Enchanted canyon

Surrounded by forests, eerily arid 'The Cedars' defies reality of Sonoma County landscape with serpentine rock, springs, exotic vegetation

By MEG McCONAHEY, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT, May 8, 2003

(Source: http://www.northbay.com/recreation/general/08cedars_d1.html)

Reaching it is like taking a white-knuckle safari on the pitted roads of another continent -- a jarring ride that requires a beefy four-wheel drive to forge through seven swollen creeks.

A beautiful waterfall is a popular area for botanist Roger Raiche to bring people to that are visiting The Cedars near Cazadero. (Photo by Crista Jeremiason)

But arriving is like landing on the surface of another planet.

Just a few hairpin turns from the redwood forest lies this mysterious place, where a sheer wall of barren serpentine rises above a narrow cleft in the low mountains between Cazadero and the coast.

Early settlers called it "The Cedars," probably misidentifying the glaucous green Sargent cypresses, which only grow on serpentine rock. But well-known Bay Area botanist Roger Raiche, who has been exploring these remote ridges and canyons for more than 20 years, calls it "another world."

Here is a landscape like no other in Sonoma County, an eerily arid island surrounded by the oak savannah and moist redwood forests only a few miles down the narrow dirt and gravel trail that passes for a main road through the property.

You might expect to find such a hot arid vegetation pattern in a place like Lake County. But it is intriguingly out of place so close to the ocean.

"It's the unexpectedness," Raiche said, "that makes it so exciting for me."

So out of the way is The Cedars that the locked entrance is 4¼ miles down the little-traveled King Ridge Road beyond Cazadero. But the gate hardly means you're there. Hang on to your lunch. Prepare for another 45 bumpity minutes by four-wheel drive up into the canyon, the heart of the 540 acres of The Cedars that Raiche and his partner,David McCrory, finally had an opportunity to purchase in 1997.

In the six years since, the pair, who recently moved their respected Planet Horticulture landscape design business from Berkeley to a 26-acre spread in Occidental, have not been selfish with this special spot. Every year they lead treks for members of the California Native Plant Society and other groups by special arrangement. They also frequently make it available to botanists, geologists and other scientists, including a team of NASA researchers who are studying the area's unique mineral springs for signs of micro-organisms capable of surviving in their waters with an extemely high alkalinity.

Such research, they hope, may lead to new insights into how life on earth evolved in such extreme environments and how it might be developing on other planets.

On Saturday, Raiche will lead a slide show tour for the general public at the Spring Wildflower Festival at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts. One of the prizes offered at the festival, put on by the Milo Baker Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, is a private tour of The Cedars.

McCrory said Raiche's years of experience exploring the state in search of rare plants has shown him how much habitat is being lost to development.

"Our hope is that we can show a good example of private ownership of land that needs to be conserved and also to show how much we can learn and gain from preservation and conservation of wild areas, not just collection seeds but collecting the land where these plants grow so they can be preserved forever."

Set on botanically inhospitable serpentine, a dense rock more commonly found below the surface, on the upper layer of the earth's mantle, or on the ocean floor -- it is home to unusual plant life, some quite rare, like the Mount St. Helena Morning Glory that grows only on serpentine. The Cedars is also a haven for five plant species or subspecies found nowhere else on earth.

It was here that Raiche, who for more than two decades has overseen the California Native Plant Collection at the University of California at Berkeley Botanical Gardens, identified his first new plant, a crowning moment for any budding horticulturist. It was an as-yet unrecorded variety of calochortus, a member of the lily family. It was taller that its more commonly seen California cousins, but with only two flowers of pale yellow. Now it bears his name, "Calochortus raichei."

It was a variety that other botanists who had made their way to the site, hidden away in Western Sonoma County, had somehow missed -- perhaps coming too early in the season, before the bloom.

"It was an exiting discovery. This plant is not known anywhere else in the world other than on the serpentine of the cedars," Raiche marveled on a recent visit, a day when the steep slopes were was cool and slick from a heavy morning rain.

"I've always been totally amazed at the place. A whole canyon that no one knows about."

Raiche was first drawn to the place back in 1981, his curiosity piqued by a specimen of a rare lady slipper orchid in the University of Calfornia collection collected near an old mine in Sonoma County. His first hike in, he found the elusive orchid and fell under the spell of the place.

"As soon as I got in the canyon I was totally blown away. This is the most amazing place. In all my years in California I still have yet to see any place quite as unusual as The Cedars," he says.

Raiche has coveted it ever since. Wrangling permission from a previous owner, he returned many times to traverse it's creek beds, its rocky ledges and ridges, sometimes hiking in from the gate, going several miles over the ridge, sweltering in temperatures that topped 100 degrees.

Over the years, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade any environmental or preservation groups to acquire a part of The Cedars, which encompasses some 5,000 acres, half of which is under the control of the federal Bureau of Land Management and the rest under private ownership. So when the canyon, representing the farthest reaches, came on the market in the 1990s, he and McCrory bought it themselves.

The site is not entirely untouched. During the early to mid-20th century to World War II, it was mined for chromite, and ruins of the old operation, from rusty truck parts to the iron-gated little dynamite magazine in the hillside, remain. McCrory and Raiche burned down the old mining cookhouse a couple of years ago, and instead, set up their own rustic camp overlooking Austin Creek.

But The Cedars remains nonetheless, biologically intact, protected by its rugged geology from intrusion by invasive, non-native plants. It is, Raiche explains, as nature designed it, and that is becoming an increasing rarity.

He's spent countless hours and days "botanizing" the area, discovering other varieties of plants seen nowhere else.

With the spring rains it comes to life with color -- billows of wild azaleas in pink and white that on a warm day fill the air with overpowering fragrance.

Raiche selected a stream orchid from The Cedars, one with very dark purple foliage, Epipactis gigantea, to introduce into horticulture. Dubbed "Serpentine Night," it was honored with an award from Britain's Royal Horticultural Society.

Other rare plants endemic only to this most remote canyon still thrive, including a new type of Cream Bush, a subspecies of manzanita and a variety of jewel flower identified decades ago by Monte Rio botanist Feed Hoffman.

There are other plants where The Cedars represents their western-most or southern-most occurrence.

"To us," said McCrory, "the Cedars is a bigger thing than us as individuals. It's God's Country. It's just a special place that deserves protection and we hope by sharing our example that other people can be inspired to work toward the conservation of other areas that have really unique habitats like this."

For more information about The Cedars or Planet Horticulture, call 874-9625.

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 521-5204 or mmcconahey@pressdemocrat.com

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