Willow Creek

Willow Creek reaches the sea below the vista point here. I wrote once about walking down through the woodland to the shore at the creek mouth, where the cool came up off the water and enveloped us. There is a picnic ground, day use only.

And the great bridge above you is one of the handsomest on the whole road, and hardly anyone stops to look at it. My grandson tells one from after my time. On the nineteenth of July, 1966, Jerry Lewis's brand-new yacht, the Pussycat, sixty-five feet of Chris-Craft with mahogany panelling and crystal in the galley, sprang a plank in fog and rough sea off this coast on her first real cruise.

The captain stuffed a mattress into the leak, and when the dining table floated across the saloon he dropped anchor and put the five of them into a rubber raft. Close to the beach the surf caught the raft and turned it over. All five came ashore in their life jackets, the comedian among them, and nobody was hurt.

The yacht was not so lucky: by nightfall she was firewood on the sand a few hundred feet north of the mouth of Willow Creek, and my grandson, ten years old, was on that beach to see it. Just above the bridge, the creek makes a swimming hole, and it was a favorite of the family. Farther up the canyon is an old mine the young people called the Hobbit mine, and my grandson and his cousin Betty hiked up to it one day.

There was a cabin there under the trees, shake roof and board walls, the way the miners left it, and he still calls it a pretty neat place.