SAN JOSE, Calif. — Where Chinquapin Trail meets Eucalyptus Loop in Wilder Ranch State Park, gorgeous meadows roll down toward the Pacific Ocean and a skeleton grove of long-dead trees beloved by woodpeckers rises above one of California’s best picnic spots — complete with wooden tables.
The Santa Cruz-area park offers world-class travel by foot or bicycle through epic coastal landscapes and a fascinating, and at times troubling, history.
Follow the coastline for classic Northern California ocean vistas and hidden surprises. Hit the hillsides to wander through tall-grass meadows overlooking the Pacific’s golden glitter. Or, a little higher up, wind your way through shaded forests of redwood, ferns and Douglas fir and sun-dappled glades among the oaks. If you have the time and energy, mix them all together in one trip.
“Wilder is not your typical state park,” says Eric Henze, author of a 2015 guidebook to the park. “It is a gem that sparkles from every direction.”
The park area’s human history goes back more than 10,000 years to the arrival of Indigenous people, through the cruelty and corruption of Spanish and Mexican colonization to dairy and beef ranching by generations of the Wilder family. Some scenes from that timeline still exist: the Victorian home that ranch founder Deloss Wilder built for his son, Melvin. The 1859 Gothic Revival farmhouse, where famed Western author Zane Grey used to gobble his grub as a ranch hand. And the red tile-roofed adobe that once belonged to a Russian-Mexican dairyman and colonial bureaucrat who allegedly ran a smuggling grift at a nearby beach.
Go further back, and the history fades, the lives and complex landscape cultivation of the Uypi tribe of Ohlone people mostly erased by colonization. Still, when you hike or bike in Wilder, you travel in their footsteps, on paths through meadow and forest trodden for millennia.
Several entry points and 35 miles of trails make it easy to pick a trip in Wilder Ranch that delivers never-ending beauty, historical discovery or heart-pumping exercise — or all three. You may spot deer and turkeys in the meadows or, if you’re lucky, a bobcat. Cottontail rabbits, quail and lizards scurry into poison oak and manzanita, hawks and turkey vultures flap and glide overhead. Aromatic bay trees scent the forest, where the squawks of Steller’s jays and shrieks of acorn woodpeckers resound. By the water, seals lounge on strangely contoured coastal shelves striped with the sediments of time and upended by the ultra-slow-motion collision of Earth’s tectonic plates.
The nonprofit Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks runs free guided coastal walks highlighting the flora, fauna and geology of the coastal bluffs, where millions of years of waves and tides have sculpted clefts, channels, arches and caves into the coast’s 20-million-year-old Santa Cruz Mudstone rock. Guided coastal bird-watching rambles, also free, provide a chance to see and learn about the hawks overhead, the wrens in the trailside scrub, the leggy oystercatchers poking their long red bills into tide pools and the cormorants and pelicans chasing fish.
Designation of the near-offshore and tidal-zone areas as a state marine reserve has helped make tide-pooling and marine-mammal viewing especially fruitful from the Wilder Ranch coastline — colorful sea anemones and sea stars reward visitors at low tide, and sea otters float offshore, smashing shellfish open on their chests. The park is one of the region’s best whale-watching locations, particularly for the annual migration of gray whales from December to April.
On weekends, free, hour-long tours of the ranch grounds — a complex of historic buildings in a shallow valley between the hills and ocean — bring to life the period more than a century ago, when the property was owned by inveterate tinkerer Deloss Wilder, known as D.D., who had come to California from Connecticut chasing Gold Rush riches and met with modest success. Tour highlights include D.D.’s 1896 water-powered machine shop and a large barn built without nails, where two rows of up to 100 cows faced each other and fed from a rail-mounted cart pulled down the middle by a farm worker. On the first Saturday of every month, the docents typically dress in period costume.
Long before the ranch was founded, before the Spanish came, the Uypi had a village in the area now occupied by the ranch buildings plus seasonal camps on the shore and in the forest, evidence suggests. Their conical homes of tule reeds or redwood bark are long turned to dust, along with the Uypi and the other five Awaswas-speaking Ohlone tribes in the region, wiped out with no living ancestors. Faint traces of their lives can still be found — in blackened areas of earth where food was cooked or in scatterings and mounds of fragmented shells.
“Our people had been there a very long, long time,” says Valentin Lopez, chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of Ohlone. “This used to be one of the most biodiverse landscapes in North America, and it’s because of the way our ancestors managed and stewarded those lands. We had freshwater fish; we had saltwater fish. We had abundant wildlife. Our people took care of those resources.”
A common view of California’s Indigenous people as hunter-gatherers ignores their sophisticated ecosystem management, Lopez says. In the area that’s now a park, Uypi people hunted deer, elk and — with special arrows — birds. They speared and netted salmon and steelhead. Evidence suggests they made tule-reed boats and hunted and fished along the ocean shore, says Martin Rizzo-Martinez, a California State Parks historian, tribal liaison and author of “We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California,” published last year by University of Nebraska Press. The Uypi people gathered acorns, blackberries, abalone and many other foods. But they also collected and sowed seeds from plants used for food, medicine, clothing and intricate basketry, he says.
