Goat Trails

It’s a beautiful Christmas morning. At roughly 8:30 am, I park my car across Highway 1 from the Kirk Creek Campground, 45 miles south of Big Sur Valley. High overhead lurks the hidden marble summit of Cone Peak.

The history of Wrights Tunnel in the Santa Cruz Mountains—once the second longest railroad tunnel in California—is a tale of death, greed and bigotry.

Goat Trails

Story and photos by Ryan Masters

Nov. 19, 2014—When surrounded by penises you realize that each one is unique. Not unique like the divine delicacy of a snowflake—grotesquely unique like the melting nose of a waxen clown. But still unique.

Oct. 31, 2014—I am standing in the rain at the corner of McAllister and Hyde in San Francisco surrounded by my people—that is to say, hundreds of thousands of Giants fans. We are watching an intrepid drunkard. He wears a floppy orange hat that is cleverly constructed to resemble a squid eating his head and clambering up a lamppost. He proceeds to bait a growing posse of cops in the street below. We find this infinitely amusing because we are cold, wet and bored.

Ryan Masters communes with one of the few old-growth redwoods in the southern Santa Cruz Mountains.