The four-wheeler groans its way in low gear, trying to negotiate a particularly treacherous piece of King's Creek Road. Like virtually all county roads, King's Creek Road was originally a logging road, designed to haul out redwoods to nearby mills. The tires flirt menacingly with precipices. Ten to 50 feet below us on the left gurgles the creek from which the road takes its name. Miniwaterfalls crest over boulders and splash into eddying pools as King's Creek winds through the redwood forest, eventually flowing into the San Lorenzo River.
Similar slides lacerate hillsides throughout the county.
To the untrained eye, they are merely organic fallout from nature's fury. He echoes an opinion widely held among geologists, biologists and even foresters that disastrous erosion problems stem from an estimated hundreds of miles of both new and abandoned logging roads and illegally constructed roads that snake throughout Santa Cruz County. While many environmentalists are still pointing the finger at logging as one of the culprits causing damage throughout the ecosystem, they're only partially right. It's not just tree removal, says Sam Herzberg, an environmental resource planner in San Mateo County, but also the paths that bring them out that are responsible for choked watersheds, a threatened coho salmon and steelhead population and ground destabilization that endangers homes and lives. Prized as a source of durable and beautiful building material, the huge, ancient redwoods were virtually decimated in this county.