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.

A day's walk north of Fort Bragg I'm greeted by towering shoreline cliffs, rising abruptly like volcanoes from the sea. I get just a glimpse of the 2,000-foot high cliffs before the morning mist turns to heavy fog and the coast is lost to my view. The Lost Coast is so rough--rougher even than Big Sur's coast--that it even thwarted California's highway engineers; much to their frustration, they were compelled by geography to route Coast Highway inland more than 20 miles.

The Lost Coast is black sand beaches strewn with patterns of driftwood and the sea's debris, mosaiced with small stones. On grassy blufftops, sheep and cows turn tail to angry winds blowing in from Siberia and the Bering Sea. Canyon mouths fill with fog, nourishing the redwoods within.

Abandoned barns and fallen fences record the efforts of settlers who tried, but failed, to tame this land. Nowhere is the Lost Coast blighted by transmission lines, oil wells, power plants, RV parks or fast-food franchises.

As traced on the map, the Lost Coast's northern boundary is the Eel River in Humboldt County, its southern boundary is Usal Beach in Mendocino County. Much of the Lost Coast is in public ownership as part of the King Range National Conservation Area in the north and Sinkyone Wilderness State Park in the south.

But "Lost Coast" is not a place name found on any map.

Except mine.

One January, some years back, I served as volunteer ranger/campground host for Sinkyone Wilderness State Park. I cared for a couple of horses, gave directions to the very few visitors who braved the rains and miserable park road to get to the coast, read and wrote in the ranch house that serves as the park visitor center on those days when it rained hard, and wandered the trails on those days when it rained less. I hiked all the Lost Coast's trails, mapped the territory, then supervised production of a map called "Trails of the Lost Coast."

A 55-mile footpath--Lost Coast Trail--traverses the Lost Coast. To reach the trailhead, from Wages Creek Beach outside of the hamlet of Rockport where I camped in a private campground, I must walk seven miles along the beaches and bluffs, then another seven miles up Usal Road. The road, a muddy thoroughfare not pictured on most maps, hasn't changed much since Jack London and his wife Charmian drove it in a horse-drawn carriage on a trip to Eureka in 1911, or since J. Smeaton Chase rode it in 1912. I'm not surprised that after two hours of hiking the road, not a single car has passed me.

I arrive at Usal Camp on the banks of Usal Creek, select a campsite (I have a choice among 15 in the 15-site camp) and set up my tent. Sunset draws near though I know this only by consulting the moist face of my watch, not by any glimpse of the day star that has been absent all day.

I follow Usal Creek to its mouth at Usal Beach, a dramatic dark sand and gravel strand backed by tall cliffs whose tops are lost in the fog. Scattered at the base of the eroded cliffs are huge boulders. Such rocks falling from the bluffs make me glad Lost Coast Trail stays atop the bluffs rather than below them.

Usal Beach is not a friendly place. Not only do huge rocks rain on the beach, huge rogue waves frequently surprise-attack the shore. The surf pounds offshore rock pillars, socks Usal Creek in the mouth. However these adverse conditions that discourage even walking Usal Beach, did not discourage capitalists of a hundred years ago.

During the 1890s, Captain Robert Dollar regularly navigated his steamship, Newsboy, in and out of the treacherous doghole port of Usal in order to transport logs sawn by the Usal Redwood Company. The aptly-named Dollar went on to greater fame as founder of the Dollar Steamship Line, later President Line. The sawmill closed in 1900, and Usal became a near ghost town in a large part because the timber in these parts was inferior. The redwoods' timber prospects looked good to the loggers, but the tall trees never yielded board feet commensurate to their great size, and produced a lesser grade of lumber. Nevertheless Georgia Pacific Company resumed logging after World War II and continued until 1986 when, after cutting down most of the trees, sold its land to the park. In 1969, the company burned Usal to the ground, to avoid what it termed "liability problems."

I lug some driftwood back to my camp and, after much coaxing, get the wet wood to burn. When the fire offers more heat than smoke, I put my pot of macaroni and cheese on the fire. As my hands and face warm and my damp clothes dry, my thoughts turn to from California's wettest land to its driest.

