Lost? It’s definitely not lost. It’s just wild.
Wild. Tragic. Haunting.
People resided there since the dawn of the first nations. In harmony, they say... relatively speaking anyway. Present day Northern California is rugged. Harsh. Violent. These people believed in the spirits of the earth. The trees. The land. The ocean. The animals. Everything had a spirit. The non-native settlers believed in economics and progress… forsaking this land for profit.
After the sinking of the brig Frolic in 1850 and the discovery of a green gold, sawmills sprung up in every cove and railroads replaced oxen or river flows in getting fallen trees from the job sites down to the mills. Due to the north coast’s isolation, milled lumber would then be loaded onto boats in sketchy anchorages called dog-holes, because the schooners that served them would have to be able to "turn around in a harbor barely small enough for a dog"
Sinkyone was logged, nearly to the brink. After World War II, the need for lumber increased, as the “greatest” generation migrated toward buying houses in developing suburban areas all across the nation , by the 1950s, mills consolidated and roads were made to bring logs out to the bigger companies inland or down the coast.
Georgia-Pacific felled groves into early 1980s, when the tribes and environmentalists fought to save Sally Bell. As a result of lawsuits, GP sold off 7,100 acres of forest to the Trust for Public Land in 1986.
Mom drove us up there once before logging operations had ceased. At the time she had an ‘85 Subaru hatchback. It was front-wheel drive. Standard transmission. The drive in was beautiful. It was also definitely a trek which demanded one’s full attention to the road and conditions; narrow single-track sections, blind corners, ruts, etc. We happened to pick a day where logging trucks weren’t traversing the road. Otherwise… yeah
Usal was primitive. Its namesake creek meandering through a grove of trees before pooling up behind a sand berm. The beach itself, gravely and gray. At either end of the sand, towering cliffs rose above the sea. The place was wild—alive! Mom and I were one of maybe a handful of people on the beach. We spent a good portion of the day taking in the whole scene,
My friends and I made pilgrimage up there several times per summer for a couple of years. Beer. Cigarettes. Cooking over open flames. We felt almost feral. Those times were glorious!
I solo trekked up there about a decade after. Sinkyone hadn’t changed all that much. Camped once more with a different circle of friends in ‘06, and then life took me away from there. Honestly, I actually never even thought about the prospect of going back.
With a Chevy Cobalt I dubbed the “Red Menace,” the pandemic times of 2020 found me road tripping all over Mendocino County. My photography, a phoenix rising from the ashes.
‘21 and my son is my co-pilot on coastal photography adventures. From Iversen Point to Hardy Creek, the boy and I explored and documented a host of new-to-both-of-us locales. It was then that Usal and the Sinkyone re-entered my headspace. It was truly an adventure. A right of passage even.
After reading up on the area, apparently Usal had become a fairly sketchy place to camp. And the road in, aggressive and inconsiderate. It seemed, according to the internet, that the primitive innocence was gone. Would it even be worth taking my son up to visit? Well, I’d heard the same thing years earlier about other areas of coastal Northern California, but reality was indeed different from online stories shared. Fuck it, we were going to do it.
I picked my son up after work. It was a Friday afternoon. Summertime 2021. We ventured north. It was a long drive just to reach the dirt road, and by that point, the boy wasn’t feeling 100%. He wanted to keep going though, so we did.
Golden hour was beginning as I drove us into the lost. Surprisingly, there was hardly any traffic on the road. I made a couple of stops for photos before we descended into Usal beach. By then, it was too late to go see the Candelabra Redwoods (chandelier trees), so I found a place to park and the boy and I walked to the beach.
Sunbathers. Fishermen. Families hanging out. The beach was packed, but still offered plenty of open space wander absorb the land and sea.
Just offshore, a stellar run of anchovies created a massive feeding frenzy. Bigger fish, seals, pelicans and gulls… all glutens. Yet, so cool to witness!
The boy and I left the beach toward the tail end of golden hour. On the drive back toward the highway, we encountered a lot of traffic heading toward Usal. Thankfully everybody was respectful and had good communication skills.
Despite numerous stops, we still managed to reach Hardy Creek when the red sky was at its most vibrant.
After seeing what it was like up there, my son wanted to go back. We still had a Mendocino Land Trust trail to explore and the chandelier trees to marvel at.
Okay, so in November of ‘23, my son and I did attempt to go back into the Sinkyone. If you know the road in, you understand that it does not like wet weather. There had been some rain falling that October, but there was a bit of a dry spell. A friend was going up to surf, and shooting the waves on the lost coast was high on my photography bucket list. After discussing possible road conditions, the boy and I decided we’d follow my friend up to Usal.
When you’re driving a full-size 4-wheel-drive with good ground clearance, the road gets bumpy, but not horrible. Within a few miles of getting off the pavement, we encountered a pretty gnarly washout. Thank God I know how to drive, because it took some finagling to pass through, but I did so without bottoming out. And we all continued on.
Further up, along the narrow twists and blind corners of the climb to the road’s summit, we ran into a line of 4x4s heading south. With barely a shoulder to pull off into, I allowed them to pass. The lead truck stopped, the driver rolled down his window, and said to me, “You’ve got some balls to even attempt this!” He would go on to describe several spots further up that would more than likely result in me getting stuck. My son didn’t like that idea. Not one bit.
Of course, there was a problem. I’d have to back down the goddamned mountain to a place suitable enough where I could do a few-points turn. That was around many corners. To this day, I have nothing but appreciation for the caravan, as they allowed me into their line so I could safely get to where I needed to go. Heh.. but reverse for a couple of miles, I think I impressed my son with that stunt. I kind of impressed myself too.
The Sinkyone gave us another core memory, and one more true Mendocino County adventure!
Life has taken my son and I in different directions since then. However, I still think about going back up again.
One day.
