Walking a New Path

My weekly column is now about paths and streets and tracks, caminos and chemins – finding a way.  Here’s one about a new trail in an old park.

The Lace Lichen Trail is the first new trail in 75 years at Point Lobos State Reserve, near where I live on the Monterey Peninsula. 

These 400 acres of cypress and pine forest along a stunning rocky oceanside promontory first became an official state park in 1933, but long before then trails and paths already snaked through the landscape.  Deer had formed windy ways in the woods, and the Ohlone native Americans had cleared away routes so they could gather sage and abalone.  19^th century visitors to Point Lobos, smugglers and artists and picnickers, cleared back more branches and dug out steps down to the sea. 

By the 1950’s park staff and volunteers had formalized these old tracks into trails named for their location -  North Shore, Carmelo Meadow, Bird Island, Cypress Grove.

Last year, as attendance at what has been called “the greatest meeting of land and sea” grew to nearly a million visitors a year, they decided to add the first new official trail in nearly a century.

I walked the new Lace Lichen Trail for the first time with my adult children Owen and Norah, at their invitation.  It was the day before Norah’s wedding.  Talk about a new path!

If our lives are journeys, (“the way,” “the pilgrim route,” “a long strange trip”) it’s a special day when we walk a new path.   This was a special day.

I say that this Lace Lichen Trail is new, but the first part is actually an old trail rebuilt.  Before, walkers had to watch out for lots of roots and bumps and narrow spots. You had to be careful going down and up the winter creek beds. Now it’s so hard and smooth and wide, it’s barely recognizable as the old trail.  With its new form, and some little bridges over the gullies, it now meets ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) standards..  For the first time, people in wheelchairs can move with ease through this mysterious forest, where feathery lace lichen droops from the branches of Monterey pine.

The trail is better for parents too – they can now smoothly wheel their kids in strollers, as the smell of the sea and the roar of the waves beckons them westward. 

And every walker is much safer than before, since the trail, which used to be shorter, now extends with brand new sections all the way from the park entrance to the sea, where you used to have to walk along a road.

If life - and marriage - are journeys, we surely know that those paths have bumps, gullies, narrow spots and some danger, if only from distracted drivers. 

So it is definitely a blessing when folks open up a new path for us.  It’s a gift to find a route that welcomes us all, that is safer, and has bridges.  A way for wanderings and discovery, whatever our age or ability.

Thanks, California taxpayers and Point Lobos Foundation for this blessed new path.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter