Ventana Wilderness Creekwhacking: Doolan’s Hole Creek

[Justin Baker]

Kyle and I went on a creekwhacking (creek + buswhacking) trip in the Ventana Wilderness. We explore up Ventana Creek and Doolan's Hole creek. Traveling through Ventana Creek was easy.
Hiking up Doolan's Hole was very difficult. The creek was just a giant collection pit of dead wood. I have never seen so much dead wood in one creek. It took us several ours to hike the 1.5 miles out there. We would either climb up on a large redwood and walk over the 10-30 foot tall piles of dead wood or try and climb under everything. Some of the waterfalls were a little treacherous to get around and I slipped badly on one large wet log, almost slipping and falling down into a pit of log debris. Everything we stepped on was potentially loose and we to test it before putting our weight down. It was fun.

Mating banana slugs.

The Big Sur Wild and Scenic River.

Ventana Creek

Kyle

Confluence of Ventana Creek and Doolan's Hole Creek

Me

Huge log jams.

This is actually part of the creek. We had to climb over crazy things like this. Scrambling over dead trees.

Noodles.

Excessively smokey lunch break.

Camp on Doolan's Hole Creek.

Kyle's gloves.

Redwood Sorrel.

More Redwood Sorrel.

Even more Redwood Sorrel.

Redwood Sorrel everywhere.

Waterfall. This was a little difficult to get around. We had to improvise some ropes to lower our packs and climb down.

Even more log jams.

Kandlbinder in the distance.

[Jay Wilkerson]

Great pictures Justin and cool looking snake!

[Justin Baker]

Thanks Jay, do you happen to know what kind of snake it is? We always see interesting reptiles on the dry parts of the trails.

[Eugene Smith]

Looks like a western gopher snake to me.

[David Lutz]

Ventana looks like a beautiful place but I see photos like that and start to feel itchy right away.

Nice to see young people out gettin' after it…..

[Jay Wilkerson]

Eugene knows his snakes and that is a Gopher Snake!
I think this is a Garter snake? LOL

[Justin Baker]

"I see photos like that and start to feel itchy right away."
Oh yeah, poison oak is everywhere in the Ventana. Fortunately I'm not allergic to it, but if you are allergic you want pants even on the trails.

[brian H]

good stuff, see any trout?

[Justin Baker]

The Big Sur River is mostly shallow, so I have only seen tiny ones. There is supposed to be a steelhead run, but I haven't seen it yet.
The Little Sur River, which is north of the Big Sur River, is a very important spawning stream for Steelhead.

[Author]

Posts