CALIFORNIA
El Corte De Madera Creek Preserve
It’s been a bit of a long weekend so I’ll be keeping this short. Corte de Madera Creek Preserve is open to hiking with proper social distancing. The bathrooms were closed but we didn’t end up needing them. This is another park that’s right off Skyline in Woodside, so very conveniently located. There’s actually about 30 miles of hiking trail. In my opinion the trails are pretty confusing and the map is pretty cramped. We were hiking in the bottom half but Ana said the hiking in the top half is more interesting.
We started at the parking lot at Sierra Moreno and decided to make our way to the point of interest marked on the map - the old growth redwood. I think we took Oljion to Steam Donkey to Gordon Mill to Crosscut to Timberview. Whew. Yeah, lots of trails! The signs are pretty consistent throughout, you just have to have a good idea of where you’re trying to go.
These trails had a LOT of mountain bikers on it, and was pretty standard Santa Cruz mountains fair.
We got an insanely late start - nearly 3 PM! And we were supposed to get rain around 6 PM. So that also contributed to us picking a relatively short route. We headed to the big ole redwood and immediately turned around to get back to the car.
It’s pretty big! Humans for scale! You can’t really get a good picture or even really see the top in person. According to the trail map logging in the redwood forest petered out in the early 1900’s. This tree is one of the only trees from before that.
From the tree it was my idea to take Timberview Trail all the way back to Skyline where I thought it would be simple to skirt alongside the road to get back to where we parked. I was WRONG! Somehow we got lost in the small twisty trails near Skyline and we ended up walking about 0.3 miles on the road itself to get back in time to get food at Alice’s. Walking along Skyline is super sketch and I do not recommend this!
Overall I’d estimate from the trail map and my fitbit that the hike clocked in at around 6 miles!
But I did get my BMW burger from Alice’s and it was 100% worth it!