panoche road

Tags: #places #dispatches #sketches #natureNot that far south of Hollister, make a left at a little complex of buildings or a large farm, depending on how you look at it, that’s the start of it. This is CR J1, the Panoche Road, and it is only marginally maintained. As it winds its way up the Tres Pinos gulch the grand landscape views are presented in miniature. The views are close, the walls rise steeply but not to a particularly great height, and yet all the necessary components are present. The flat valley bottom, the flood plain, it’s barely a hundred feet wide. The creek, mostly dry right now, has cut a sharp vertical channel through it, a couple of feet deep. And the stream bed itself is gravel and stone cobbles. Everywhere along the bottom is green and as the land rises above the tiny plain, the grasses dry and brown. There are some cows here, and some horses there. In the wider places there might be a farm, or a dirt road leading off into the mountains, up some side creek’s…