LOST HORIZONS : Up the Coast With Joseph Smeaton Chase

I see him in the mist, lone horseman on this Big Sur trail. Bedroll and saddlebags are tied to a nimble chestnut mare, the warm breath of which is visible in the chilly autumn air. A campaign hat tops his weathered face. A walrus mustache covers the trace of a smile. For an instant, I imagine I’m face to face with the ghost of Joseph Smeaton Chase, prose writer and trail rider of the purple sage. He acknowledges me with an almost imperceptible nod, and then he’s lost around the next switchback.

My trail this morning is the Vincente Flat Trail, which zigzags up the steep coastal slopes of the Santa Lucia Mountains. It has about everything a Big Sur trail should have: solemn redwood canyons, oak-studded potreros , meadows smothered with pink owl’s clover and California poppies, and--when the foggy curtain parts--a view of the tempestuous Pacific. In my pack is a well-thumbed, hard-bound copy of Chase’s “California Coast Trails.” So vivid is his evocation of the coast, circa 1911, that I begin to hear his voice in the wilderness, begin to see the trail through his eyes.

The author-naturalist-adventurer set out in 1911 to take a horseback ride from Mexico to Oregon, along California’s multisplendored coast. He left us a record of his solo journey in “California Coast Trails.” About three quarters of a century later, I walked many a mile in Chase’s footsteps--or, rather, hoof-prints. It now seems fitting to reread him. And what better place than the middle of the coastal range? In the Ventana Wilderness, the Big Sur Country, the heart of California?

Residents of San Simeon and Morro Bay warned Chase not to enter the Big Sur country. “Several people told me that I should get lost in the rough and little-traveled country I was entering; but my saddlebags held provisions for a week and I knew that water would be plentiful, so felt sure I could get through, provided only that I found forage for my good little horse, Anton.”

Chase always tried to look ahead, not merely around the next bend but into the future of California. He knew he was bidding adieu to a pastoral, romantic way of life, and it saddened him. The Panama Canal was under construction, and Chase predicted that its completion would mean the industrialization of land’s end. “With an increase of commerce and population there will come important physical changes and the obliteration of much of what is distinctly western in life and manners.”

Chase hated the automobilists who raced by and left him in the dust. “When a true democracy arises, one of its first jobs will be to abolish the automobile as an offensive chattel of privilege.”

The Santa Lucia backcountry remains imperturbable, and Chase’s description of his trail, my trail, the coastal trail, still rings true. “No roads traverse this picturesque tract, but a long bridle trail wanders up the coast, threading its way through deep gorges of redwood, madrono and tanbark oak, and along league on league of bold cliff and breezy mountain slope--ever in sight or sound of the gleam and boom of the Pacific.”

Some Big Sur visitors insist that there’s little good about a day that begins with frost at dawn, gets hot enough by noon to peel your nose and becomes downright chilly with the first afternoon shadows. Other, perhaps wiser, visitors say that such autumn days are among the most magical of the year.

Fall in the background gives the traditionalist, usually a homesick New Englander, a chance to see autumn leaves. Maples, sycamores and black oaks wear their fall colors, while the vibrant reds of poison oak brighten the forest floor. Red and white alder flicker like fire in the wind. But really, it’s not the leaves but the light that gives autumn its color in the Santa Lucias. The sun is strong, the shade deep and black, a seven f-stop difference between light and shadow, the kind of sharp contrast found in the photographs of Ansel Adams, a man who deeply loved these mountains.

I see Joseph Smeaton Chase now in my campfire. As captured in the photographer’s studio, he appears to have been a quaintly Victorian, professorial-looking fellow who wore tweed coats and vests, broad cravats, wing collars and a pince-nez on a chain looped over his right ear. On the trail, wearing khaki pants stuffed into high boots, he resembled a Rough Rider. When more-genteel travelers asked him where he was bound and Chase replied, “Oregon,” they often grew irate and thought that he was making sport of them. Usually, he was mistaken for a drifter. Such encounters tickled more than irritated him, for he possessed a healthy sense of humor.

Chase was born in London in 1864 into something of a literary family. His father, Samuel Chase, was a publisher, and his brother worked in a London bookstore. He came to California in 1890 and first settled on the slopes of Mt. Cuyamaca in San Diego County.

What brought the young man of 26 to California? The prospect of wealth? Happiness? Curiosity? Certainly he never became wealthy as result of the modest sales of his books. His happiness is hard to judge; if we agree that man is a social animal and that happiness is a quality that must be shared, it would appear that Chase spent too many days alone in the saddle, too many days alone at his typewriting machine, to have been truly happy. But if Chase came to California out of curiosity, he must have been a very satisfied man. He rode and wrote his way into a “Who’s Who” listing by exploring coastal trails, desert trails and Sierra Nevada trails, by visiting every lighthouse keeper, Mission friar and octogenarian with a story to tell, from El Centro to Gasquet.

Chase is listed in Los Angeles directories from 1893 on. He lived for a couple years with a wealthy family on their ranch in the San Gabriel Valley, where he tutored their sons. He then became a social worker for an agency associated with the Bethlehem Institutional Church, which aided laborers and their families. Later he worked in a camera store on 5th Street near Main.

Los Angeles was hardly a busy metropolis at the turn of the century, but Chase began to feel confined by city life and his isolation from the green world. “The human palate is, in fact, strangely dead to the majestic ingredient. How often, while some gorgeous solemnity of cloud scenery has been offered to the gaze, have I marveled to see that only one out of hundreds of thousands of passers-by has bestowed even a casual glance upon it, but that their attention has been given entirely to the store windows, the pavement, or the hats. There is something rather awful about this insensitivity: What can it mean?”

