Jenner Headlands preserve takes hikers to breathtaking heights

The smart plants who’ve adapted here, like the redwoods, have precise tricks and clever features to capture precious water drops from the fogs that waft over. Others rely on deep tap roots, reaching tens of feet to find subsurface water trapped in the rock, until that too is gone. Then the waiting begins. Along the trail, in the mid-day heat, even the multitudes of birds are hunkered down.

Up on Pole Mountain, where the fog doesn’t reach, the shrubs and trees look lush, despite the dry and heat of fall. The oaks here grow incredibly tall and stout, and still retain deep green leaves, unlike many of their cousins in Sonoma County’s lower, inland hills.

The reason has to do with the way the mountain affects the weather. Storms in winter sweep wet from Russia across the Pacific, and down from Alaska, and if the blocking high-pressure ridge does not form, they run aground here. When they do, the moisture-heavy clouds are pushed by winds up the steep face of the mountain, chilling as they rise, higher and higher. As they do, droplets form, and they release their rain. And as a result, in an average year, the mountaintop receives 30 inches more water than the coastal bluffs below.

Originally, the land along the ocean bluffs here were coastal prairie, grazed by herds of wildlife. Upslope they were backed by ancient forests, stands of redwoods and firs, hardwood oaks, madrone and bay. After Russian trappers, European and American migrants arrived, the wildlands were converted to ranches. The vast forests of redwood were heavily harvested, and clearcut as recently as the ’60s.

Human activities still deeply mark the land in the preserve. Much of the native tapestry of forests was replaced by pasture for grazing sheep and cattle that took a heavy toll. Many of the native California grasses and prairie and the wild streams were degraded or overtaken by foreign, imported species. The familiar blonde hillsides here, windblown wild oats that go emerald green in the spring, are foreigners, that arrived on the hooves of imported livestock. Feral pigs, originally introduced from Asia and Europe, root and ruin here ,too. Of the five major streams that drain the preserve, few stretches escaped heavy silting from lumber roads, cattle damage and the loss of steelhead and salmon.

But resilient remnants of the wild habitats remain. Once fenced off behind locked gates, for the first time in a century they can now be discovered and enjoyed by hikers. Towering redwood groves still offer deep shade and quiet. Higher up, in the thinner soils of the highlands, gray-barked giant oaks spread tremendous limbs. Creeks sustain trees and wildlife in their canyons. Wildflowers erupt in color on hillsides in the spring.

Under the protection of the new Preserve’s detailed management plan, the native plants and wildlife species — black bears and bats, mountain lions and badgers, and hundreds of species more — will be given a chance to revive and re-establish.

In September, the Monarch butterflies respond to some inner clock and flutter steadily south for hundreds of miles, and as they pass through the preserve, some pause in the trees there. We spotted a few on the wing, orange and black against the sky. They’ve been coming long before we arrived: the cycle of life on the Headlands stretches back millions of years. It’s a distinct and rich place, shaped by a unique confluence of sea, land and air.

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