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‘My impression of the Portolá Expedition is that they had crossed through Portola Valley. Why else would they name the town that?”
Like many who grew up here, Nick Neely, 34, assumed the men who made the first recorded European sighting of San Francisco Bay in 1769 went through what’s now Portola Valley. But after two years of research and retracing the Portolá Expedition’s steps on a 650-mile-long trek, Neely believes the men marched and rode through Woodside, then turned east before reaching his hometown.
Neely, a naturalist, journalist and poet, has a new book coming out in early November, “Alta California: From San Diego to San Francisco, a Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State,” to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Portolá Expedition’s arrival on what is now called Sweeney Ridge, an uphill climb on the east side of Pacifica.
On July 14, 1769, Captain Gaspar de Portolá left San Diego with a caravan of 64 Spanish army soldiers, Roman Catholic priests, native Indians and more than 200 horses and mules, hoping to find Monterey Bay and create a settlement there.
The group, however, failed to recognize Monterey Bay from the sand dunes and kept heading north, and then inland. The men camped along San Pedro Creek and a scouting party first scaled the knoll overlooking the Peninsula watershed. The rest of the expedition followed, making a second mistake. When the men spotted the bay they called it San Francisco Bay, thinking it was what Sir Francis Drake had discovered several years earlier. But that body of water was in fact near Point Reyes, which on a clear day can be seen from this vantage point 1,220 feet above sea level.
On Nov. 4, Juan Crespí, the Franciscan friar who kept a diary for the expedition, described finding “…a large arm of the sea … some sort of harbor there within the mountains.”
Portolá wrote a more mundane report that momentous day: “We traveled for three hours, the entire road was bad, we halted without water.”
Cresting the same hill at dusk on Nov. 4, 2016, good and grungy from walking the expedition’s path for almost 12 weeks, Neely halted to celebrate with champagne, family and friends near the discovery site stone marker on Sweeney Ridge.
By Feb. 1 of this year he had trimmed his backpacking beard, gained a little weight back and completed drafting his 432-page book for Counterpoint Press, the same publisher who printed his first book, “Coast Range: A Collection from the Pacific Edge.”
While Crespí wrote about experiences with “heathens,” bears, earthquakes, and the natural supply or lack of water and grasses, Neely weaves that narrative into his book, and then adds his “own interest in contemporary California and what I was seeing along the way,” he says.
He calls his book “a composite portrait of current California. … it’s my homage to the state.”
Carrying a tape recorder, computer, iPhone, lightweight tent, sleeping bag and very few clothes in a backpack on his lean 6-foot, 4-inch frame, Neely looked more like he was “hiking through and not like a true vagrant,” he says. He believes that’s why he rarely ran into hassles and most people were willing to talk to him.
And he was careful because he didn’t want his gear stolen. He largely kept out of sight at night, camping about five nights a week, sometimes in campgrounds, but more often in dry creek beds. Other nights he slept at motels and enjoyed the luxury of a shower.
Along the route fast food restaurants provided fuel, water, restrooms, and air conditioning, he says.
Neely planned to cover eight to 10 miles every day like the expedition did, reading Crespí’s journal the night before he hit the trail. He lined up guides in places such as Camp Pendleton where he needed permission to pass. Other times he took chances and trespassed – for example, when he followed 20 miles of train tracks in the middle of the night near Point Conception without using a flashlight.
He writes that, while he anxiously waited for darkness to fall, “I pictured the orange-eyed great horned owl I had watched through my binoculars along these tracks the night before. Their feathers are frayed so that they make no sound in flight.”
Neely talked into his recorder frequently, and also sat down three or four times a day to write down observations. He also took “10,000 photos,” but the book came out so long, he decided to use none, just maps to illustrate his “creative non-fiction … where along the way I tell micro-stories.”
One that stands out is when he ambled into Cabrillo Village area of Ventura and a local urged him to move through quickly and go on to Oxnard to avoid arousing suspicion among rival gangs.
Neely’s travels took him through every environment – suburbs, cities, preserves and wilderness areas.
“Time, I have come to believe, is the one true wilderness,” he writes.
His travelogue account of natural and human history is sprinkled with firsthand encounters with wild animals, a tarantula, ants, nettles and poison oak, as well as detailed descriptions of Native cultures and Spanish missions.
He also touches on more modern-day topics such as immigration, agriculture, resources and development.
A parallel can be made when looking at why and where the Portolá Expedition turned around in the Bay Area.
After the group made its way down the San Andreas Valley, camping out where Crystal Springs Reservoir now exists, and progressing somewhere along current-day Canada Road and Interstate 280, the expedition camped along the San Francisquito Creek from Nov. 6 to 10. The men reported running into hostile Native Indians, stretches of burned-over land (so livestock had little to graze on), and having to resort to eating acorns from white oaks, which caused indigestion.
The expedition, Neely writes, “would have seen and admired the standout redwood” now known as El Palo Alto, which grows near the train tracks at Alma Street and El Camino Real in Palo Alto. The theory is that somewhere in that vicinity the men decided to backtrack. They did eventually find Monterey Bay on their return trip to San Diego.
On the last day of his trip Neely covered 25 miles, stopping in for a beer at Rossotti’s Alpine Inn, also known as Zott’s, before walking to his childhood home in Portola Valley.
He hasn’t lived in the area since he attended Crystal Springs Uplands School, where he ran long distance. He went to college in the East and earned master’s degrees in literature and the environment in Reno, and in nonfiction and poetry in New York.
He observes that between California’s sprawling suburbs and extensive highway network, “not a lot of people are walking in California. … California remains very unfriendly to walkers,” especially along the coast where it’s not accessible to all.
“We are totally dependent on cars. We should all walk more; you see more, see the world at a different pace. Walking seemed to me to be too fast,” he says.
Neely lives in Hailey, Idaho, with his wife, Sarah Bird, a painter, and their two young children. In the future he sees himself teaching at a university, possibly in California, but his next book project may keep him in Idaho for a while since it’s based on a new bird species discovered there.
Another trek and two public talks
Nick Neely will be hiking up Sweeney Ridge on Nov. 2 at 2 p.m. with his trekking backpack filled with books to sign. He will talking to the Pacifica Historical Society on Nov. 3. On the anniversary of the bay sighting, Nov. 4, he will be speaking at Books Inc. in Palo Alto at 7 p.m.
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