They say that when threatened by fire, one should head towards water. If that’s the case, then hiking five days along the ocean shore was the best thing I could have done while a swarm of fifty forest fires wreaked havoc among the peaks of the Northern California Coast Range.

After contending with multiple highway closures and valleys clogged with smoke, I escaped the blazing forests and drove to the mouth of the Mattole River where the fifty-three-mile Lost Coast Trail began. I had always wanted to backpack along this remote and rugged coastline. Four-thousand-foot mountains rose straight out of the ocean here, steep enough to defy the ambitions of the nation’s best road builders and developers. Highway 1 had to be constructed twenty miles inland because of the challenging terrain, and this rerouting preserved what is now the most primitive segment of the entire California coast.