Cliff Grove

Original Photographs, By Patrick Kelly.

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“Whatever, Together.”

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“I Swear I'm Not Angry, That's Just My Face.”

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“Heat Water, Don't Let It Boil.”

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“My Own Words Inside My Head Rang Like a Bell Inside A Head.”

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“That’s Like Me Blaming Owls For How Much I Suck At Analogies.”

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“All My Best Friends Bang Those Drums.”

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Cervus canadensis nannodes (females)

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“I Still Have These Questions.”

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10:01 pm, Looking Towards a Full Moon in Kings Canyon National Park.

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“That’s Not A Lesson By The Way, Just A Comment On Lumber Availability.”

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(Inverness Ridge on March 14, 2020)

All the small things. All those teeny tiny things that just end up as fuel. All of those things that are not really that small - only when in the shadow of something like a Douglas Fir. It’s like an inland sea or a river, all of those ferns. It’s hard not to mistake the bunch of individuals for a whole - one large organism laying down throughout the forest. All of those things, those tiny, over-shadowed things, just hiding there in the middle of it all. Drinking in the fog, eating the forest floor. All the small things, growing together like green, intertwining lamps. The forest usually glows when you’re on Inverness Ridge, especially in the late Spring. Mostly because of all of those small things.

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(Taken on the Woodward Trail looking north towards Limantour, on March 14, 2020.)

Three quarters of the way down Woodward Valley trail, when you come out of the last pines, you start seeing the old-growth sentinels dotting the coastal scrub. For the first time since a peek at the top of Mount Wittenburg, you have a view to the Estero to the north and of the wider landscape. The Douglas Firs are huge and bare and they look like they’ve been through it. They sit in these gullies, bathed in poison oak and berry bushes, providing a fitting frame for the landscape of Limantour in the background. Damn, it’s pretty. The landscape looks ancient and so weathered. But everything on it is brand new.

Almost 25 years ago, the Mount Vision Fire burned the area in the photo above all the way down to the beach. And the Fire Lane Trail and Drakes View and all the way up to Mt. Vision to the right of the frame. It burned the Woodward Trail behind and a lot of it in between. The forest has thrived since. Bishop Pines grow thick before they crowd each other out. Lupine and ceanothus colonized the understory first and is everywhere now. Birds are everywhere. New or not, it’s one of the prettiest areas of the park and that’s because of the fire.

So you have to hope it happens again. Hopefully the extra fuel and the canopy fires don’t take down the tallest Douglas Firs. Hopefully the smoke scared off the animal population before the fire spread. Hopefully the Bishop pinecones have already opened and have found their soil. Now all we need is the rain.

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I haven’t added any saturation to this image - I double checked. This is what the Sky Trail looks like in March. It seems so technicolor and unreal to me, so frozen still with green.

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(Taken on March 14, 2020, most likely looking North on Sky Trail, which the Woodward Fire overran.)

The Woodward Fire is tiny compared to the fires raging now. Not to me it’s not, but in true size and devastation it is. The Woodward is burning itself out on the inside, contained 95% on the perimeter. It’s consumed almost 5,000 acres of wilderness in Point Reyes. That’s a lot of beautiful land burned up. But nothing compared to the rest of the west. The Creek Fire in the Sierras is over 220,000 acres and still growing. The August Complex is about to blow right past 800,000 acres. At the seashore in West Marin, there are no structures burnt, no one seriously hurt. In the megafires to the north and east, the devastation is incalculable. Our brains can’t comprehend destruction on that scale, no matter what we compare it to.  But a park is self-contained and a little easier to define, so it’s less crazy making to think about. That’s a long way of saying that I know Point Reyes is not the center of the world. Not even close. I know that. But sometimes it feels like it is.

I was in Point Reyes the Friday before the lightning strikes. It was so hot on the Bucklin trail that I had to sit down in the middle of trail mid-hike. That smell that hangs around when the sun bakes the pine was everywhere; trail-side leaves so hot they were crackling. It was primed. I told a couple of visitors that Chimney Rock and the rest of the west peninsula was the clearest I’d ever seen it from the top of Bucklin. 3 days later and two ridges over, visibility was what was in front of you.

