After failing to complete a strenuous Munch Canyon shuttle hike in mid-July, my hiking comrades and I attempted something similar again in early August — but from the official trailhead beginning on Sunset Valley Road (upper end).

As readers can see from the photograph, the small Munch Canyon trailhead where we parked fits only three cars, but over the decades I’ve seldom seen many there except in deer-hunting season.

Although the scenic Munch Canyon Trail is not in the San Rafael Wilderness, it is nearby in Los Padres National Forest, and along this winding path you can also reach the base of named Ranger Peak (Conant map: 4.1.1.).

As we hiked in at 7:45 a.m., we noted from U.S. Forest Service signs on the adjacent poles that all motorized vehicles have been banned (the trail isn’t very suitable for regular mountain bikes either). I also felt rather dreamy striding along and queried myself whether time honestly existed on its own.

Ranger Peak itself at 4,600 feet is often in view, and sometimes we could orient ourselves by using Bryan Conant’s fine map and a simple compass.

A Santa Ynez hiker responded to the first Munch Canyon column with the information that his group has identified five types of oaks and four species of conifer along the Munch and Munch Connector trails. We observed predominantly gray pine at the higher elevations, with plenty of valley oaks and other acorn-bearing quercus trees.

While hard chaparral ruled over most of the hillsides, many glowing potreros (small meadows) dotted our meandering trail. It wasn’t quite as hot on Aug. 1 as our earlier visit on July 18, but we had started our hike later in the morning and would pay for it when we concluded that at 11 a.m.

After about a mile, the trail met a signed junction with the Munch Canyon Connector Trail veering off to the right, yet a bit of exploration confirmed the connector was badly overgrown and in places non-existent — so we backed up to the main trail and continued toward Ranger Peak. (Avoid the Connector.) After another mile or so, we chose to turn it.

A magnificent outcropping of blue serpentine caught our attention, so we stood in the shade for a while to discuss it.

One of us identified a strange-looking insect to be a thoughtfully named “diabolical iron-clad beetle” (Phloeodes diabolicus). Native to California, these low black bugs are encased in an extremely rugged exoskeleton and can live up to two years.

Iron-clad this way, they survive predators, hikers stomping on them in unnecessary hysteria, and even being run over by cars.

I also spotted a common California brown centipede (Lithobius forficatus) scurrying along the hot, sandy trail. While these do bite, the venom is minimal, and at most you will get some swelling in the limb.

This 5-mile effort was not as exhausting but just as thrilling as our mid-July Munch attempt, and once again we were foiled by the non-existent portions of the so-called Munch Canyon Connector Trail.  

Yet during the cooler portions of the Munch Canyon Trail, amid luxuriant potreros and myriad oaks and pine, I experienced time stretching out in wildly wondrous ways. Occasionally, we would cross an intermittent stream and appreciated that these rivulets still ran in the hot August backcountry.

Wandering along an unknown easy trail, I have discovered that if you can slow down time, you may live longer. If this seems like a Hermann Hesse line or drawn from Jack Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums,” maybe so.

Such an insight can only emerge beside babbling streams after intense bushwhacking (connector) amid rising heat. This idyll-become-ordeal morphed as brother Sol blasted the Earth and insects scurried for cover.  

My epiphany about time blew in with the hot winds near Sunset Valley Road and Ranger Peak, and our three-hour quest felt like a full day or even a week-long experience.

While time ostensibly enlarges as I place one foot reliably in front of the other in a nearly metronome progression, in truth and perception time has slowed radically.

Meaning: My individual temporal feelings have lost touch with linear Western time just as these trails seem to elongate indefinitely while cosmic time elongates infinitely. The practical effect is to feel like you’re on an eternal trail in cosmic time: This is the so-called “Eternal Backcountry Return” [4.1.1. Books].

Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote about time seen basically as an attribute of motion, and asserted that time actually doesn’t exist on its own. His notion of time defines it only as relative to the movements of things.

Thus, Aristotle contended that time is a measurement of change, and thus time can’t exist without some change (“succession”). He also theorized “time” requires the presence of a soul capable of “counting” the movement (the motions). As if I had been unconsciously numbering my “steps.”

For Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, space was finite like the Munch Trail, but time was and is infinite. So as “infinite” time expands, the ecstatic hiker-wanderer treads the endless eternal return and the soul refreshes.

When I occasionally glance up, the sacred Hurricane Deck fills the sky’s blue canopy as I stare north (first photograph). Like Australia’s luminous Uluru (aka Ayers’ Rock), this startling formation contains ancestral beings (the First People), hidden springs, secret caves, petroglyphs and colorful pictographs.

Yet, it turns out that time here below has also become elastic as we wander complex trails in the shadow of roving condors and atop lurking insets and masses of red poison oak.

4.1.1.

Bryan Conant, “San Raphael Wilderness Trail Guide and Map” (2015) available at Chaucer’s Books; Dan McCaslin, “Eternal Backcountry Return” (Sisquoc River Press, 2018) available on Amazon and at Chaucer’s; Aristotle, “Physics” (e.g. at 4.11 where he states that we perceive time and motion together; also 219a3-4). Thanks to John Evarts of  the Santa Ynez Valley Natural History Society for his trail information.