leaving the forgotten South Pacific Coast Railroad behind, tucked away safely in these woods.
I so appreciate the time you take to understand the meaning of the places you photograph. All my curiosity is satiated by these kind of posts which are written so fluidly. I love the pictures of that car!
Super photos and descriptions/ story to go with your photos. JR