Fort Ord National Monument, Monterey County, California

 Waxing Crescent Moon

I paid my second visit to Fort Ord National Monument yesterday to hike another small segment of its 86 miles of trails.  This time I parked at the Creekside Terrace Trailhead and tried my best to stay on single track trails rather than the wider dirt roads that follow the ridgelines. Some of the single tracks are multi-use (for horses, hikers, and mountain bikers) and some are for hikers only. They are clearly marked, so there shouldn't be any problems as long as people respect each other. I prefer trail walking over road walking, but many of the trails are short connector routes that intersect the long ridge roads. Most of the hikers I encountered were on the ridge routes yesterday. Maybe they feel safer there? 

I saw zero horses and only a few bikes, but there were plenty of walkers out on a sunny, warm, still day. The single tracks are lined with chaparral, with some of them shaded by gnarly old scrub oaks. I spied a few mountain quail and one chubby cottontail rabbit, but the main visible occupants were blue belly lizards, which were darting around all over the place, stopping occasionally to do a few pushups. Those critters are in shape!

Fort Ord was a U.S. Army facility from 1917 to 1994. Millions of soldiers were trained and were deployed from there from World War I through the Vietnam War. The base was decommissioned in 1991 and closed in 1994. Now the National Monument grounds cover 14,650 acres, under the joint auspices of the BLM and the U.S. Army. A little over half of that acreage is still off limits due to the presence of unexploded ordinance and other military contaminants. When remediation efforts are completed, the BLM (and the public) will acquire that land as well. We are very fortunate to have such a choice piece of property preserved for our use here on the $$$$ Central Coast.

On the east side of the park there are beautiful exposures of sandstone bluffs along Trail #30, which begins right at the parking area near a shaded picnic ramada. These bluffs are a fine example of badlands topography formed by differential erosion of the sandstone along the steep cliffs. You can walk right up to them in minutes on the sandy, clean tread. Happily, I only found one piece of trash on my two-hour loop walk - a broken piece of a plastic belt buckle. It is now on its way to the county landfill to sit there with the rest of the plastic junk for hundreds if not thousands of years. 

My imagination tells me that this park is only beginning to reach its potential as a recreation area and natural conservation/education site. My hope is that the damage from the war years can be fully remediated and the land can heal beneath the feet of happy, healthy visitors far into a peaceful future. I am looking forward to many more mornings of soaking in some rays and climbing the gentle, protected  hills so close to home.

Peace, Love, and Preservation,

Jim

#2,022 in 2022

Mileage Update  as of May 1: 667 out of 2,022