mini-vacation at costanoa, part 1 - hiking the hills

This post is the first in a series. To see more photos near Costanoa, click here.

The footbridge over Whitehouse Creek.

In November of 2010, I desperately needed a vacation. It had been a busy year, full of wedding photography and other types of hard work, and all I wanted was to be alone for a few days far from all computer screens. I booked three nights at Costanoa, about half an hour's drive from my house in Santa Cruz. My biz partner dropped me off with my stuff and sped away, leaving me to enjoy the first solitary vacation I'd ever been on in my life. There were a few other resort visitors around, but not anybody I knew. For several days I rested and hiked and took pictures. It was exactly what I needed. Still need, in fact. I want to do it again, right now.

Costanoa is a marvelous place for a getaway, though it's a bit pricey. Many have said this, online and in print, and they are one hundred percent right. I discovered the place when hired to shoot a wedding there. It's a minimally developed resort right next to Año Nuevo State Park, my favorite stretch of coastline. You can stay in a room in the lodge, in a heated cabin, in an unheated tent cabin, or you can camp at the KOA campground there. I wanted to camp in my Tent Cot, but that November was particularly cold and kept hinting at rain. This was supposed to be a vacation full of ease and idle pleasure. I took the glamping option, and went for a tent cabin with a heated mattress pad. Every night when I'd finished dinner (also pricey, at the Cascade Restaurant on premises) I sat for a while in the Adirondack chair in front of my tent cabin and watched the fog roll in. Then I crawled into my warm bed and read mysteries or just thought about life, for hours and hours.

Daytime was devoted to walking, thinking, and photography. Costanoa is on the mountain side of Highway 1; behind it are swathes of Año Nuevo State Park and Butano State Park, coastal hills with trails leading to redwoods and views of the ocean. The Whitehouse Creek trail will take you a long way- you can even get to Big Basin State Park using this route. I didn't hike that far. I was a little confused by the trail markers and didn't want to get lost. I took the Ohlone Ridge loop and ended up at a bench at the top of the ridge – you can see the bench in one of the photos way below. I ate lunch here and daydreamed for a while, walked on further and got lost, found the trail again a couple of hours later, and proceeded languidly down the hill as afternoon turned into evening. Ah, vacation.

Following the Ohlone Ridge trail, with its Dr. Seuss-like pampas grass, up into the hills behind Costanoa.On the way up to that lunchtime bench, I delighted in the pampas grass that lined the trail. Later, I learned it's an exotic from Argentina and takes over the land, choking out native vegetation. I learned a lot of things about this place later on that were disturbing to me, involving the choking of native species. If I'm honest I have to admit that I'm glad I didn't have this information when I was relaxing in and around this beautiful resort.

My belated California coastal natural history education began when I wanted to know where the name Costanoa came from, and looked it up. Costanoan is a term derived from Spanish that was broadly applied to coastal Native Americans in this area, especially the various groups that comprised the Ohlone people. While living in this area I have heard the Ohlone people mentioned many times, but I'd never done any reading about them except what I happened upon by chance. A trip to the highly useful Californiana room at the Santa Cruz Public Library's downtown branch netted me the history I sought.

The Ohlone people who made this area their home were living the good life. They knew what to eat and how to eat it, and didn't really practice agriculture or care much about property. Instead, they valued status in the community over wealth and ate things when they were in season, using strategic burning of land to maximize their harvest of naturally occurring grass seeds and other plants. Down by the sea where Año Nuevo is now, they ate many types of shellfish which they cooked in sealed baskets full of water they heated to the boiling point with hot rocks. They were clever, resourceful, and highly spiritual; they practiced shamanism and wove legends around Coyote, the trickster spirit.

Then the Spanish came, bringing Catholicism and diseases, and within 65 years the Ohlone population was reduced to less than ten percent of its former numbers. Crafts, rituals, languages, and most of the old ways were lost when these people died. 

It's a familiar story, this senseless destruction of native life and culture, and it made me deeply sad to learn about the way it happened here, in this area I've come to love so much. I think back on my wanderings on the coastal hills, and I try to imagine living there as part of a people who had established themselves in the Bay Area possibly as far back as 4000 BCE. That is a very long time for a culture to survive and develop and become infused with the spirit of this lovely place. In a way, it's nice that this relatively low-impact resort was named to commemorate them, but in another way it's painfully ironic to think of luxury-camping in the general area where they thrived for so long before they were almost completely destroyed.

Once the Spanish claimed ownership of the land around here, it passed from one person to another until it became a dairy ranch called Cascade Ranch. I'm not sure of the exact sequence of events, because the books I consulted described Año Nuevo's history, and that's two miles away from Costanoa. I think the developers of Costanoa bought its 120 acre grounds from the original Cascade Ranch. They went through a very long permitting process with San Mateo County before they were allowed to build. What they made is an eco-friendly resort that protects the land near Año Nuevo and Butano from more destructive development. If it can't all be parkland, it might as well be something like Costanoa. 

The photos below show some of the things I found on my trek over the bridge and through the hills behind the tent cabins. I saw no other humans for many hours. The day was warm and sunny where I went, while in the distance I could see fog on other hills, moving in slowly to drape Año Nuevo and eventually, Costanoa's grounds. Later that night I would feel the chill and appreciate the roomy saunas that were a short walk from my tent cabin. Saunas, by gosh! Every vacation should have them.

This deer skull and the hoof above were just a couple of parts of the entire dead deer I found on the trail. No entrails or anything like that were left, just bones and some hair. I know I wasn't supposed to take anything but pictures, but I admit I snagged a jawbone and took it home to give to my toddler nephew.