After my fellow coastal traveler Chase finished his long coastal ride, he began exploring the desert, wrote desert books, moved to Palm Springs and married. No doubt after an upbringing in the England damp, and his excursion along this coast, he was ready to live out his days where it was warm and dry.

The Lost Coast is said to have two seasons: six months of rain and six months of fog. It's very foggy again today. The ocean below and the sky above are a single shade of gray. The tall grass covering the coastal slopes, and the Douglas fir that border the meadowland are dripping. Lost Coast Trail is muddy, and populated by so many earthworms that the earth itself seems alive and wiggling.

I enter Dark Canyon, a rain forest-like environment of bay laurels draped with moss, maple and alder. The fog lingers in this canyon, so that the land never seems to dry. The fog tarries, too, in Anderson and Northport gulches. The Lost Coast's canyons and gulches, from Usal to Bear Harbor, were logged not so many years ago, but the fog softens the scars, hides the stumps. Wrapped in mist, the forest is healing.

Along Little Jackass Creek grows one of the few surviving old-growth redwood groves, the Sally Bell Grove, named for the last full-blooded Sinkyone. She survived a massacre of her people to become a woman of strong will and strong medicine.

Near the grove, I hail state park ranger John Jennings, an easy-going mustachioed fellow who has been there almost since the beginning. There is Sinkyone Wilderness State Park; the beginning was in 1975 when the state park opened.

He spent the afternoon finding and cleaning up a marijuana garden, he reports. The grower had harvested his plants, but not his trash and Jennings hauled away beer bottles and a hammock. "A lot of trash for just two plants."

While the marijuana industry is small-scale compared to elsewhere in Humboldt County, the weed and its growers nevertheless invade the state park.

The Lost Coast is part of the so-called Emerald Triangle, the name given to an area of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties where many a marijuana garden grows. the sinsemilla flourishes.

In the good old days of the Sixties and Seventies, big growers harvested huge fortunes--crops of hundreds of plants grew along the Lost Coast in places like the banks of the Mattole River near Ettersburg. But growers have fallen on hard times, particularly on the coastward side of the isosceles. The CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Plants), complete with helicopter surveillance and trucks full of heavily armed men running through the woods, has been effective in reducing the number of growers. So have stiffer jail sentences and fines, not to mention confiscature and forfeiture of their land.

Now growers have taken up guerrilla gardening--cultivating a half-dozen, sometimes only one or two plants in dispersed locations on public land. Still, a single sinsemilla plant is a cash crop of several thousand dollars, making it worth the risk to many.

As a Peace Officer--a term that better describes his job than that of his city cop counterparts, he must protect the Lost Coast from both the countercultural outposts of Whale Gulch and Garberville and the dyed-in-the-neck red-necks who come to work and play.

At best, the locals, like the native Sinkyone who preceded them, could be said to be family-oriented, loosely organized tribal group that lived off the land. At worst, the locals are attracted to the Lost Coast because its long been a place for people to escape tax collectors, the criminal justice system, and most conventional forms of personal and social responsibility.

"John, there are three seasons," Jennings tells me.

"No way, John. You told me two the last time I was here: the fog season and the rainy season."

"That's the weather. The humans around here observe three seasons: hunting season, fishing season and growing season."

These three seasons make it rough for Jennings in a park designated "wilderness." A wilderness is by definition off limits to vehicles, which severely restricts what locals call "traditional uses" of the land.

'Traditional uses' is a motto that plays well with the conservative board of supervisors and county government, but in practice is quite different. Traditional wood gathering is four-wheeling it up to a tree and chainsawing what you need. Traditional fishing is backing up to the river and fishing off the back of a truck. Traditional hunting is blasting at critters from a pickup truck. Traditional agriculture is planting pot on public land. In the minds of many locals the gun is an integral part of the coastal system and they want to solve their traditional problems in their traditional manner.

