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The quiet was only one remarkable aspect of this May riding trek through hilly forest and along craggy Pacific beaches about 150 miles north of San Francisco. Riding athletic endurance horses, my husband, Joe, and I were exploring the Northern California coast in a different way, spending little time along the congested Pacific Coast Highway, (Highway 1), which coils, climbs and plunges along the jagged rim of the continent. Its vantage points are spectacular: cliffs fringed with green pines sheer down to the roiling gray Pacific. But its heavy traffic meant our views were more like snatched glances from behind a Winnebago.
Horses afford a view of a different world on this coast, where both nature and society are constantly buffeted by shifting, sometimes colliding, forces. Our riding trip, five days in all, took us into the forests and the hills, along old logging roads where Noel pointed out hand-hewn notches on giant redwood stumps and deep earthen furrows where monster logs began their long slide down to swollen streams that floated them to sawmills. We trotted for miles on well-maintained public horse trails on bluffs overlooking the ocean. We galloped up mountains to clearings where we were stunned by sudden majestic views of the Pacific. We cantered along the foaming cold surf and crossed pastures where cattle grazed.
Our trek was part of a package called the Redwood Coast Ride, which is offered by Lari Shea, a well-known figure on the international endurance-riding circuit. In endurance riding, which has its roots in tests performed by cavalries all over the world,seasoned riders follow timed courses for 50 miles or more over rugged terrain. Crossing the finish line first is one of the goals; getting your horse there in top-notch physical condition is the other. Veterinarians at checkpoints before, after and during the race disqualify horses with too high a heartbeat, dehydration or other problems.
Ms. Shea operates cross-country and coastal rides from her stable at Ricochet Ridge Ranch in Fort Bragg, about 10 miles north of the town of Mendocino and a four-hour drive from San Francisco. We chose Ricochet Ranch because Ms. Shea offers a choice of tack, including English, which we prefer to bulkier Western saddles. English-style trekking is hard to find in the United States.
Like all good trekking operators, Ms. Shea and her guides, like Noel, have the intuition and knowledge to match horse with rider.
"I can usually tell whether you can ride just by the way you get out of a car," said Noel, 44, who started out cowboy-shy on our trip and by the second day was regaling us with stories of growing up in this lonely part of California. In registering riders for the trip, Ms. Shea also has guests briefly describe their skill levels; she can accommodate riders from beginner to advanced.
We timed our trip to coincide with the height of spring, and day after day we were surrounded by flowers -- huge stands of rhododendrons under the redwoods, hot-orange California poppies, pink foxglove and wild blue iris.
Ricochet Ridge Ranch offers a weeklong trek for groups of riders every month during warm weather, but it offers custom trips year round. We had to be in San Francisco for a couple of days, and she arranged a five-day trek for us. Each day's route was different, though the routine was similar. We'd arrive at the ranch at 9:30 a.m. and meet Noel, a wiry man with the build of a jockey. We'd watch as the day visitors left for the popular one-and-a-half-hour beach rides. Then we'd load our three horses into a trailer and take them to a trailhead in the forest or along the beach. We'd ride three hours before stopping for a picnic lunch prepared by Noel. After another few hours of riding and a return in the trailer, we'd be back at the ranch by 5 or 5:30.
We stayed at local inns, so there was plenty of time for a shower and rest, then dinner at a restaurant in Fort Bragg or down the coast in Mendocino.
The day we arrived, Noel sauntered over to greet us by name. He took us into the barn, where Ms. Shea had left us detailed biographies of our horses. Joe was assigned to Sungari, an 8-year-old bay gelding, who had recently outtrotted nearly a hundred horses to win first place in a 50-mile endurance race in California. I was on Nikita, also 8, a bay gelding. Both Sungari and Nikita, I read with some alarm, were to be Brazil's entries in the Pan American Championships in endurance racing in Canada later in the summer. Though we are both experienced riders, I wondered whether the horses would be too much for us.
Noel sensed the apprehension. "Come on and meet your horses," he suggested.
We went to one of the corrals where the pair were basking in the sun. Nikita wore a turquoise fabric bridle and breastplate and matching blanket with saddlebags. Sungari was outfitted in red. They looked as if they were going to an aerobics class, which, in a way, they were.
Noel warned me that we'd be going to the beach, which he said Nikita regarded as his personal sandbox, for our hourlong shakedown ride.
Actually, Nikita gleefully regarded it more like his personal racetrack. It was hard to hold him back once we turned onto the open beach, which stretched ahead empty and, for a horse that likes to run, enticingly into the faraway ocean mists. When we returned from our brisk ride up the beach, part fast trot and part thundering gallop, I looked Noel in the eye and asked if I had too much horse.
"No," he said simply. The next morning, when we set out on our first full-day ride, I realized he was exactly right.
Noel loaded up the horses, hitched the trailer to the ranch's red Ford pickup and drove to Jackson Demonstration State Forest, a big tract of woodland just north of Mendocino. We unloaded the horses, then followed soft paths through second-growth redwood. Noel pointed out a "fairy circle" of sequoias that ringed a huge stump. Deep pink rhododendrons were in bloom, with scatterings of wild iris underneath. In shadier spots, ferns rose four feet high.