The Uypi conducted controlled burns to promote growth of some plants — like fire-dependent hazelnut — and deter growth of others, to enhance habitats for deer, elk and birds and boost their own food and medicine supplies. Uypi people restored salmon-spawning beds and stream entrances after storms, Lopez says.
The Catholic church’s establishment of Mission Santa Cruz in 1791 destroyed those ways of life and the carefully nurtured environment. Tribespeople were enticed and coerced into the Spanish mission, then enslaved. Grasslands became cattle pastures, disrupting Indigenous people’s food sources and sending them, hungry, into the arms of the mission’s padres. Measles, smallpox and tuberculosis ran rampant. A Native baby’s odds of survival into adulthood went from about a 75% chance to a 20% chance by moving to Mission Santa Cruz,” Rizzo-Martinez writes in his book.
At Wilder Ranch, an adobe building in the ranch complex testifies to the end of Spanish rule in 1821, following the Mexican-American War and the transition to a second colonial system under Mexico. The two-room structure belonged to Osip Volkov, a Russian who landed in Monterey, became a Mexican citizen, renamed himself Jose Antonio Bolcoff and was appointed mission administrator in 1822. Mexican policy dictated that the area that became the ranch was to return to the Ohlone, but Bolcoff ended up with a deed to much of it, running a sawmill and dairy. The building was almost certainly built by Indigenous people, and it appears Bolcoff stole its terra cotta roof tiles from the mission, Rizzo-Martinez says.
Historical lore indicates Bolcoff ran a side hustle along the coast at a spot in the park known today as Sand Plant Beach, where he helped traders skirt Mexico’s import taxes into the Monterey Bay area. “For a small fee, Bolcoff would allow smugglers to bring in their goods via rowboats up the creek under cover of darkness,” Henze writes in “The Complete Guide to Wilder Ranch State Park.”
Bolcoff fell into debt and lost the property in 1854 to his creditor, Moses Meder, who built the Gothic Revival farmhouse. Deloss Wilder and his dairyman partner, Levi Baldwin, from Marin, bought the property in 1871.
By the 1950s, four generations of Wilders later, Santa Cruz County officials coveted the ranch for housing and rezoned it, imposing a tax burden that forced the family to sell. The buyer, an investment firm, planned to build thousands of homes and a shopping center. But in the face of public outrage over the plan, the state bought the land for a park in 1974.
“This, in effect, is part of what makes Wilder great,” Henze says, “It could have been a huge subdivision, with all of its history wiped away, and it wasn’t.”
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Take a free tour
Historic grounds: Take a one-hour guided exploration of the ranch’s water-powered machine shop (where the drill press and lathe still function), horse and cow barns, farmhouse (ask to hear the player piano) and 1897 Queen Anne Victorian home (say hello to goats, cows and chickens of the same breeds kept by the Wilders)
Guided coastal walk: This 2 1/2-mile, 2 1/2-hour ramble takes visitors along the ocean bluffs.
Guided coastal birdwatching walk: A 3-hour, 2½-mile trip includes many stops for viewing birds, plants, and scenery.
Get tour information and book your spot at https://santacruzstateparks.as.me/schedule.php.
Hike a trail
Fern Grotto: Follow Old Cove Landing Trail from the parking lot to the Ohlone Bluff Trail. At marker post 8, drop down to Fern Grotto, an otherworldly sea cave with an entrance overhung by ferns, a little over a mile from the parking lot.
Enchanted redwoods: Go up Wilder Ridge Loop from the ranch complex — after the first climb, look out for the pond created to provide water for Deloss Wilder’s hydro-powered shop — to Enchanted Loop, to wander through the redwoods on an 8-mile trip.
Eucalyptus picnic spot: Descend Chinquapin Trail, from Empire Grade 2.3 miles up from UC Santa Cruz’s west entrance, to the stunning picnic spot at Eucalyptus Loop, a little over a mile from Empire Grade.
Getting to Wilder Ranch State Park
From Santa Cruz: Take Mission Street to Highway 1, go 1.7 miles past the Western Drive stoplight, turn left for the Wilder Ranch State Park parking lot. ($10 per vehicle)
From the north: Eight miles down Highway 1 from Davenport, turn right to access the parking lot.
Alternative access points: Baldwin Loop trailhead beside the highway 1.7 miles up the coast from the parking lot; or up Empire Grade 2.3 miles past the west entrance to UC Santa Cruz, parking near where Chinquapin Trail meets the road.
Find details, trail maps and more at www.parks.ca.gov.
Pick up a picnic or grab a bite
For picnic provisions, stop at New Leaf, a natural-foods store in Santa Cruz, for a custom sandwich or grab-and-go sushi, snacks and treats. The market is open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily at 1101 Fair Ave. on Santa Cruz’s Westside; www.newleaf.com.
After your park visit, park yourself on the patio or in the taproom at Santa Cruz Mountains-born Humble Sea Brewing Company and avail yourself of local lagers and IPAs, along with locally made meat, vegetable and vegan empanadas and — barring rain — dishes from a rotating cast of food trucks: Humble Sea opens at 11 a.m. daily at 820 Swift St.; https://humblesea.com.
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