North Coast's pygmy forests have an aura of enchantment

Salt Point State Park, 20 miles north of Jenner on Highway 1, has a 1.4 mile long hike to Pygmy Forest, out and back, or add another mile to do the hike as a loop. For both, start from the Woodside Campground parking area on the east side of the highway just south of the main park entrance. Take Central Trail to North Trail, climbing through redwoods and marine terraces 500 feet in elevation to the pygmy section, which has a somewhat different mix of trees (no Bolander pine) than the Mendocino sections. Park fee is $8. Camping is available in the park.

Van Damme State Park, just south of Mendocino, provides two ways to see the pygmies. Walking up the aptly named and lush green Fern Canyon trail, the Pygmy Forest is about 8 miles from the trailhead, and 500 feet higher. Alternatively, one can drive to a 0.25 mile short Pygmy loop in the Park, by turning east on Little River Airport Road, just south of Mendocino on Hwy 1. Drive inland for 2.8 miles to the signed parking lot and trailhead on your left. The pygmy forest trail here is actually a raised wooden platform, to protect the extremely slow growing life underfoot, and wheelchair accessible. The State Park has an $8 day use fee, but the Airport Road access is free. Camping is available in the park.

Jug Handle State Natural Reserve, five miles north of Mendocino, has a 2.5 mile easy to moderate trail that starts at the ocean and climbs a well-signed Ecological Staircase through a beautiful sequence of plants and forests on five terraces, with the Pygmy Forest at the topmost. Parking and trailhead are just off Hwy 1, and a self-guided nature tour provides interesting detail on what you’re seeing. Open sunrise to sunset, it’s free. No camping in the Reserve, but available nearby.

It’s estimated that less than 2,000 total acres of the rare pygmy ecotome remains, scattered and largely unprotected in Mendocino and northern Sonoma Counties, where they’ve been used for garbage dumps, airstrips, and private development. Thanks to ongoing conservation efforts – Hans Jenny’s wife and Teresa Sholar’s husband brought the first successful lawsuit to limit their destruction with the Sierra Club in the 1980’s – some are now under California State protection and accessible to the public.

In the summer of 1956, a small team drove up from Anaheim California and into the Pygmy Forest east of the village of Mendocino. They were on a mission: to bring back specimens of the rare miniature trees that grew there.

With the help of a State Park ranger, Walt Disney’s crew carefully extracted an ancient, gnarled pygmy Bolander Pine, drove home and transplanted it in the new dwarf forest Walt was creating for Snow White in Storybook Land. There, to everyone’s surprise, it reportedly resuscitated and began to grow towards its full natural height, 10 stories tall.

Hidden within a long, narrow strip of the westernmost coastal hills of Mendocino and Sonoma Counties, the pygmy forests still have an aura of enchantment today. They’re inhabited by stands of rare wispy pine and cypress trees, some more than a hundred years old, but still as thin as broom handles and barely as tall as a standing adult.

The stunted trees live in a realm of their own, an ecological niche of white bleached soil and lichens, awash in sunlight, an eerie oasis surrounded by dense forests of towering redwoods and firs.

After nearly a century of study, the mystery of why they only grow here, and stay so small, is still being unraveled, although a handful of dedicated investigators have been steadily collecting the clues.

When people come to study the pygmy forests, the expert everyone calls is Teresa Sholars, a trim, energetic local ecologist, who obliges with personal tours, encyclopedic knowledge and an educator’s passion for her chosen subject.

Now an emeritus professor, Sholars was 21 when she first encountered the pygmies with her botanist husband Robert. Coming to Mendocino in the ‘70s, they fell in with a colorful Swiss researcher who was commuting from UC Berkeley, Hans Jenny.

Jenny, the top soil scientist in America and internationally renowned, was trying to understand the unusual earths of the pygmy region, and fighting to rally protection for their globally unique ecology.

Teresa spent the next 40 years studying the forests, and working to preserve them, first with her husband, and after his death, as a professor and an expert with environmental, native plant and community groups.

The first clue to the pygmy mystery, and the one Jenny uncovered, is buried underfoot. Drive along winding Highway 1 near Mendocino and in places you’ll find yourself on a flat straightaway. To the west, the flat coastal plain drops off a cliff into the blue Pacific, and to the east, a rank of forested hills climb, one above the other, a thousand feet or so.

It’s not obvious from the car, but if you walk up into those hills it’s possible to see they’re actually a series of relatively flat platforms, separated by fairly steep slopes — a giant staircase — all the way down to the sea.

On the staircase, under carpets of redwood forest, tan oak groves, huckleberries, ferns and soil, Jenny and other investigators discovered ancient sand dunes, and then seabed. The platforms weren’t hills, but a series of marine terraces, giant flat slabs of wave-cut sandstone from the ocean floor.

The individual steps were carved by the high sea levels between Ice Ages, and then left exposed when the ice returned, lowering the sea level again. When sea levels were low, cliff faces were cut in the seaward edge of the exposed flat platforms by the Pacific surf, and then the steps were preserved, one after the other, as the entire coastline was pushed up over time by tectonic forces.