Tassajara: A Love Letter in Fire Season

“Fire heats, wind moves, water wets, earth is solid.”
-- Sandokai
(Merging of Difference and Unity)
Composed by Shitou Xiqian (Sekito Kisen), 700–790

— by Robert Reese

 June 24, 2021 --- The Willow Fire has grown to approximately 2877 acres and is burning in steep rugged terrain in the Ventana Wilderness three miles from the monastery. There are 455 firefighters on the ground including seven Hotshot crews assigned to the fire. Estimated containment: July 11.

From its first washes near the foot of the South Ventana Cone, Tassajara Creek sweeps southeast through the steep canyons of the Los Padres National Forest before spilling into the deep ravine of Tassajara Valley. Winding through the pale arms of sycamore trees, Tassajara Creek pours past alder, madrone, buckeye and live oak, splashing into deep pools and coursing over granite tiers until it reaches the sulfuric hot springs at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.

Located at the end of a dirt road 40 miles southeast of Monterey in the Santa Lucia Range, the 160-acre Tassajara Hot Springs is Monterey County’s oldest resort. For more than one hundred years and nearly a dozen incarnations and owners, Tassajara has been operating as a resort and visited for its harsh beauty, quietude and mineral hot springs.

This year, the San Francisco Zen Center celebrated 54 years as stewards of Tassajara. Since establishing a monastery at Tassajara in 1967, Zen Center has quietly attempted to preserve the valley’s unspoiled wildness and in 1983 purchased an additional 160 acres of adjacent land, providing the property a large buffer from potential development.

 The approach to Tassajara is through the soft rounded hills of Carmel Valley, carpeted in spring with great splashes of chartreuse and emerald green. Poppies, sky lupine, cottonwood and shooting stars explode in April. Monkey flower, castilleja, clarkia and penstemon offer vivid coloring during the summer.

The upper Carmel Valley is a land of history and legend. In the 1890s, stagecoaches carrying passengers and mail to Tassajara stopped at Camp Steffani (now marked by a stone monument) on mile east of Carmel Valley Village. Here, the historic Rancho Los Tularcitos—given by then Governor Figueroa as a land grant in 1834—stretches for miles. Some five miles further, Tassjara Road abruptly cuts south towards Jamesburg and the vast Los Padres National Forest. Jamesburg is little more than a collection of houses at the end of the paved road but gives the impression of being the last outpost on convenience and civilization on the edge of a frontier. From here, the road is unpaved and ascends steeply through live oak, maple and madrone. Bracken and chaparral give way to the deep greens of Monterey Pines and hubcaps fill with the soft red dirt of Tassajara Road—rutted and dusty from June to October. Outside the windshield, rhythmic hills betray the region’s sea-floor origins.

On south-facing slopes, the improbable-looking Yucca plants cling to the hillside and give the landscape a southwestern feel. Also known as the Lord’s Candle, or Spanish Bayonet, the Yucca’s stalk can sometimes measure up to 10 feet tall with coarse, spiky foliage that forms a halo around the pale yellow blooms.

Deep pockets of manzanita, sycamore, toyon and tan oak are set among bracken and poison oak. In the spring and fall, the air is comfortable 70 degrees, though temperatures can sometimes climb into the 90s. In July and August temperatures can soar to 110 with little wind in the isolated canyons. Deer flies are rife in July and August. During the winter, temperatures plunge into the low-20s with snow on the highest ridges.

Some six miles from Jamesburg, the road opens onto Chews Ridge. Here, the observatory looks out above the pines to sea and mountains and sky. Through 180 degrees of horizon, and more than fifty miles into the distant rise of hills, not a single house is to be seen. No store, no highway, no headlights, no street lights. Just the roaring silence. The Ventana Wilderness is a serious land, where a walk off one of the trails, down into the steep-walled canyons, takes one into the embracing silence and isolation of true wilderness.

Extending nearly five miles north-west to south-west, Chews Ridge divides a portion of the watershed for the Carmel and Arroyo Seco Rivers before falling away into the labyrinth of canyons of the Los Padres. On a clear day, Mount Hamilton and Whitney can be seen, as well as ships at sea and much of the Santa Lucia Range to nearly San Luis Obispo. Beyond Chews Ridge, the road descends to China Camp and more airy views of South Ventana Cone, Miller Canyon, Junipero Serra Peak and Black Cone. The visual perspective is at once immense and disconcerting.

The soft greens of coulter pine and live oak give way to arid greens of ceanothus, buckwheat and Yerba santa. Soon Chews Ridge descends to the Church Creek trailhead, which eases into the Tassajara watershed, crossed here and there by veins  of darker green where seasonal creeks make their way to Tassajara Creek and, finally, Arroyo Seco River.

A short distance past China Camp the road begins the swooping plunge to Tassajara, winding 3500 feet in five miles. Blasted out of solid rock by Chinese laborers who also worked on the Southern Pacific Railroad, the road follows the serpentine contours of the mountains before the last mile where it makes two enormous hairpin turns.

In the late 1800s, stage coaches making the trip form Salinas had curtains drawn over the windows to keep passengers from seeing out to the yawning precipice and 20-foot pine logs were chained to the coaches to save horses and brakes. Between Salinas and Tassajara horses needed to be changed three times over the 12-hour trip.

It was not until 1912 that the road was opened to automobiles. Even then, the route was so narrow that motorists telephoned Tassajara from the ridge to make sure a car wasn’t coming up before making the descent. Today, a Zen Center brochure issues a quiet warning to carry water, stay in low gear and not ride the brakes. Farther down the canyon the green striations of the valley floor can be seen. Here, in 1968, on the first and last ridge from which the monastery can be seen, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi scattered the ashes of Nyogen Senzaki, one of the first Zen teachers to make his home in America. On May, on a full-moon Saturday in 1972, students scattered a portion of Suzuki Roshi’s ashes into a buffeting wind over the monastery he founded.

A more appropriate funeral site could not be imagined for the diminutive, charismatic teacher. Cuts in the hard, bright rocks reveal the overlapping of ancient layers of deep sediment. Though ordinary in themselves, the mountains near Tassajara seem another world from the everyday: remote, absolute and changing color with everyhour’s shift of light.

Originally formed in the horizontal layers on a prehistoric ocean bottom, the convoluted ridges and layers of sediment buckle in accordion-like processions towards the sky. The steep mountains create huge shadows that travel up the valley through the day. The road drops through laurel and thick groves of madrone before settling towards the valley floor and Tassjara’s entrance. At the end of the road, a sign reading “Tassajara Zen Mountain Center Zenshinji” (Zen Mind/Heart Temple) greets visitors. (To be continued).