The land we now call Sinkyone Wilderness State Park, located about 225 miles north of San Francisco, has long been recognized as something special. During the late 1960s, the great Catholic theologian, Thomas Merton, felt that the Needle Rock area would be an ideal place for a life of prayer and contemplation, and talked of establishing a monastic community there.

Adapted from A Walk Along Lands End: Discovering California's Living Coast (HarperCollins) by John McKinney. (In this excerpt, we join John in far northern California, some 1,400 miles into his 1,600-mile solo trek up the California coast.)

It doesn't get any wilder than this. California has a very long coastline, and millions of acres of wilderness, but it has only one wilderness coast. The Lost Coast.