Berry Creek Falls Hike
Big Basin Redwood State Park Hike
Date: 08 June 2013
No. of days: Half
Difficulty: Easy
Distance: 9 miles
*Berry Creek Falls Hike on Skyline to Sea Trail (out and back)
Its time yet again, to pen down another fun filled and an exciting hike. This time it was a small group – Mark, Hannah-love, Nate, Jonathan, me, Dana, Abhinav and Jessica. We left the south bay at 8:45am and took the HW85S and then the HW9 to reach the Big Basin redwood state park.
I did have a small adventure by taking the wrong exit at the beginning but managed to find my way eventually. The drive to the park on highway 9 was pretty exciting due to the curvy up-down and narrow road. I was pretty surprised to see so many cars in the parking lot and found parking almost about a mile in the park. We checked the map that we got along with the forest entry and then started on our memorable hike through natural sun protected shaded trail. We took the redwood trail to connect to the Skyline to the Sea trail to Berry Creek Falls. The first memorable pitstop or milestone was the tree with a giant hole, a walk through tree if you would want to call it that. Some photographs there and we were on our way to the falls. It was a lot of fun just to talk to the group and hop around, monkeying all along the way.
At a point, the trail ran parallel to the stream/river along the creek. We decided to play and enjoy our day and so got down to the river. Mark demonstrated a spectacular stunt of a jump and side turn to land on the shore of the stream getting himself pretty wet. We then hopped from stone to stone as I’d imagine men/women would have done ages ago. I liked tight trunking :-P (Tight rope walking but walking across a tree trunk). There you go, I just invented a new term “trunking” :-D We reached the falls at 1:30pm. Ate the food that all of us got and then walked to get closer to the falls. There was a nice observation deck that stood right across the falls providing the observer with uninterrupted view of the entire Berry Creek Falls. We weren’t the ‘normal’ observers. So most of us walked closer to the waterfalls. I found a tree with a nice huge hole through which I would be able to get down to the river’s shore. It was a redwood tree tube from almost middle of the tree to the bottom of the tree through the roots. We all jumped in. I was literally jumping up and down like a small kid with a lollypop. It was a lot of fun when first Mark went into the water to get under the falls. Then it was Jonathan and then finally it was me. I was too tempted to take a pass. I instantly remembered India – the Western Ghats. Almost all treks evidently involved getting into the water, be it a river, a pond or waterfalls. The water was just right to have super fun. We dried up, took a lot more pictures and then started our return hike at about 3:00 pm and reached the headquarters of the park at 5:30pm. After a brief break, we decided to head to Mountain View for dinner. On the way, we stopped at a vista point and then reached Mountain View at 7:45pm. We had dinner at St. Stephen’s green and went home after that. Oh yeah, how can I forget. I had forgotten how to get back to where I parked my car and to top it off, I was pretty adamant that Abhinav was completely wrong about the location of the car. Haha. It turned out to be exactly where he said it ought to be.
Yet another memorable hike with some really great people.
Picasa Web link here