Carruthers Cove

“Bad roads. Good hike.”

That could be one way to provide a capsule description of the road to the trailhead and the trail to Carruthers Cove.

Coastal Drive (once upon a time, Highway 101) is the route to the trailhead. It was bypassed because of its propensity to slide into the Pacific. Even today, the road looks like it needs a bit of repair – potholes, wide cracks, buckled pavement. In my view, such imperfections just add to the sense of adventure, and I hope the road is kept in a kind of arrested decay, just safe enough for travel.

The other “bad” road is the logging skid road that extends from Coastal Drive to Carruthers Cove. The hike to Carruthers Cove begins as a footpath and ends as a footpath; the middle is reworked skid road. Think of it as a transition: the walk begins gently enough, but the deeper you go, the more the ghosts of industry poke through the undergrowth. And yes, as skid roads go, this one has aged gracefully – trade the logs for hikers, and you’ve got yourself a trail.

Carruthers: In the land of the redwoods, where so many features are named for timber barons or outside-the-area industrialists and philanthropists, it’s refreshing to find a feature named for a newspaperman, J.H. Crothers.

Distinguished newspaper publisher Crothers, a business leader in Humboldt County during the first half of the 20th century, owned the cliffside property above misnamed Carruthers Cove. (Cartographers somewhere along the line misspelled his name, and it stuck. A fate every journalist dreads – your name in print, spelled wrong.)

And here’s a tale that makes me smile as a longtime newspaper columnist myself. On a foggy June day in 1916, the steamship Bear, en route from Portland to San Francisco, ran aground near Cape Mendocino. Its cargo? Hundreds of tons of newsprint. Crothers – sharp eye for opportunity – snapped up the soggy bounty for $500, then hired local ranchers to wrestle the thousand-pound rolls out of the surf. The paper dried, the presses rolled, and The Humboldt Times kept publishing. The haul even seeded the Humboldt Paper Company. It’s not every day you get to say your local paper was literally pulled from the Pacific.

Once you hit the beach, you’ll see bold sea stacks punching through the surf and a wetland at Johnson Creek’s mouth, bound in by stone. Northward travel is limited by cliffs, but southward – at low tide – you can stride a couple of miles down to Ossagon Rocks.