Problem: Too few steelhead
Solution: Shoot the sea

Problem: Too few trout
Solution: Shoot the merganser ducks

Problem: Too few quail to shoot
Solution: Shoot the bobcats

Problem: Too few deer to shoot
Solution: Shoot the mountain lions

Near sunset--or more precisely about when the sun sets since I have not glimpsed the orb all day--I reach Wheeler, where some cement foundations mark what used to be a company town (1950-1960). Near the ruins grow spearmint, alyssum and other domestic plants gone wild. During the Lost Coast's logging decade, diesels hauling 120,000 pounds of logs thundered along Usal Road from Wheeler, a modern town of 30 families, with electricity and phones.

Wheeler, one of the last company towns (and maybe the newest ghost town) on the California coast, was established by the Wheeler family. The Wheelers renamed Jackass Creek "Wolf Creek," probably to avoid calling their business, Jackass Creek Timber Company instead of Wolf Creek Timber Company (Not surprisingly the Wheelers figured a company named for a creature with a reputation as a predator was preferable to one considered a nitwit.)

One of mapmaking's great joys is choosing geographical names among contenders. I figured that Jackass Creek was so-named before the Wheelers and their timber company came, so Jackass Creek it should be henceforth, and Jackass Creek it is on my Lost Coast map. I pitch my tent by Jackass Creek beneath two large redwoods. The redwoods remind me that tomorrow I will visit a very special stand of the tall trees--the J. Smeaton Chase Grove, a grove that I named for my trail companion.

From Wheeler, I ascend steep switchbacks, then wind through a grassland at the edge of a forest. Among the blue-eyed grass and monkey flowers are fox gloves so beloved by Chase.

I reach Duffy's Gulch a garden of rhododendrons, head-high ferns and vines climbing redwoods to the sky. Splashing color about the gulch are Indian paintbrush, dandelions huckleberry, Douglas iris, Calypso orchid, and some bright red poison oak. The trees in J. Smeaton Chase Grove are towering 1,000 year old redwoods, some ten feet in diameter, surrounded by a multitude of ferns--sword, lady, five-finger and woodwardia.

Doubtless Chase would have frowned at me for naming a grove for him. He was a modest man (far more photographs of his horse survive than of him) and wrote of the vanity in naming groves of the tallest living things for men of questionable stature in California Coast Trails.

But Chase also wrote of the rest that comes with an eternal sleep in the woods:"Every good man loves the woodland, and even if our concerns keep us all our lives out of our heritage we hope to lie down at last under the quiet benediction of slow-moving branches."

What did he want from California? 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. He found the love of the land, the love of a woman, the love of writing.

I know I couldn't wish for much more than that from my life.

It begins to rain and I decide not to stop at Railroad Creek trail camp, but to push on for the relative comfort of Needle Rock Ranch House. Just offshore, a strange cloud formation, like a blackened tea pot, pours water from ocean onto the land.

An hour's walk in the rain (a relief, actually from the incessant fog) brings me to the ranch house, a combination visitor center/ hostel, where I unpack my things. During the 1920s, a dairy operation, complete with large stockyards, stood on these bluffs. Around the stockyards stood a store, a hotel, school, and living quarters for the families of the dairymen. The Calvin Cooper Stewart family were the main residents of Needle Rock, and today their ranch house serves as the park visitors center.

On the visitors center side of the ranch house, I am angered to discover that my Lost Coast map is no longer offered for sale; displayed instead is a brand new map of Sinkyone Wilderness State Park, this one published by the state parks public relations office in Sacramento. It is a smaller map, a near-duplicate to mine except for one heartbreaking omission: J. Smeaton Chase Grove.

I'm furious: the state park mapmaker substituted a blank spot on the map for J. Smeaton Chase Grove. The map's text alludes to "a beautiful redwood grove" on the 4 1/2-mile trek between Wheeler Camp and Bear Harbor, but does not say where one can find it.

Before I descend from anger into a major funk, the dark clouds vanish, and the rain ceases. I step out onto the porch to see the sun, low over the water, struggling against the gloom. An isolated, lone eucalyptus shines ghostly white against the dark, storm-tossed sea.

