View from Hi Mountain Lookout along SLOCREST Trail toward Pacific Ocean

Our project is to create a trail along the crest of the Coast Range Morro Bay to the Carrizo Plains.

As was done with the initial planning for the PCT the trail will be a collection of existing trails and dirt roads with some trail building required. As the trail comes into existence there should be additional trail building to move the trail off of the roads.

Another problem to surmount is the private land which will need to be crossed. The PCT again offers lessons here. About 300 miles of the 2600 mile long PCT is located on Private land.

This trail will offer open up the vast wild lands that lie in central and eastern San Luis Obispo County. 

"Having covered the entire length of the project by various modes of transport, hiking, biking, packing, and chasing wild steers on the Chimineas at one end to gathering cows and calfs at the Bernardo ranch on the other it is hard for me to imagine a more diverse and precious landscape to traverse within the county. "

Bruce Hilton, San Luis Obispo County Parks Commissioner

Things of Intrinsic Worth
written by  Wallace McRae

Remember that sandrock on Emmells Crick
Where Dad carved his name in 'thirteen?
It's been blasted down into rubble
And interred by their dragline machine.
Where Fadhls lived, at the old Milar Place,
Where us kids stole melons at night?
They 'dozed it up in a funeral pyre
Then torched it. It's gone alright.
The "C" on the hill, and the water tanks
Are now classified, "reclaimed land."
They're thinking of building a golf course
Out there, so I understand.
The old Egan Homestead's an ash pond
That they say is eighty feet deep.
The branding corral at the Douglas Camp
Is underneath a spoil heap.
And across the crick is a tipple, now,
Where they load coal onto a train,
The Mae West Rock on Hay Coulee?
Just black and white snapshots remain.
There's a railroad loop and a coal storage shed
Where the bison kill site used to be.
The Guy Place is gone; Ambrose's too.
Beulah Farley's a ranch refugee.

But things are booming. We've got this new school
That's envied across the whole state.
When folks up and ask, "How's things goin' down there?"
I grin like a fool and say, "Great!"
Great God, how we're doin'! We're rollin' in dough,
As they tear and they ravage The Earth.
And nobody knows…or nobody cares…
About things of intrinsic worth.

® Wallace McRae. All Rights Reserved. From Things of Intrinsic Worth and Cowboy Curmudgeon and Other Poems by Wallace McRae. 

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