 |
1889, Official Map of Santa Cruz County,
A. J. [Andrew Jackson] Hatch |
1877: C. C. [Charles Campbell]
Rodgers, founder of the Mountain Echo newspaper published in Boulder Creek, had
an encounter with a mother grizzly and her two cubs. Rodgers was living on his
homestead at the source of Boulder Creek at Bull’s Spring (also known as Bull Springs). Bull’s Spring is
close to Highway 236 on the edge of Big
Basin State
Park and on the
Skyline-to-the-Sea trail.
 |
Headwaters of Boulder Creek at Bull's Spring, with
a small concrete dam through which the creek flows. |
He had not yet built his
cabin on the land and so slept on the ground under the stars. Around sunrise
one morning he awoke to find a large female grizzly eating his discarded bacon
rinds just a few feet from the end of his bed, with two cubs a little further
away. Rodgers and the bear looked at each other for a brief time - that seemed like
an eternity to the former. He then sprung to his feet and without stopping to
dress he “clasped the nearest tan-oak in a loving embrace” and made a desperate
attempt to climb it. Fortunately, for Rodgers, the bear gave a disgruntled
growl and sidled slowly off into the nearby brush.
 |
| The area has since been logged. |
That very same day Rodgers
constructed a scaffold, in a “bunch of redwoods” well up from the ground, and used it
to sleep on until he had completed his cabin. He bored holes in a redwood into
which he drove wooden pins so as to make a ladder up which he could climb to
the scaffold high in the tree.
In October the same year, C.
C. Rodgers had yet another encounter. The Santa
Cruz Weekly Sentinel reported:
“On the head of
Boulder Creek, last week, C. C. Rodgers, while ascending a trail, found himself
in the rear of a couple of grizzly cubs. They hurried along, a few feet apart,
the hunter getting his Henry rifle in order to give them a salute. Hearing the
pattering of feet behind him, he turned his head and beheld mother bruin, open
mouthed, long-haired and shaggy, and apparently as large as an elephant.
Thinking that there might be something in the bushes that he wanted he turned
aside, breaking one side of his bridle in doing so. Held by one rein around and
around swung his terrified animal, and the grizzly kings of the forest, together
and satisfied that neither was hurt, moved off at their leisure, apparently
indifferent to the presence of the man with the broken bridle.”