It is this special, brooding light that intrigued the great Catholic theologian Thomas Merton when he visited here and talked of establishing a monastery for Trappist monks. He thought the Lost Coast shores around Needle Rock an ideal location for a life of prayer and contemplation--high praise indeed for one who believed so strongly in the power of physical silence and seclusion.

On a pilgrimage to Asia to experience Buddhist monastic life, deeper in India, Merton felt the spirit of the Lost Coast burning bright within him, and he wrote in his journal: "This deep valley, the Mim Tea Estate, above Darjeeling: it is beautiful and quiet and it is right--yet it has nothing I could not essentially have found at Needle Rock or Bear Harbor--nothing I did not find there last May."

Above the roar of the breakers I hear what sounds like the crack of a bat meeting a baseball, like someone is taking batting practice on the bluffs. I walk up-coast a hundred, two-hundred yards, following my ears until I spot an amazing sight. Two bull Roosevelt elk paw the ground, lower their heads, butt antlers. Around them, grazing on the bluffs are two-dozen females, by all outward appearances utterly disinterested in the result of this combat.

Again and again the elk circle, feint, clash. From a distance they look evenly matched, but up closer it's apparent that a young bull, strong but outweighed, is challenging an older bull. No blood is drawn. This is more ritual, than actual, combat.

Roosevelt elk are enchanted-looking creatures, with chocolate brown faces and necks, tan bodies, and dark legs. The California natives look like a cross between a South American llama and a deer. In truth, the elk are more awesome when they butt heads than when they call. I always figured elk had a majestic call, a trumpet to arms, but these Roosevelts have a funny little call more like the wee-wee of a pig than the bugle of a powerful 1,000-pound elk.

The younger bull may successfully challenge his elder next year or the year after, but this evening the older bull, with his fuller antlers and more clever moves, and still very much in his prime, is a sure-bet to keep his harem. Sunset (the first I've seen in days) casts an orange glow over the clifftop combatants, like a floodlight on a stage. When the light finally fades and darkness falls, the duel ends.

Dark shapes gather together, protection against the enemies of the night, but if the elk intend to be inconspicuous they had better stop eating. The ruminants tear at the grass, an aggressive munching, like a lion ripping into a kill.

Next morning I hike up Whale Gulch on the Lost Coast Trail, leaving behind the state park and entering King Range National Conservation Area. It's one of the wettest spots in America, with over a hundred inches of rain annually, but today the weather seems most indecisive. Black clouds hover offshore to my left, the sun rises over the King Range to my right. The radio in the ranch house predicted a 50% chance of showers.

Soon after crossing the boundary between state park and U.S. Bureau of Land Management territories, I cross another boundary, the line between Mendocino and Humboldt counties.

The county line is another boundary of sorts--the 40th parallel of latitude.

This change in latitude heralds a change in attitude.

In the sharp morning light, this land shows its scars. The King Range is chainsaw country, Utah with fog. The magnificent coast is visible, and files of Douglas fir, but so also are clear-cut ridges, overgrazed slopes and silted streams. Some of this land looks like the "Before Rehabilitation" pictures in the Boy Scouts' Soil and Water Conservation merit badge pamphlet.

I think of yet another boundary I've crossed--this one wholly in my mind. After all this coast-walking, I've decided there are three Californias: Smog Land, Fog Land, and Log Land. This beginning of BLM land, this 40th parallel, this Mendocino-Humboldt county line, this is clearly the start of Log Land.

As I climb Chemise Mountain, the vegetation changes. Most of the fir have been logged, and it's tan oaks and madrone that cling to the steep hillsides. Near the top of Chemise Mountain is some chemise (greasewood), as well chaparral bushes and lots of manzanita; the presence of drought-resistant plants only a mile or so from a thick rain forest is truly bizarre. The difference in ecology has to with elevation. Chemise Mountain (2,596 feet), or about 2,000 feet higher than the rain forest. I enjoy the view from atop the mountain: King's Peak, the dominant promontory to the north, a half-dozen ridges of the Sinkyone to the south, Shelter Cove on the coast far below. The view doesn't last long; it closes like a storm window.

