![]() ![]() It’s not that the bold and the outdoorsy are discouraged by the danger or the distance. High tides make walking along the beach a precarious endeavor in Torrey Pines and elsewhere. In the intervening years, only a handful of hikers have attempted to hike the entire California coastline. But the group escaped to become closer and more determined,” wrote Bob Lorentzen and Richard Nichols in their 2003 trail book “Hiking the California Coast.” Both authors hiked part of the 1996 expedition and Nichols was present during the close call at the Lost Coast.Ī couple months later, the expedition reached the border with Mexico, becoming the first known group to complete the California Coastal Trail. ![]() “There the drenched, demoralized hikers huddled by a smoky fire and wondered if their luck had run out barely a tenth of the way through their ambitious trek. Each pair of muddy boot prints on his coat marked an additional survivor.Įach hiker made it across Kortum before he lifted himself up and leapt to safety over the blackberry bramble.Īs they waited for the tide to lower, the frazzled group hunkered down for four hours in a tiny cove sheltered from the waves by the rock face they had just climbed. One by one, the other seven hikers stepped on and across him. “Walk across me, and you can get to the next headland where there’s a trail,” Kortum reportedly said as he laid across a thicket of wild blackberry vines, every inch of his lanky frame bridging the void between drowning and safety. He laid like a plank for several minutes - a human bridge for each of his friends to walk over to get to safety. Kortum, an experienced hiker and decades-long coastal advocate regarded as the father of the Sonoma County environmental movement, donned his heavy raincoat, tossed his backpack over the ravine, and stretched his body over the breach in the rock wall. If they could climb over the gap, he reckoned they would be safe from the rising tide. The oldest among them, Bill Kortum, spotted a gap in the ridgeline where a small creek trickled into the ocean. The volunteers feared for their lives as the fog cleared overhead and the tide rolled up to their hiking boot-laden feet.įirst, to the ankles, then, to the shins, finally, up to their chests and rising fast - powerful high tide waves threatened to suck the hikers to sea or submerge them completely.ĭesperate to get off their receding perch on the sand, the eight hikers surveyed the coastline for escape routes. The group ranged from 44 to 68 years of age, including one woman who described herself as “not a hiker at all.” The aim of their expedition a quarter-century ago was not to pull off an extraordinary athletic feat it was to raise awareness about the trail that they loved. ![]() The team was made up of volunteers from Coastwalk California, a non-profit organization focused on coastal access and dedicated to the completion of the California Coastal Trail. It was on one of these remote sandy shorelines that the first group of eight hikers attempting to complete a walk along the California Coast from Oregon all the way to the border with Mexico was in serious danger of drowning only a few days into their 1,150-mile journey in the summer of 1996. ![]()
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