JPG Magazine: Stories: Photo Essay: The Silverpeak Wilderness

The Silverpeak Wilderness

By Aaron Snyder

21 April 2008

In the middle of this semester, I headed out with a group of 10 people from my Backpacking and Hiking class for a 3 day backpacking trip down to this area called the "Silverpeak Wilderness" I didn't know anything about where we were going, just that it was 2 hours south of Monterey, California, and probably by Big Sur somewhere, and that it was in the larger "Ventana Wilderness".

Of course, we got lost trying to meet up with the other car that was driving down there, so we headed south, hoping to encounter them on the way down, and sure enough we did. We pulled our car out to the side of Highway 1, and unloaded our gear.

I looked up and saw a trail switchbacking back and fourth up a huge hill.

"Is that where were going?" I asked.

"Yup."

I realized then that I probably should have trained more for this trip.

An hour later, we were at the top of that hill I was looking up at, about 1000 ft elevation gain in less than a mile, overlooking the ocean from the top of a ridge that looked for miles in every direction. The ocean was shimmering with late afternoon sun, and the sun was following us into the valleys, as we pushed our way through the overgrown forest.

I looked ahead and the trail was leaving the ridge, and diving into the brush, thousand foot drops into a creek that supposedly was rushing down through the valley, out of sight. At times we were walking on mattes of poison oak and brush.

After about an hour, we reached our first trail camp.The trail camps are small, but well equipped. Most have a fire ring and a grill over the fire ring. There are usually some sort of logs also, serving as seats, places to place your food, etc. However, as was stated before, they are small, probably not having room for more than 2 tents. There was a huge meadow, with thousands of Lupins and other little flowers pushing their way though the grass.

Turns out, photographic opportunities abound in Ventana. We went in the spring, and found that many different types of wildflowers were blooming. The hills were green with different varieties of plants, freshly watered and coming back for summer. The creeks were all flowing, with rain about 2 weekends before we came.

A really interesting thing was happening this year also. All the yucca (actually a lily if I'm remembering correctly) were blooming. Apparently, the plant only blooms once in its entire lifetime and then dies. However, they like to hang out in clusters, so one will die, and another one will bloom and take its place. Its an amazing plant because it's blooms look like something out of Narnia or something like that. 20 foot tall stalks with flowers slowly blooming their way up to the top.

After you break though the desert like scrub brush, you get to the serpentine fields, a deadly concoction of magnesium and asbestos, this small, sticky-feeling stone makes it incredibly difficult for anything to survive up here, unless its really well adapted. Another amazing thing about these stones is that they are slowly turning into that beautiful green stone we know as jade, and because of that, there is a lot of green jade chunks just hanging out!

After an amazingly challenging 3 days we left down the same trail we came, with new friends, new experiences, and a new outlook on life (at least for me.)

The Silverpeak Wilderness is worth the visit for photographers, nature lovers, avid hikers, backpackers or anyone who just loves being out and appreciates the beauty that is around you.