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By Eric Johnson

Lee Thompson, ranger with the Bureau of Land Management, is standing in the Saturday morning sun describing the almost 6,000-acre property now known as Cotoni-Coast Dairies National Monument. The occasion is a tour sponsored by the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History—the land is not yet open to the public—and there are a dozen of us gathered together to hike and learn.

I have visited this place several times, and wrote a number of articles about it during the campaign that led to its designation by Pres. Barack Obama in 2017, so I am somewhat familiar with the place. Still, the tour wound up being filled with delightful surprises.

After a gentle uphill ramble, we circle up and Thompson explains that we are standing on one of the four uplifted marine terraces that make up the majority of the property. Each of these is composed of its own primary geological feature: sandstone and mudstone in the lower two; granite and marble further upland. As we will find out over the next couple of hours, this place, which appears from Highway 1 to be a rather uniform landscape quite similar to neighboring places such as Wilder Ranch, actually is a varied piece of land that contains its own unique treasures.

Shortly after we hear from Lee, the trail heads up a canyon and into a forest. There, I am stopped in my tracks by a massive Douglas fir tree that appears to have three big, symmetrical trunks, a couple of which branch into sub-trunks. I’ve seen a lot of Doug firs but never one like this. We are hiking on a new trail, recently built by Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship, which itself is a bit of a wonder. In places, what appear to be hand-quarried chunks of sandstone are dry-stacked to form foundations that support the path across a hillside. At the bottom of a set of switchbacks, we find ourselves near Molino Creek on an easy, flat trail that, one imagines, involved some serious machete work.

As a person who has hiked thousands of miles in the Santa Cruz Mountains over four decades, I found this particular walk in the woods exceptional. The fact that we were on a lightly guided tour and not an ordinary Saturday stroll might have sharpened my senses. The company—a group of people drawn together by a natural history museum—helped. When a birder spied what she immediately spotted as an osprey headed out to sea, we all stopped and looked up—a relatively common sighting, made special by the setting. As we were stopped for lunch at a shady turn of the trail 20 minutes later, the osprey returned with a fish in its claws: Yes!

Other uncommon sightings of common wonders: the beautifully decomposing tail feather of a red-tailed hawk; the shockingly red berries of a baneberry bush; a small, dense grove on a steep hillside of identically-sized redwoods; another Doug fir jutting from a rocky outcrop, apparently hundreds of years old and no more than 12 feet tall—nature’s bonsai; the camouflaged and almost hidden large nest of … I don’t know what.

On this day filled with memorable moments, one stands out. I was walking at the time in a small group that included Ranger Thompson and Gus Porras-Center, a PhD-packing neuro-biologist and serious amateur naturalist. I had noticed that the trail, which passed through a marginally dense forest, was littered with white detritus, and had already guessed they may be owl pellets. These (pardon me) are undigested and regurgitated chunks that have passed through an owl’s gizzard—the big birds hack one of these up every day, ordinarily while ensconced in their nest or perched in the upper branch of a favorite tree.

I only share this possibly disgusting information because Gus had gotten down on a knee to examine one of these pellets and in it found: a tiny, elegant, mouse skull. Again, I’m sorry if this is a bit much, but to me, this was one of the coolest nature discoveries I’ve witnessed in some time.

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The Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, a local leader in nature education since 1904, has been tasked with creating trailside interpretive signage for Cotoni Coast Dairies. The public was given a glimpse at the collaborative work between the museum, BLM, and Land Trust of Santa Cruz County at an exhibition the museum put up this summer: "Cotoni-Coast Dairies: Monumental Steps."

Gus Porras-Center learned about the museum’s tour while attending an event during that time. A native of southern Spain who moved to Watsonville a year ago, Porras-Center says the openness of the coastal prairie makes him feel at home.

“I understand that some folks might prefer other kinds of landscapes,“ he says, “but the short brush, the dry grass is, the sandy spaces—I find this comforting, because I used to spend a lot of summers in the coastal pine woodlands near sand dunes.”

Like me, Porras-Center also appreciated the varied terrain.

“I really enjoyed transitioning between the different ecosystems and zones,“ he says. “It was almost like passing through a curtain as we went from the conifer forest to oak woodland, and you could see the boundary of these two places just by looking down at the fallen oak leaves.”

A similar sentiment was expressed by Karen Schmidt, a 1991 graduate of the UC Santa Cruz science communications program who worked as a journalist for more than a decade before taking a position teaching science at Aptos High School 15 years ago (she is now happily retired).

“I expected it to be more like Wilder Ranch,” she says. “I was really surprised by the upper forests.”

Schmidt, who volunteers at the museum, says she was pleased to find a number of native plants in the woods above the former grazing land, which is mostly populated by non-native grasses.

“Once we got up into the gulches and gullies, where cattle have not been munching, it looks like a repository for some native plants.”

“After going on the trip, I can’t help but think about the potential for more environmental education, especially working with the indigenous people here, to get more native plants growing and spreading, and using the trails as a kind of classroom.”

Ross Johnston, who is just three months into his tenure as the Museum of Natural History‘s public programs manager, says he is pleased and honored that the museum is seen as a trusted leader in science education, and that organizations including BLM and Land Trust are helping the museum reach bigger audiences.

“I’m just coming from a place of excitement and gratitude,” Johnston says. “It’s just beautiful that we are able to come together and collaborate with so many constituents. The fact that they were willing to open this area to us for a behind-the-scenes tour is really amazing.”

Johnston reports that the event sold out quickly—it was announced on a Thursday and every slot was filled by Monday. He encourages folks to sign up for one of the upcoming tours on September 28 or November 23 to experience this special place themselves before it opens for public access.