At the very start of the pandemic in March, worried that the National Park Service would close the park, I scurried up to hike the Old Pine Trail loop. School had closed the day before and the quarantine was closing in; if there is something that can possibly distract you from the immensity of that it’s the Douglas Fir forest southwest of Mount Wittenberg. These photos are from that trip on March 14th when the last thing you’re thinking about is a fire in the woods.

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Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail. Big Basin Redwoods State Park. California. Taken on March 23, 2020.

An obsession with Redwoods is becoming. Or at least it should be. The trees, the forest, they’re ethereal and they pass on some of the juju on to whoever falls for them. Yea. That’s a nice thought.

But, in truth, it’s really easy to romanticize anything to do with woods dominated by Sempervirens. It should be fairly straightforward to understand the inherent value in the beauty and rarity of the overstory. But the understory has rare value too. And in Redwood forests the understories always have a unique glow. In Montgomery Woods and Prairie Creek, it looks like someone swept before you got there. In Armstrong and Muir Woods and Big Sur, chapparal sneaks in and out naturally. At Jedediah Smith even the ferns make humans seem small. But Big Basin, for size or whatever reason, has it all.

This is looking west down Kelly Creek (Hey!), towards its confluence with Berry Creek in West Waddell Creek Wilderness. This photo seems a decent approximation of the understory of Big Basin, especially the heart of West Waddell Creek. Maybe a little heavier since the trees here are all reaching for the creek-created sunlight. Creekside or a recent fall is the only way that you’re going to see it like this, to see how much variance there really is all the way up past where the first redwood branches sprout. This is the forest that burned, took the brunt and provided the fuel.

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Berry Creek Falls. Big Basin Redwoods. March 23, 2020.

You elusive bastard. I get it – you have to be all mystical even in the age of cell phones. But, c’mon. The waterfall is all off, every time.  The trees don’t look nearly big enough. Both fallen and standing. Even the water doesn’t look like it does, no matter what you set the color to in post. I’m convinced that trying to take a photo and “capture” any fall along Berry Creek Falls is a fool’s errand; you’re better off trying to memorize the sight of it in case the area burns down in an inferno.

I tried to make it a habit to go every year, sometimes more. It probably had something to do with how everything there feels intangible all of the time. Everything on the way there is hard to grasp too. I still need to take the Howard King to get out there sometime. My favorite way is down Sunset, but from Waddell Beach is wonderful too (minus the fire road). But I’m sure any way, especially in the winter, is the best way.

Anyway, here is my best attempt at Berry Creek Falls from the trip in March. A two-image composite and it still isn’t enough.

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Taken on March 23, 2020 in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, along Sunset Trail where it crosses the first trickles of Berry Creek.

There’s this spot on the Sunrise trail, where it opens up and you get a view down the Berry Creek drainage. You just sort of pop out of the old-growth into pure chaparral and you get all of this context and a break from the curtain – enough to make you really appreciate the forest that you left - before you pop right back in again. A clear view of how the creek falls down all of that resistant rock, follows the folds and funnels into Waddell Creek and then on to the Pacific. It’s one of a handful of places in the park where you actually get to see the park’s shape from on high, one of a handful of places in the park where you feel like you’re looking down on the redwoods.

The vista is great and rare for Big Basin, but that’s not it. Down the drainage is wonderful, but looking back up the hill is better. It’s land too flat to send the water down with enough force to cut a ravine like all of the ones below. Steep or not, you can tell that any water to hit this hillside ends up in Berry Creek. Through the layers and shades of green, you can see that the forest thins out and goes from old-growth Redwood to shorter pine and on to chaparral. Normally, you’re either in a Redwood forest or you’re not. Not here. Here, you are surrounded by redwoods but not in the forest. Here, you can see the Redwoods in the background peeking over the wind-stunted pine and manzanita. Here, it’s like a family photo – oldest in the back, youngest in the front. Here, the forest gives you a little extra perspective.