Following the Paper Trail

They spent their nights on beaches or public parks, sleeping on the ground, and arose every morning on stiff legs to walk some more.

The four men and six women, most in their 60s, included a retired librarian, a teacher, a telephone repairman, a surveyor and real estate agent, a housewife and a wildlife biologist. They were, at best, weekend walkers. One had never slept outdoors.

Many of them had never met before, and yet on a clear spring day, they set out together to hike 1,196 miles of what, at least on paper, is known as the California Coastal Trail.

They waded waist-deep through murky, brackish estuaries and hired boats to ferry them across large rivers. They used ropes to scale bluffs. In places that were underwater during the day, they waited for the tide to recede and teetered across algae-slick rock under the light of the moon.

For individual hikers, such as recovering cancer patient Linda Hanes, this was an epic, restorative quest -- a chance to experience California as pioneers had done and to breathe new life into a 30-year-old effort to forge a trail the full length of the coastline.

But for some people living and working along the route, the hiking party represented an advance guard of visitors who might trample on their private property or crowd their solitude.

The clash of these values would play out all along the trail.

In 1972, California voters approved Proposition 20, the state's Coastal Initiative, reasserting the public's interest in the coastline and decreeing that "a hiking, bicycle and equestrian trails system shall be established along or near the coast."

Yet, today, little more than half of the trail exists. And many of the remaining gaps are blocked by barbed-wire fences, locked gates and shoulder-to-shoulder houses. Completing the route would require the state to buy rights of way and make other improvements at a cost of $322 million or more.

The expedition was organized by Coastwalk, a nonprofit group based in Sebastopol, Calif. The hikers knew there would be obstacles, places where they could not walk -- beneath the wave-washed cliffs of Big Sur, for example. But they did not count on so many man-made barriers, clear indications that many oceanfront landowners don't warm to the idea of a public trail near their property.