As I descend precipitous Chemise Mountain Trail toward the coast, the weather has decided to be--indecisive. The sun warming the King Rang from the east, meet the storm brewing on the western horizon and the result is neither rain nor sun but a dense fog. Here on these very steep slopes, exposed to the full fury of Pacific storms, the fir grow grotesque, their massive trunks short and twisted. Only the patter of condensed fog dripping from the branches breaks the silence.

I hurry through the dark, spooky forest. The reason for my hustle down the knee-jarring decline is that I have an appointment with Point No Pass on the beach below at precisely 2:53 p.m. and I must not be late. Such punctuality is critical because rounding the aptly named point is only possible at a rare minus tide, which, lucky for me, happens to occur this afternoon. If I can't round Point No Pass, and walk the beach to Shelter Cove, I will have to ascend this brutal slope of Chemise Mountain and hike over the crest of the King Range to continue north.

About a quarter-mile from the beach, I reach the end of Chemise Mountain Trail; it's been buried by a landslide; as if a giant bulldozer has scraped the side of the mountain. I slip-slide on feet and butt through the slide, zone, hoping the mountain doesn't slide with me to the sea. When I reach the beach, I walk a mile to Point No Pass and, thanks to my watch and tide table, I am able to round the point and reach Shelter Cove.

Shelter Cove is not a ghost town. Yet. As I approach I see a mountainside laced with 40 miles of paved streets, with more gridded streets, an airstrip and a golf course on the bluffs below. The labyrinth of asphalt was built to serve a subdivision of five thousand lots. By my count, only a hundred or so houses have been built--most on the bluffs.

The beach, 25 miles from Shelter Cove to the mouth of the Mattole River is the longest roadless stretch in California. Just in case, one of the locals decides to practice some traditional drunk driving on the beach tonight, I pitch my tent behind a massive log that seems guaranteed to stop even a tank.

As I gather driftwood for my evening fire, I nearly step on a rattlesnake. As lethargic a creature as I've ever seen, the timber rattler manages one flick of the forked tongue at me before uncoiling itself from a piece of wood, and crawling deeper into the wood pile. I manage to work up some sympathy for a snake in such cold and wet part of the world. The Lost Coast belongs to amphibians, not reptiles.

Next morning, I'm off into the fog. A magnificent beach it is. Rock, pebbles, and coarse black sand, strewn with great logs, as if the sea, not the land, had been logged. And water, water, everywhere. The ocean, deep and wide and restless on my left, the fog all around me, creeks trickling, waterfalls tumbling from the rainforest above to the beach below. High above me, at the limits of vision, where the green slope meets the gray sky are seeps and springs nurturing hanging wildflower gardens, scattered like Easter eggs in the forest.

After a long day, I make another beach camp, another driftwood fire, at Cooksie Creek. Then back to the beach the next morning.

I hear the residents of Sea Lion Rocks before I see them--two dozen Steller sea lions. A mile beyond the big creatures is the abandoned Punta Gorda Lighthouse. In 1911, after several ships were wrecked on the rocks and reefs off the Lost Coast, a lighthouse was built a mile south of Punta Gorda--whose name means "massive point."

The mouth of the Mattole River, a complication of gravel bars, marks the northern end of the Lost Coast. Sea gulls and osprey circle above me as I watch the harbor seals bob in the tidal area where the river meets the ocean. I look back into the mist at the King Range, at slopes that seem so much steeper than the angle of repose, that only by some hidden force deep within the earth keeps from collapsing into the sea.

It is not really the coast that is lost, but us. If we cannot find the coast because of the smoke of our cities, the walls we build to keep each other out, the industries we run that run us, it is surely we who are lost.

We all need one place on the map, one place in our hearts that is lost. In a wild place, lost from the mean streets, we can find ourselves, our best selves. A place that is peaceful, for prayer and for contemplation is good, a place that is wild, for challenge and confrontation, is better, a place that is both peaceful and wild, for the love of life and the lust of living, is best.