Our first effort was to reach Ocean View Summit. It's not much of a peak, having
only 15-20 feet of prominence, but by the name I expected it might have decent
views to the coast. We started at the gated
Middle Ridge Fire Road off China
Grade Rd, near the
Cutter Boy Scout Camp. This was the same camp she will be
visiting a few weeks later, so I thought it would be a good idea for her to see
what hiking in the area might be like. Warm!
We had no trouble at all finding Ocean View Summit with the roads and various
junctions adequately marked with 
trail signs.
We spent a lot of the hour-long, oddly downhill
hike to the summit looking for
animal tracks in the dusty road (hard to find
with all the boot prints) and practicing morse code, two of the skills she's
planning to learn at camp. It had been more than 30 years since I last tried
morse code and I had to admit that Jackie knew more of the letters than I did.
But with about 80% comprehension, we choose our words carefully to avoid the
letters we didn't know (hard ones like f,j,l,q,v,y) and took turns audibly
sounding "beep!" and "beeeeep!" to spell out four and five letter words.
T'was not easy.
Ocean View Summit was somewhat of a disappointment. With a signed side trail
just off
the Middle Ridge Fire Rd, we found a small clearing with decent views
of everything minus the ocean. To
the southwest one see to the Pacific waters,
but just barely. The surrounding sandstone 
rocks were heavily
graffitied as a register of sorts, but there was a nice,
primitive bench that we used to take a break and eat some
snacks. Afterwards, we went back north a short distance on the fire road to
explore the unnamed highpoint at 1,840ft+ (about 160ft higher than Ocean View).
That turned out to be short walk through untrailed forest to no place special
without any views. Luckily Jackie just went happily along with me and didn't
even ask what we were doing out there. She seemed to enjoy exploring the
downed trees and finding 
her way through the forest clutter.
Shortly after returning to the fire road and heading back to the TH, we came
across a medium-sized 
snake
that we paused to photograph. A racer snake, I
think. We also came across a 
CDC
prisoner work party heading out for trail
maintainence. They seemed nice enough, greeting us as we went by, and Jackie
didn't even notice they were prisoners until I pointed out the back of their
orange jumpsuits 
afterwards.
Our short 4 mile hike was over in two hours.
Before driving down to park headquarters, I stopped at a few places along China
Grade Road looking for the elusive China Grade benchmark. There was
a benchmark near the
Middle Ridge TH that was spotted easily enough, but in two attempts I didn't
find the one labeled China Grade. I think we hit
the highpoint on the south side of the road, but wasn't quite sure.
After driving down to Big Basin HQ, we visited the Visitor Center and checked
out some of the
large trees nearby, very impressive specimens. Jackie wanted to
call it a day by this time, but eventually acquiesced to my cajoling. In the
end she was glad she did because the
Pine Mtn Trail was easily the better of the
two hikes we did. From
the park HQ it's about 2.5 miles to Buzzards Roost, a
rock outcropping on the north side of Pine Mtn. We spent some time
scrambling to the highest point, a bit of 
class 3
that had Dad more nervous than 
daughter.
The maintained trail ends at
this point, but a not-hard-to-find-nor-hard-to-follow trail can be found just
behind
a sign. I left Jackie at the roost while I did the last third mile to
the top of Pine Mtn. The trail was maintained at one time, still in decent
shape, and it was not obvious why it was now being rehabilitated. There is a
large pile
of rocks marking the end of the old trail and almost nothing of
a view. Perhaps this is why the trail was discontinued to this point?
I went back to join Jackie who was doing her summer reading against
the side
of the pinnacle. She didn't want to leave her nice reading nest just yet so I
went and found another use trail to a lower pinnacle about a quarter mile to
the east.
The Pine Mtn Service Road (which is crossed several times while
ascending the Pine Mtn Trail) ends at
the base of this second pinnacle. There
may have been a communications tower or similar here at one time, but all
evidence is now gone, leaving just a large clearing.
Our last bit of excitement came back down near the bottom at Blooms Creek CG
where we had to cross the creek. Jackie wanted to forgo the bridge in favor of
a large tree fallen across the creek. Though I initially turned down her
request, I eventually acquiesced, seeing as she'd done a good job on the Pine
Mtn Trail without complaint. She started off across on her
hands and knees, but
eventually switched to a 
standing position
before getting all the way across as
her confidence increased. She thought it was great fun. I was just nervous.
We 
ended the day
after putting in about 9 miles. We'd have to do a few more on
our next outing on Friday. Now to find some summits to visit up in the Marin
County area...