Headed for Santa Cruz? Wilder Ranch State Park offers myriad ways to play, from history tours to hiking trails and a Fern Grotto.
Where Chinquapin Trail meets Eucalyptus Loop in Wilder Ranch State Park, gorgeous meadows roll down toward the Pacific Ocean and a skeleton grove of long-dead trees beloved by woodpeckers rises above one of California’s best picnic spots — complete with wooden tables.
“Wilder is not your typical state park,” says Eric Henze, author of a 2015 guidebook to the park. “It is a gem that sparkles from every direction.” The nonprofit Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks runs free guided coastal walks highlighting the flora, fauna and geology of the coastal bluffs, where millions of years of waves and tides have sculpted clefts, channels, arches and caves into the coast’s 20-million-year-old Santa Cruz Mudstone rock.
On weekends, free, hour-long tours of the ranch grounds — a complex of historic buildings in a shallow valley between the hills and ocean — bring to life the period more than a century ago, when the property was owned by inveterate tinkerer Deloss Wilder, known as D.D., who had come to California from Connecticut chasing Gold Rush riches and met with modest success. Tour highlights include D.D.
The Uypi conducted controlled burns to promote growth of some plants — like fire-dependent hazelnut — and deter growth of others, to enhance habitats for deer, elk and birds and boost their own food and medicine supplies. Uypi people restored salmon-spawning beds and stream entrances after storms, Lopez says.
Historical lore indicates Bolcoff ran a side hustle along the coast at a spot in the park known today as Sand Plant Beach, where he helped traders skirt Mexico’s import taxes into the Monterey Bay area. “For a small fee, Bolcoff would allow smugglers to bring in their goods via rowboats up the creek under cover of darkness,” Henze writes in “The Complete Guide to Wilder Ranch State Park.”
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