Length of hike: About 7 miles
Difficulty: Moderate
Best time: Spring, early summer, and fall
Highlights: Wildflowers, waterfall, PlanetWalk, a Glorious Fourth
To get there: From the town of Sonoma or the city of Santa Rosa, take State Highway 12 to Kenwood. Turn east on Adobe Canyon Road and follow the narrow winding lane about three miles to the entrance kiosk of the park. The day use fee is $6.00 per car. The parking lot is straight ahead up the hill past the kiosk.
The trail: A century ago our foremothers bought their sugar in blocks known as loaves. The sugarloaf was often shaped like a cone with a gently rounded point. Certain geographic features remind us of this shape—Sugarloaf Mountain on Guanabara Bay, a landmark of Rio de Janeiro, is probably the best known. Sonoma County has its own sugarloaf and it has given its name to a unique state park.
Perched on the steep ridge separating Napa and Sonoma counties, Sugarloaf Ridge State Park appears at first to be merely a typical slice of California meadows and forest. Its grassy hilltops and chaparral slopes are fringed with oak woodland—a mix of oaks, Douglas fir, gray pine, California buckeye, big-leaf maple, California bay laurel, and madrone. Several creeks offer cool corridors of redwood, alder, and willow.
But this state park offers much more than a course in California Landscape 101 and is full of surprises. Modest Sonoma Creek, which follows Adobe Canyon Road and runs through the family campground, is a trout stream. A seasonal waterfall is worth a visit in rainy months. Park in the unsigned wide space on the left side of the road near the top of the canyon; the trail begins on the right side of the road. The leaf-strewn path plunges steeply downhill for a little less than half a mile through damp, shady forest—a splendid place to see lichens, mosses, ferns, and liverworts growing on the rocks and trees. The trail ends up at the bottom of the waterfall where white water tumbles over huge boulders.
During the summer, the waterfall shrinks to a trickle behind the rocks, but the park offers, as a substitute, an unusual way to celebrate the Fourth of July. Park docents Dave and Bill lead an annual trek to the top of 2,729-foot Bald Mountain to view fireworks from all over the northern Bay Area. I went for the first time in 2004. About thirty-five of us gathered at the stables and started hiking at 7 p.m. We took Lower Bald Mountain Trail to Vista and then scrambled up narrow, rocky Headwaters Trail to reach the summit at about 9 o’clock. The sun had set, but the sky still held too much light for fireworks, so we settled in to munch on the snacks we had brought with us and to watch the stars pop out.
Santa Rosa’s Fairgrounds, in the middle distance to the northwest, started the light show. Soon we could see tiny bursts of red, yellow, blue, green, and white far to the south on San Francisco’s Marina and along the East Bay. Then nearby Napa began its display, followed by the town of Sonoma, across the ridge a bit to the southwest. We oohed and aahed and wrapped our parkas closer against the encroaching chill. Ten o’clock came and went, but we could not leave without seeing the best show of all. To the east, directly below Bald Mountain, lies St. Helena, a small burg with a big attitude. Its fireworks show was the last to start and the shortest in duration—fifteen to twenty minutes—but it was the most original, with bursts and swirls we had not seen all evening. We shouted and cheered and agreed it was a spectacular finale.
The pyrotechnics were over, but our night’s adventure was only just beginning. We now had to walk down the mountain in the dark. At the top, the path is loose and gravely and quite steep. I was glad I had brought my little flashlight and my hiking stick, but still the going was slow. After half a mile, the rest of the way was on an old, uneven asphalt road, now part of the Bay Area Ridge Trail. I had hiked this route many times, but in the dark it was a new experience of treacherous cracks, clots of weeds, and gaping potholes. The stars glittered in the midnight sky but gave us no guidance. We strung out in small groups, and whispers and laughter mixed with the sounds of insects and night birds. An intrepid few led the way with no lights—they were hunting for glowworms. These tiny creatures cast a bright, yellowish white light that you can’t see except in total darkness. The hunters located the worms in half a dozen places by the side of the trail and alerted the rest of us following when to douse our lights. We were spellbound—the glow was so alive, but when we turned on our flashlights, we saw only soil and dry leaves.
