The Banks Of The Navarro

Step aboard the wayback machine for another trip to Anderson Valley of my childhood in the late 1950s and 1960s — and in this case, into the 1970s. I begin with an apology for taking license with the 19th century ballad “Banks of the Ohio” in the title and with reassurance that this reminiscence does not — unlike the song — include a murder.

I read with interest the Anderson Valley Land Trust’s recent Navarro River Water Trail Assessment initiative. Preliminary findings suggest a surprising amount of visitation to the handful of Navarro River access points. The Navarro River has always attracted visitors of one sort or another; swimmers, picnickers, fishermen, campers and more. I enjoyed the Navarro in all those ways as a child and young adult, but perhaps the most unusual was as a backpacker, on a trip we called the Ocean Hike.

Soon after El Rancho Navarro — my parents’ summer camp near Philo — showed signs of becoming a viable business, someone came up with the idea we could hike from camp all the way to the Pacific Ocean. If we followed the Navarro River, the hike would be approximately 30 miles and would take two or three days to complete. The route would run primarily through timber company land. The Ocean Hike idea proved so alluring, we gave it a try. It became one of the enduring traditions of camp; a trip we took — two or three counselors and as many as 15 kids — two or three times a summer for the next 20 years.

I must have been about 12-years-old the first time I took the Ocean Hike. The route was fairly straight-forward; through Hendy Woods State Park, then a mix of land traverses and river walking until we hit timber company land, and finally a trek along logging roads and Highway 128 to Navarro-by-the-Sea. It sounds pretty easy. In reality, it wasn’t easy at all.

The route evolved over the years. One modification near Navarro-by-the-Sea came after an encounter with an unhappy local resident bearing a shotgun. A couple of others were the result of not wanting to hike on the narrow — and believe me, it is really narrow bordering on non-existent — shoulder of Highway 128 west of Navarro, which those days carried lots of loaded logging trucks traveling at breakneck speeds.

Navigation also proved interesting. While the logging roads made for easy hiking, the Navarro River’s convoluted watercourse made pinpointing one’s location an art form. I remember pulling out my compass on one trip and discovering that — though the Navarro flows generally west northwest — we were walking due south!

Campsites varied. Overnight stays at Paul M. Dimmick State Park (now Campground) alternated with rustic layovers at places like Cape Horn (about halfway between Hendy Woods and Dimmick) and Iron Bridge (about halfway between Dimmick and Navarro-by-the-Sea).

Then there was the matter of fresh water. With the exception of the Navarro River itself, there wasn’t much. Yes, topographic maps show a bunch of little creeks that flow into the Navarro River. In reality, almost all of them are seasonal and go dry by summer. There was a seep near Cape Horn that yielded about a gallon every 20 minutes. There was a nice spring a few miles southeast of Dimmick so icy cold I believed the water somehow worked its way down from the Sierra Nevada. Consequently, provisions for every hike included several full one-gallon water bottles, each one guaranteed to make a heavy backpack — the evolution to lightweight equipment then was in its infancy — even heavier.

Even if we didn’t camp at Dimmick, we always stopped there to refill our water bottles. It also was our emergency pull-out for campers who — despite a series of warm-up hikes — couldn’t make it to the ocean. In the early days, there was a pay phone (remember those?) from which we could call for help.

On one hike I led in the 1970s, I had two children with badly blistered feet that needed to be taken back to camp, so I went to the pay phone only to discover it had been removed — all that remained was the cement slab! I ended up hitching a ride to Navarro (which still had a pay phone, thank goodness) with the quintessential hippie couple, complete with Volkswagen microbus, who thought I was a park ranger.

The hike may sound like a long trudge, but it offered plenty of diversions. The forests back then primarily were medium-sized, second-growth redwood; beautiful and cool. There was an old, falling down logging cabin tucked back into the forest with a rusted hulk of a car from 1930s next to it (how it got there was a mystery — the logging road was across the river) and falling-apart newspapers from the early 1950s inside. Perhaps the largest untouched downed redwood in Anderson Valley outside of Hendy Woods could be found along the way. There were a few spots to play in the river, though with 30 miles to cover, there wasn’t a lot of time to do it. And there was the ocean at Navarro-by-the-Sea; beautiful, powerful and with lots of beach to comb — a true reward for completing the hike.

There also were a few risks. Not wild animals and not dangerous terrain so much as nasty plants. Poison oak we knew and avoided. Deadly foxglove was pretty but obvious. The one that got me was stinging nettles; I blithely walked into a patch in shorts on one hike — the result was a nasty bunch of welts on my legs that itched like hell and didn’t go down for three hours. Not fun.

In all, I probably took the Ocean Hike seven or eight times, including at least one round-trip. In addition to the usual route, campers also took a couple of Ocean Hikes that went cross country to Elk via the old Greenwood railroad right-of-way — but I somehow missed those.

That was then and this is now. Neighbors are a bit less neighborly. Old orchards with low fences are now young vineyards with deer fences. Logging returned to the middle reach of Navarro River in the late 1970s and 1980s. Navarro River flow is less than in the 1960s and early 1970s for a variety of reasons (hint to Anderson Valley Wine Association — a valley-wide initiative to increase river flows through summer and autumn, carefully implemented and deftly promoted, would benefit everyone, including your members) and water quality isn’t as high. While a hike to the ocean is certainly still possible today, it wouldn’t be as I remember. Still, it might be fun to do it one more time.