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Outside Magazine August 2002

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Destinations: Northern California: The New Park
This Land Is Your Land
Deep in the redwood hills near Mendocino lies the Big River Estuary, a secret cache that will soon belong to bears, bobcats, otters, and you.

By Robert Earle Howells


	Inland empire: looking up the Big River (Kurt Markus)

FROM THE HIGHWAY 1 BRIDGE a half-mile south of Mendocino on California's North Coast, the Big River looks tantalizingly moody and gorgeous, its slinky coils meandering over grassy flats and vanishing into a deep gorge defined by the dark, towering presence of coastal redwoods. For the past 150 years this has been verboten terrain—private property, recently in the hands of Hawthorne Timber Company, a Fort Bragg, California-based logging operation. But in about two minutes, I'm going to sling my mountain bike onto a shoulder, hop over a locked gate, and slip into this landscape for a ride along the Big River's northern banks. And no, I won't be arrested, scolded, or even glared at. The once-doomed-to-be-logged (again) Big River is ours, and it's the best news California's northern coast has heard in a long time.

As soon as the ink dries on a few final documents, any time between now and November, a $25.7 million purchase will transfer the Big River from Hawthorne to the California state parks system.

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For beta to plan your visit to the Big River, click here

The exchange will be made through the Mendocino Land Trust, a local non-profit conservation organization, which raised the money in less than a year after the timber barons signed the purchase agreement. The Big River's 7,344 prime acres of river, estuary, wetlands, and forest will fill in a long-coveted missing piece of a public-lands puzzle. The property is adjacent to 2,499-acre Van Damme State Park to the south and the mega 48,652 acres of Jackson State Forest to the north. Jackson in turn abuts Mendocino Woodlands and Russian Gulch State Parks and Jug Handle State Reserve, thereby linking 60,000 acres of parks, hundreds of miles of hiking, biking, and equestrian trails, and critical corridors for wildlife. That means protection for all sorts of stellar denizens, including river otters, black bears, beavers, mountain lions, and bobcats, plus 130 species of birds, including spotted owls, golden and bald eagles, herons, and ospreys. The Big River portion alone will leave intact a swath of fir and redwood forests, 50 miles of river and tributaries, 1,500 acres of wetlands, and the longest undeveloped and heretofore unprotected estuary in northern California. It promises an inland alternative for visitors who make the three-hour drive from San Francisco to behold the Mendocino area's grand seaside scenery: magnificent cliffs, roaring surf, solitary beaches.

And it means I get to go for a ride—a sneak preview, actually, of this new playground that will soon be accessible to everyone. I hoist my mount over the gate and start up the Big River Haul Road, which loosely parallels the waterway to the end of its estuary, 8.3 river miles inland. The dirt doubletrack is now a nearly flat mountain-biking and hiking thruway into the new parkland, while four or five steep, technical spur trails lead uphill to the north like off-ramps. Some of these old roads will be decommissioned, but at least one of them will link the Big River with Jackson State Forest, where there's a 300-mile feast of trails to ride and hike. But the Big River Haul Road itself is easy going, and riding it is a leisurely way to survey the new park. All the land I can see is part of it, the north-south boundary marked by steep 800-foot transverse ridges. Inland, the new acquisition extends a couple of miles beyond the end of the estuary. The river winds placidly toward the Pacific between the ridges as it leaves the eelgrass flats, widening to about 100 feet near its mouth. I spot three osprey nests in redwoods above the riverbank and notice one of their tenants doing some fishing for...what? Coho and steelhead both run in the river, but not in the large numbers of yore. Spared the impact of logging, though, they just might stage a comeback.

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