The Fiscalini Ranch Preserve’s Bluff Trail at the Marine Terrace. 
The Fiscalini Ranch Preserve’s Windsor Drive entrance. 
The Bluff Trail and the Marine Terrace Trail at the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve. 
Artfully designed benches are placed along the Bluff Trail. 
A view from the end of the Bluff Trai at south Windsor. 
A sign for a Chinese temple in Cambria. 
The Chinese temple. 
Chinese immigrants carry a roasted pig.
During early October along California's Central Coast, crashing waves hammer the coastal cliffs below and distract one’s attention as balmy sea winds tousle one's unruly hair. Treading along the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve’s neat boardwalk on the captivating Bluff Trail, my hiking partner and I observe numerous seabirds and white, foaming surf pounding below. The tiny, inquisitive snouts of California harbor seals and sea otters dot the areas near the masses of kelp.
In the 1890s, Chinese immigrants harvested and dried the kelp as well as harvested the easily available abalone.
Unlike the daring surfers who actually enter our glorious Pacific Ocean and cavort, I’ve always enjoyed hiking near the water or on cliffs above it (think of Point Lobos) or even on boats floating atop the water. Readers know that a recent column detailed another easy hike on some seaside cliffs, those in Goleta above Santa Barbara Shores County Park, and this hike follows a cliff path called the Bluff Trail in Cambria’s 437-acre Fiscalini Ranch Preserve.
Cambria is about 130 miles north of Santa Barbara, and in an earlier column I mentioned walking the boardwalk at the Piedras Blancas sea lion rookery near there, as well as the possibility of inexpensive car-camping at the 115-site Hearst San Simeon State Park campground. See 4.1.1.
However you get there and wherever you spend the night, one eventually realizes that the slick resort town of cute Cambria really distracts from several exciting hikes in the area. For serious backpackers, there is Salmon Creek Falls and the six miles up to the Coast Ridge Road, and for more casual tourists, many options pop up. The ever-present spectacular coastline begs for exploration and offers many windows into those “sublime” feelings the Romantics believed were essential to human happiness.
After a five-minute drive from downtown Cambria toward Moonstone Beach, we stop at a dead-end on Windsor Boulevard. It serves as one entrance to the large Fiscalini Ranch Preserve parcel. There is parking for four cars and an area for wheelchair-access vans.
Climbing up a few steps, we choose the obvious wide, wooden boardwalk (wheelchair accessible) that initiates the most scenic loop on Marine Terrace: the Bluff Trail. After ascending just a hundred yards or so, the entire ocean suddenly becomes visible and the hiker hears shore birds screeching and surf pounding the dark rocks below. Higher up, a bit like at Montaña de Oro, the now above-water ancient marine terrace rises steeply.
Our Bluff Trail meanders along the highly picturesque and treeless bluffs (cliff tops) for an exciting and easy mile, and then one either returns the same way or swerves left, uphill, taking one of the numerous ascents to see other parts of the huge pristine reserve.
If you visit with older folks or children, there are several bizarre and wild benches placed artfully on your way.
Brochures available on-site list 17 separate paths to the top of the broad marine terrace formation, and I recommend trying out No. 6, the Forest Loop Trail, along with the Bluff Trail.
On this charming hike, you’ll find 70 acres of the environmentally stressed Monterey pine. This beautiful conifer has a limited range on the California coast today (just three main stands left), although it’s the most widely planted conifer globally.
What we see in California today are relics of the Pleistocene coastal coniferous forest that supported our native Monterey pine from modern Riverside County in the south to modern Marin County in the north.
Therefore, the hikers can pick and choose their routes, and perhaps take the two-mile Bluff Trail there and back while staring at the ocean and the seals, and then change the pleasant stroll into a sweaty six-mile workout hike up along the Forest Loop Trail.
Since we only did the two miles, my partner and I began exploring Cambria itself later in the day. Near the Rigdon House on Burton Drive, we urban hiked into the surprising Greenspace Creekside Reserve — a protected 1.7-acre natural area alongside Santa Cruz Creek (which was running).
I’m a historian and history teacher, and with all of our current public debate about immigration and U.S. history, imagine my surprise when we found a refurbished Chinese temple at the Creekside Reserve.
Who would have considered the concept of 19th-century Chinese immigrants living in Cambria, replete with a social center and temple?
Like the United States importing Chinese workers to help build the Union Pacific Railroad, Chinese workers gravitated to the seaside Cambria area in the 1880s to work in nearby quicksilver mines, as well as to harvest seaweed and abalone, both of which could be dried and exported back to China.
The rebuilt Chinese temple seen in the photograph was also a fraternal and social center sweetly situated on sloping banks next to the reliable creek. We know there were ceremonies and feasts, as seen with the two men carrying a roasted pig in the last black-and-white photo.
We don’t know how many Chinese immigrants lived in Cambria and used the temple, but their numbers kept diminishing as more and more fled this area. They likely felt the continually growing anti-Chinese sentiment signaled by the shameful 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that forbade any more Chinese immigrants.
This left those Chinese laborers who were already here in a fix — if they left California, they would likely never be allowed back. At any rate, none was left by 1916.
Deep time, immigration, ecstatic visions of the foaming sea from the Bluff Trail, Chinese immigrants living here … . At midweek, there were few other hikers, mostly aging silverbacks and some foreign tourists, particularly Chinese and Germans.
4-1-1
» From downtown Cambria, follow the signs to Moonstone Beach. At the Moonstone Beach turnoff, go straight instead on Windsor Drive to the very end (a dead-end). Begin hiking in the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve (parking on the street is also OK). Dogs must be on a leash, and bike usage is restricted to specific trails. Bring a camera and water.
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in the Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