I stumble toward the faint murmur of Hare Creek, pop into my sleeping bag and look up at a million crystals in the sky. Just before I fall asleep, I hear Chase whispering to me: “Is that the wind or the river booming softly ten thousand miles away? Or can it be truth, cosmic sound, the very sound of the earth? It might be. It might be.”

I’m filling my Sierra cup with coffee when I hear another voice in the wilderness. This one belongs not to Joseph Smeaton Chase but to a woman with long, black braids and Birkenstock sandals. “Am I still on the trail?”

“It depends on where you’re going.”

“Esalen.”

As she walks closer, I see the Indian blanket and rolled-up yoga mat, the bag of soy nuts tied to her belt, the beatific smile.

“Go back to the trail junction and head downhill on the Vincente Flat Trail. It will take you to Highway 1.”

“Was I on the right path?” Her intense eyes sparkle. “I mean in the narrow sense of the word.”

“In the narrow sense, no.”

Chase visited the majestic bluff top where Esalen now stands, although it wasn’t a metaphysical fat farm then but a primitive hot springs resort called Slate’s. He enjoyed a hot bath in a tub perched on a cliff, with the gulls screeching above him and the breakers roaring below. “Here some hot sulphur springs issue from the face of the cliff, and a couple bathtubs have been hauled up . . . and the water led into them. This makes a decided novelty in the hydropathic line, and would be worth money to the enterprising owner if the place were more accessible.”

An enterprising owner did make the place more accessible, and, judging by the number of Esalenites I meet in the backcountry, also quite successful. Chase whispers to me once again: “One meets out-of-the-way characters, naturally, in out-of-the-way places.”

My route today takes me over the shoulder of Cone Peak, which has been a geographical landmark to coast travelers for 100 years and is the most abrupt pitch of country on the Pacific coast. It rises to just under a mile high in a mere 3 1/2 miles from sea level. On a clear winter day, while you’re standing on Sand Dollar Beach, it’s a stirring sight to look up at snow-covered Cone Peak.

Botanically, it’s a very important mountain. On its steep slopes, botanists Thomas Coulter and David Douglas discovered the Santa Lucia fir, considered the rarest fir in North America. (Tree lovers know that when names were attached to western cone-bearing trees, Coulter’s went to a pine, Douglas’ to a fir.) The spire-like Santa Lucia fir is found only in scattered stands in the Santa Lucia Mountains. It grows above the highest coast redwoods, about 2,000 feet, concentrating in steep, rocky, fire-resistant spots.

“With trees about me I find that I seldom suffer for lack of company,” declared Chase, the consummate tree lover. He had kind words for nearly every type except junipers, which for some reason brought out all of his arboreal antagonism. “Misanthropic,” he called them. “Churlish relatives of the conifers,” he sputtered.

His love of nature was colored by the fact that he was British-born. He dedicates “California Coast Trails” “to my Brothers, Whose lot it has been to remain in the Old Home Land.” The central coast reminds him of the rocky shores of Guernsey and Jersey. Purple foxgloves growing along the coastal trail recall the flowers decorating the lanes of Surrey and Devon.

Some of Chase’s English imagery is less clear. How could he get excited over gorse, that prickly shrub of the British Isle wastelands, a menace to California ranchers, an unwelcome alien growth to ecologists? And how could he compare the dry Santa Monica Mountains with the lush downs of England?

My trail this morning is nearly the same used 75 years ago by Chase. I ascend into Lime Kiln Canyon, where, late in the last century, lime was quarried, burned, packed into barrels and shipped from a cable landing at the mouth of the canyon. By the time Chase explored the fern-lined canyon, he found only moss-covered buildings and rusty machinery.

As I hike into the upper reaches of Lime Kiln Canyon, the trail becomes difficult to follow, because range cows have trampled it into oblivion and added a few paths of their own. Chase and his loyal horse, Anton, got lost here. “The complication of cattlepaths among which we now wandered was quite beyond my trailcraft. About mid-afternoon I found myself entirely at fault, high up on a steep and slippery slope that was cut by frequent gullies choked with sharp rocks and stubborn brush.” I manage to stay on the trail, not on account of any great pathfinding skill but because somebody has tied plastic ribbons to strategically located oak trees.

High atop the coast ridge, I break for lunch. As I dip into a bag of figs, I wonder what kept Chase on the trail day after day, night after lonely night. Incessant rain, lip-cracking heat, poison oak, sand fleas, no-trespassing signs, rattlesnakes, quicksand. Nothing discouraged him.

His first book appeared in 1911, when he was 47 years old. “Yosemite Trails,” a combination guidebook and nature essay, is second only to John Muir’s books as a description of the Sierra Nevada. That same year Chase also wrote “Conebearing Trees of the California Mountains.” Trees haven’t changed much over the years, and this handbook is as useful today as it was in 1911.

After “California Coast Trails” was published in 1913, Chase began exploring the desert. He roamed from Twentynine Palms to Borrego to Brawley, over the dunes to Yman and along the Colorado River to Blythe, and wrote about it all in “California Desert Trails,” a natural-history masterpiece.

In 1915 he moved to Palm Springs and married Isabel White, one of the famous White sisters who so influenced the growth of Palm Springs. And it was perhaps the White family who influenced Chase to write his last and worst book, “Our Araby,” a booster endeavor that helped an isolated oasis evolve into a sophisticated resort. No doubt, he wrote it under some pressure from the Whites, who owned much stock in the Palm Valley Water Co. And, no doubt, Chase, from his grave, regrets writing it.

Ahead lie Madrone Camp and Arroyo Seco, Higgins Creek and Lost Valley, and the second half of a perfect fall day. As I hit the trail, Chase speaks to me one last time: “Why does complete beauty, in which there is innocence, make us sigh? Is it that we are conscious of separation and sigh, perhaps less for the innocence that must be than for that which has been lost?”