Pacific Valley Ranger Station

Prewitt Creek reaches the sea just north of our valley, and beside it stands the Forest Service's Pacific Valley station, with its green engine and the crews who watch this coast for fire. Inside, the walls are covered with patches from fire departments all over the country, left by the firefighters who have come to help when the Santa Lucias burn. Prewitt Creek itself is one of the small creeks of the family's stretch of coast, and the kind of name that only exists because somebody lived here long enough to need it.

The creek is Jim Prewitt's. He and Curnell Mansfield drove cattle to this coast from the Bryson country in the dry year of 1859, came back in 1864 to buy out the squatter Frank Muma, and Mansfield homesteaded the south side of this creek and in time held nearly four thousand acres from the ocean to the summit. A boy named George Ames rode down from Santa Cruz at fourteen to work for Prewitt, and worked for the Mansfields and for us the rest of his life: Old George, honest as the day, never paid more than thirty dollars a month and died with a small fortune saved, who once shot an eagle off a calf with the Colt he carried in his saddle.

And up the ravine here lived the Krenkels. Margaret Krenkel, Mother Krenkel to the whole coast, was city-bred in San Francisco, rode a mule to her own wedding at Los Burros, and dug her well by hand. I wrote her up as the coast's legend, and she was.

The Prewitt Loop leaves from behind the ranger station here, climbs up over the hill, and comes around and down again. My grandson and his cousin Betty walked it one day when they were young, a day's hike and a good one. There was a slide across the trail, and Betty was worried about him at it, but they got themselves across, and all was well.