King Peak and the Lost Coast Trail

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At the trailhead

This was my first trip up to the Lost Coast. A crew from SLO (me, Randy, Juli, Brielle, Pat, Greg, Tracie) made the ~8 hour drive up in two parts. Part one involved driving up Thursday after work to just north of Santa Rosa, camping at the Russian River RV Resort. Since we got there after "quiet hours", they made us sleep outside of the campground along the road on a small grassy patch. We got up early the next morning and made the second leg of the drive to the Shelter Cove Ranger Station to pick up permits. From there we took the dirt road to the Saddle Mountain trailhead where we planned to start our trip. Greg's Toyota Matrix made it despite warnings from the ranger. I think it took around an hour to get from the ranger station to the trailhead. 

King Peak summit

We started hiking around noon planning to summit King Peak then find a spot to camp just on the other side of the peak. King Peak is the highest point in the area and the namesake of the King Peak Wilderness. After about an hour and a half of hiking we caught our first views of the peak to the north. It still looked pretty far off, and there was quite a bit of smoke to the east. 1.5 hours later we were on top and a few hours after that we had found a place to make camp near a barely running creek at Maple Camp. We hiked about 7 miles total that day. 

Descending toward the beach

The next morning we were up and hiking by 9:30 planning to get all the way down to the ocean, about 10 miles away. We descended about 3,000' total and stopped for lunch at Bear Hollow Camp. We popped out at the beach around 3:00 p.m., 5.5 hours from camp. Since we got there relatively early, we were able to grab a great campsite right along the creek near the ocean. 

Views from the descent

View from camp

Navigating the coastline at high tide

The following a.m. we were up and moving around 8:30 so that we could get past the cliffier parts of the trail before high tide. After a few miles of beach hiking, we found the junction with the Buck Creek trail. It took us about 2 hours to get to that point from camp. Greg warned us that guidebooks rated the Buck Creek trail as the steepest maintained trail in CA. It didn't disappoint. We climbed more than 2,000' in just a few miles but eventually made it back to the old 4WD trail near Saddle Mountain trailhead 4 hours from camp. We got back to the cars 30 minutes after that then made the long drive back to SLO.

Beach hiking

More beach hiking

More beach hiking

This is the point where we turned inland from the beach