Independence Day is the only time night hiking is sanctioned in the park. The first Fourth hike did not require sign-ups and more than 200 people showed up. Park authorities now limit the group to no more than forty. If you want to take this hike, sign up well ahead of time.
Day hikes on the twenty-one miles of park trails are as interesting as a nighttime excursion. In spring and early summer, wildflowers abound. The visitor center, open Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., has a fat book of color photos of park flowers and this helps identify many of them. Pink clarkias are especially plentiful and I have spotted five different species. I also find brodiaeas, vetches, woolly sunflowers, pink and white clovers, blue-eyed grass, thistles, sticky monkey flowers, and a lovely deep red pea. Poison oak abounds, and I have to look out for its clusters of three lethal leaves.
In June, before the weather gets hot, I like to take the path from the parking lot and follow it through oak woodland to Lower Bald Mountain Trail. From there I can look down into the Oakmont development at the southeastern end of Santa Rosa. Above the houses, the deep forest of Annadel State Park climbs up Bennett Mountain. Across the canyon an improbable vineyard flows down the steep slopes just below Little Bald Mountain. Along here I often hear the buzzing call of spotted towhees in the dense chamise and baccharis of classic chaparral.
I turn right at Vista Trail, which is woodsy at first and has no grand views. A spring spills out onto the track amid a crowd of chain ferns—long chains of sora, which contain the fern spores, line the undersides of the huge fronds of a plant that goes back to dinosaur days. Soon the landscape opens up to mountains that, on a really clear day, seem to climb over each other on their way east to the Sierra Nevada. Mount Tamalpais sleeps to the southwest in Marin County, and the Coast Ranges march off to the ocean in the west.
A stony outcrop bears the name Indian Rock, but I have heard there is no known special association of Native Americans with this feature. However, I find it pleasant to sit here to eat lunch and contemplate the faraway mountains; it seems likely that the Wappos, early inhabitants of this region, did so too. As Vista Trail roller-coasters across the mountainside, hordes of brodiaeas and clarkias come into view, almost about the same time Mt. Diablo, in Contra Costa County, materializes on the southern horizon. Yellow Calochortus luteus and white linanthus, as well as several species of yellow composites, nestle in the dried grasses.
The route then dives down toward its junction with Gray Pine Trail. The track is steep and rocky, muddy and slippery in wet months, but worth the effort for the butter-yellow globe lilies that gather here in early summer. Some years I find tons of purple vetch at the bottom with golden poppies and orange butterflies.
Gray Pine crosses a get-your-feet-wet stream and then joins Meadow Trail. As I turn to the right, I find that I have landed in the middle of the solar system. I am now on PlanetWalk. Saturn is around the bend ahead; Uranus is behind me quite a distance away on Brushy Peaks Trail.
The park's Robert Ferguson Observatory, the largest observatory dedicated to public viewing and education in the western United States, has marked out this planetary scale model. Although I can picture the solar system and the planets in their orbits around the sun, I have trouble visualizing just how small the planets are, compared to the immensity of the sun, and imagining the vast empty spaces between the planets. The folks at Ferguson who created PlanetWalk have shrunk our solar system more than 2,360,000,000 times so it fits inside the park and I can conveniently walk to all the planets. Trailside signs illustrate each planet’s scale in the solar system.
Soon I come out of the shadowy woods and into golden meadows and hillsides. I pass Jupiter and Mars and come to the observatory building where I find signboards that explain PlanetWalk and point to Earth, Mercury, and Venus huddled together in the group campground.
The road meanders to the parking lot past the stables, the residence of the camp host—with red roses climbing the porch lattice—and the family campground amphitheater. On a weekday in June, in two and a half hours, about seven miles, I met only three other hikers. On PlanetWalk, every step I took crossed close to a million miles of empty space. To walk at the speed of light, I only had to take one step every five seconds.
