We’ll start at the top, on a quarter mile of level boardwalk through the pygmy forest. The trees up here are decades old and most of them are no taller than you are, some only waist high, a few still well over your head. What gets you is the detail: so many years of so little growth, moss over everything, every trunk showing the struggle of it. It’s a gorgeous, almost alien place and about ten minutes in you stop comparing it to anywhere else.
From there the trail runs downhill through the Little River canyon toward the coast, and here’s the lovely part: the same species that gave up at waist height on the hardpan up top are three hundred feet tall by the time you reach the bottom. Same trees, same coast, different ground under them. It’s a few miles on packed dirt, downhill the whole way, which some knees like and some don’t. Anyone who’d rather not walk rides down with Chris instead and gets the beach to themselves for an hour, and nobody has to decide until the morning.
We’ll all meet on the sand at Van Damme Cove for a proper picnic lunch.
