CASTING ABOUT

“Santa Cruz – The Home City of the Pacific Coast," by H.R. Judah, Jr.,  Out West Magazine, 1906, Volume XXV, No. 2, August, 1906.

"The railroad finally leaves the valley and suddenly one finds himself in the heart of the Santa Cruz mountains, with their trout-enlivened streams and towering redwoods. Ah! how delightful are those mountains, where the breath of the sea and the balmy air from the pines and redwoods on the mountain sides com mingle. But the woodman's mercenary axe and the forest fires are destined slowly but surely to divest the mountains of Santa Cruz of much of their beauty. What a crime it is to destroy those trees! I remember seeing some men cutting down a kingly redwood in those mountains one day. After the tree had fallen one of the men turned to me and said, 'What to do you think of that job?' 'Well,' I replied, 'I feel as though I were an accessory to a murder.' And so I did. But California is destined to pay dearly for such crimes. Twill not be long before the destruction of her forests will so seriously interfere with the rainfall that her agricultural interests will suffer most fearfully. To see huge redwoods, hundreds of years old, cut up for fence posts and rails is not conducive to equanimity of spirit." 

 

Scott Peden Collection

"Disciples of Izaak Walton will find much pleasure in whipping the streams of the Santa Cruz mountains. They must needs be better fishermen than I, however, else they will not get a full basket. Still, I did pretty well myself, before I got through. A young Chinese lad, whom I ran across in one of the little mountain hamlets, volunteered to catch trout for me by the day — for a consideration. After that the thing was easy … whatever his name was, would sally forth with an alder switch, a cheap cotton line and a can of angle worms, and catch rainbow trout by the dozen. I gave him my flies and rods and things when I came away. I afterward heard that he traded the pole for a jackknife and, after cutting off the hooks, made a necklace of the feathery flies for a little girl of the neighborhood! He did not even experiment with the fancy fishing outfit. He was a wise heathen, that one."

 

"Through the Santa Cruz range lies the trail by which General John C. Fremont reached the coast. I climbed up the old trail one day to the top of the ridge from which the old general first saw the Pacific. The climb was a rough and tedious one, and the fact that I could stand when the top was reached, demonstrated to my own satisfaction that there was plenty of reserve force in me, even though I was in search of health. As I stood there gazing out over the lovely landscape and saw in the distance the shimmering bay of Monterey, I could understand Fremont's emotions when he said, 'That is the most beautiful picture I ever saw!"'

 

"The big tree grove of the Santa Cruz mountains is well worth a visit, if one has never seen those monster redwoods — sequoia sempervirens —"

 

Source: Panama and the Sierras – A Doctor’s Wander Days by G. Frank Lydston, M.D., The Riverton Press, Chicago, 1900.