After an hour or so of this forest reverie, Nikita was aggressively eager to get on with some action; Joe's horse was quieter. Both animals had Russian connections -- crosses of Arabian and Russian Orlov, a breed developed by the Czars about 200 years ago for trotting and endurance. As we rode, Noel talked about horses and local concerns: the logging industry and the newcomers -- the affluent second-home owners from the Bay Area, Silicon Valley and even Southern California who have discovered this part of the coast. Big, expensive new homes now claim whole hillsides and their sweeping views of the sea. In tiny town halls, in coffee shops and in the columns of the local weekly paper, titanic battles rage over the minutiae of California coastal and woodlands development regulation.
Sean Arabi for The New York Times
Riders from Ricochet Ridge Ranch stop to look out over the hills north of Mendocino and, beyond, to the Pacific.
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With a rueful chuckle, Noel said, "You'd think it was New York City they're fighting over instead of an old logging town."
The result is a simmering cultural standoff. On two-lane Highway 1, logging trucks share the road with fancily attired long-distance bicyclists, with tourists, impatient local commuters and even in-line skaters in summer. This being California, each constituency believes in its inalienable right to the road, and it is not unusual to see a logging truck tailgating a stubborn bicyclist on a plunging downgrade.
Horses, of course, are the ultimate off-road vehicle. On our second full day, we set off on the beach, mostly galloping the three-mile stretch that ends where the foot of a coastal mountain range juts into the sea. Ms. Shea met us at the finish, and we loaded the horses into the trailer and drove a few miles inland to her new property, a hilly 300-acre spread with spectacular ocean views. In one of the pastures, Nikita's mother and her new filly grazed lazily in the sun.
When we mounted again, we took an old logging road that climbed into the woods. Noel was riding a stable rookie, a little Arabian palomino that was decidedly skittish. We marveled at his patience and sweet talk, which transformed the horse into a leader by the end of the day.
During a clear stretch, we cantered about two miles to the top of a hill. Then we walked slowly down a steep, rocky trail into a hollow of old-growth redwood. Again, we climbed. At the crest of the mountain, the woods cleared to provide us with a sudden view of sunlight flooding across the Pacific under a blue sky that still had an icing of fog far out to sea. We stopped there for lunch, in a grassy field where the horses could graze and rest.
The next day, taking it easy after two long days, we rode for two hours along the bluffs over the ocean.
In the afternoon, we changed hotels, moving from a cottage with a deck opening onto a lush garden in Fort Bragg to a reconstructed historic hotel in Mendocino. Loggers from New England built Mendocino, now a seaside tourist town of 1,100 that bills itself as an artists' colony, coming West with clapboard architectural tastes, but without the starchiness.
Today, well-heeled former hippies run fancy shops that sell handicrafts and clothing. In front of our hotel, I encountered the proprietor of the horse-carriage concession, who was standing beside a fine-looking dapple-gray horse. I had a couple of lumps of sugar in my jacket pocket and asked if I could give them to the draft horse, a hulking Belgian.
This elicited a lecture on organic feed. The driver doffed his bowler and said that while he appreciated the offer and understood that some people, especially Easterners, will indulge a horse's sweet tooth, he would never do such a thing.
"Beets and carrots, oh, yes. Garlic, also. Of course, you should shred and steam about half of the beets first, then recombine them, to release all of the nutrients."
Luckily, my husband came out of a nearby bookstore and rescued me by insisting that it was time for dinner.
Early the next morning, we were glad to escape from granolafied Mendocino back up to the relative isolation of Fort Bragg, where we set off on the last and most demanding day of riding, a mock endurance ride, covering about 20 miles. We started by hauling the horses to a cattle ranch whose owner allows Ms. Shea use of the trails. Then we galloped up a slope. We had to descend.
AFTER the downhill, which required giving our horses a few encouraging words, we had to cross a logging road that had been recently oiled to keep the dust down. It was slippery. Sungari was wary of the surface. In the middle of the road, he stopped after a foot slid a little. His front feet splayed and his head down, looking at the shiny surface, he was distressed, but Joe quietly edged him to the gravel shoulder, and Sungari literally sighed in what sounded like relief.
Sean Arabi for The New York Times
Three mounts await riders for the first leg of the Redwood Coast Ride.
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We then crossed a pretty meadow and waded up Ten Mile River, about three miles from where it empties into the Pacific.
In a particularly deep part of the river, with water nearly up to our boots, both Nikita and Sungari began pawing the water vigorously, which was something neither of us had encountered before. Noel heard the splashing and turned, alarmed.
"Make him walk on! Now!"
We did.
"You don't want to take a swim under a horse, do you?"
After several days on the trail, he explained, both horses were ready to take a nice icy bath, rider or no rider.
We emerged splashed, not drenched, and loaded the horses again for a short drive to what Noel described as a special piece of land. We walked the horses through a field of wild oats, rye and barley, then tied them under pine trees, a quarter mile from an abandoned barn. We ate lunch at picnic tables in a redwood grove. Noel said that on another ride, one rider surprised the group by bringing a flute and playing during lunch under the tall redwoods.
For the last leg, we trailered to Ten Mile Beach to head back to the ranch. The horses perked up, as always when they know they are going home. The sky was gray; the sea tumbled in furiously. The beach stretched out forever in the chilly mist. We gathered our reins and ran with the wind.
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