Bayview Trail—Sky Trail—Fire Lane Trail—Laguna Trail
Length of hike: About 8 miles (3.5 to 4 hours)
Difficulty: Moderate
Highlight: Aftermath of a wildfire
Best time: February through May for wildflowers
How to get there: From Shoreline Highway (California Highway 1), just south of the town of Point Reyes Station, take Sir Francis Drake Boulevard toward Inverness. At the big curve to the right, turn sharply left onto Bear Valley Road. Take the third right, Limantour Road, and follow it six miles into Point Reyes National Seashore to the bottom of a long, steep hill and turn left at the sign for Point Reyes Hostel. Drive to the signed parking area for Laguna Trailhead. You’ll find no restrooms or drinking water anywhere along this route. If you avail yourself of the natural facilities, be aware that this area teems with poison oak and stinging nettle.
The trail: This loop hike passes through the center of the wildfire of October 1995 that started on Mount Vision and burned 17 percent of the park as well as forty-five homes along Inverness Ridge. Aside from the loss of property, the Vision Fire had an enormous impact—in the burned areas more than 70 percent of the vegetation was destroyed. I hiked along Sky Trail as soon as I could get back into the park and was shocked to see many stretches of trail reduced to ash and tall black sticks. Even then, out of misshapen charred stumps emerged living green—I looked closer and recognized the hilted fronds of sword ferns. Still, I remained inconsolable over the damage done not only by the fire but also by the bulldozers—to make a firebreak, firefighters plowed a good part of Sky Trail, trashing the hushed cathedral forest.
Although the natural recovery process and Park Service rehabilitation efforts began even before firefighters extinguished the last hot spots, the understory was gone, the ground was gray with soot, and you couldn’t get the acrid smell out of your nostrils. Black carcasses of once-magnificent Douglas firs disfigured the hills as far as you could see.
But by spring great crops of poison hemlock thrust their flat, white flower clusters eight or nine feet high. The next spring cow parsnip’s white umbels and large, lobed leaves dominated the landscape, crowding the shoulders of hikers and cascading down denuded slopes like bridal veils. Normally waist high, blue bush lupine grew more than six feet tall. Brown voles, usually neither seen nor heard, darted back and forth across the trails and scrabbled in the new underbrush. The first summer after the fire I came across a man in government khaki with a clipboard, documenting a population explosion of these tiny rodents.
To begin this hike, walk back past the hostel to Limantour Road and cross to the dirt track that leads to Muddy Hollow. Go around the metal gate, boulder-hop across the small creek fringed with watercress and young alders, and turn right at the Bayview Trail sign.
Along lower Bayview, a young flora of grasses, coyote bush, buckeye, elderberry, bay, blackberry, and hazelnut covers the low hills and presses close to the trail. Shy forest birds call out from the leaves; woodpeckers drum invisibly on burnt snags. You might glimpse deer grazing down in the creek crowded with new alders or little brown bunnies sitting as motionless as Easter toys along the verge.
Cross a narrow plank bridge and follow the creek closely for a few minutes. Formerly a deeply shaded path, this part of the trail is now open to the sky, but the alders are growing fast in and along the water. Elderberry bushes and grasses vie for space; blackberry vines insinuate everywhere, mounding high over dead stumps. Along here in the second year after the fire, I met a young woman in a hard hat lugging a chain saw. The Park Service had hired her to cut down fire-weakened trees that were finally falling and becoming a hazard to hikers and horseback riders.
At the fork, keep to the right past a weathered wooden bench. After a hairpin turn, you climb for a while through a mad jumble that seems a compendium of a field guide—monkey flower, bracken and sword ferns, thimbleberry, coffeeberry, pearly everlasting, pennyroyal, hedge-nettle, vetch, and clover are some plants you might be able to name. This tunnel of shrubs and vines is fragrant with a scent somewhat like the allspice I keep in my kitchen, but the aroma remains ephemeral—impossible to describe or to locate the source.
The trail becomes steeper and used to look out over grassy hills tumbling down to the sea, but pinelings have cropped up to screen the view. Bishop pines, once widespread, are now found only in isolated populations along the Pacific Coast. One of the most extensive groves occurs at the north end of the Seashore—the heart of the fire. The cones of these conifers release their seeds only after intense heat melts the resin. With no fire here for more than sixty years, the forest had grown old and scraggly. A new population of Bishops is burgeoning among the parent skeletons. They grow close to the trail, offering a chance to check out the needles, which are in bundles of two.
As the terrain levels off, you enter a long corridor of fifteen- to twenty-foot-tall ceanothus, in April and May covered with blue blossoms. Close up, the tiny flowers that make up the long slender clusters have a faintly sweet odor, but if you push your nose right into them, they smell like dirty socks—some people claim.
Look to the left across the ravine at the huge houses that were built on Inverness Ridge after the fire. With no forest to soften their straight lines, they look sad and out of place. Climbing to the ridge top glint the silver bones of a Douglas fir forest.
At the Bayview Trail parking area, cross Limantour Road to a scruffy continuation of the trail, now a nursery for hundreds of baby pines. Soon you arrive at the junction of Laguna and Bayview trails. Here you could decide to go down Laguna and end up in forty minutes at the ranger’s house near where you parked your car. But there is plenty of time left in the day and more good hiking ahead, so remain on Bayview to Sky Trail. In spring this scant mile blazes with electric blue forget-me-nots. Nurseries often carry this modest plant—it readily reseeds and will light up your garden from February to May.
At the Sky Trail parking lot a service road takes off through the forest. Huckleberry bushes grow here and in some years yield a good crop of purple-black pearl-size berries—it’s legal to take away two quarts. The deep greens of sword fern, Douglas fir, and blackberries serve as a backdrop for the lively chartreuse of new elderberry. From the tangle of shrubbery you can hear the nasal honking of the white-breasted nuthatch.
The fire just licked at the land along here and only a few blackened tree trunks punctuate the forest. The understory grows lush as the trail winds up into cool, dense fir. After a short rise, look for the sign for Fire Lane Trail on your right.
Fire Lane is a narrow, intimate trail. Winter wrens and scrub jays scuttle about in the mélange of huckleberries, blackberries, ferns, and lupine; the only other sound is the wind. The forest gives way occasionally to a dizzying vista of the broad sands of Limantour Spit and across Drakes Bay to Chimney Rock. Sunny days the Farallon Islands ride at anchor in the Pacific about twenty-eight miles to the southwest.
Walking along this narrow ridge, look back over your right shoulder to the country you just tramped through, with still many traces of the burn. The hostel comes into view just below Limantour Road—these rustic buildings were saved from the flames.
Ceanothus arching over the trail, dense alleys of pines, bright red Indian paintbrush flowers, cool shade, the twittering of secretive birds, and a fresh, spicy aroma—Fire Lane Trail rates as one of the most enchanting rambles through Point Reyes. Although this is a mostly downhill trail, toward the bottom you must endure six discouragingly steep—but short—upslopes. As you get closer to the ocean, many more black stick-armies march up the southward hills to the horizon, bleak silhouettes against the sky showing where the fire raged toward Kelham Beach.
At last a rocky plateau spills out to a panorama of the spit, the ocean, and the misty beyond of Asia. Then, a long, eroded ski run of a track takes you down to the junction with Laguna Trail. Turn right and continue to your car, about three-quarters of a mile.
I miss the long row of graceful alders that once grew along here, their straight gray trunks patched with lichen. Then I see horsetails, relicts from dinosaur times, flourishing among rampant blackberries. . . . Life insists.
