Cerro Alto is a prominent mountain in the Santa Lucia District of the Los Padres National Forest. The most popular route to the summit begins just outside the Cerro Alto Campground and climbs 1,600 vertical feet to the top (a peak elevation of 2,624 feet). The trail is about two miles long (one way). On a good day, I can make the summit from the campground boundary in under 35 minutes. Cerro Alto is only a fifteen minutes drive from my house.

At the top, the hiker is rewarded with a full 360-degree view. To the west lies the Pacific Ocean. The Santa Lucia Mountains stretch northward. To the south, the view is dominated by the Nine Sisters. To the east are inland valleys and the low mountain ranges associated with the San Andreas Fault.

The Nine Sisters are a chain of volcanic plugs roughly 25 million years old. Five are open to the public for hiking.

The bedrock of Cerro Alto is the Toro Formation (Jurassic), meaning the mountain is built from some impressively old marine shale.

I’ve been going up and down Cerro Alto for about thirty-five years now. Most of those trips were made by mountain bike. A conservative estimate is five hundred ascents. It’s probably closer to one thousand.

In 1994, the entire mountain burned. My first trip up after the fire was in a thick fog. The ground and trees were charred black. There was no sign of life except for a few crows. It felt Shakespearean. Or maybe Edgar Allan Poe–ian. I remember wondering how the mountain would ever recover. But it did! Watching that recovery gave me hope.

Over the years, I’ve experienced some interesting weather extremes on this little mountain.

One night, as I climbed Cerro Alto on my mountain bike in complete darkness, it began to rain. As I worked my way upward, I watched the raindrops fall through my headlamp beam. Curiously, the higher I climbed, the more slowly the drops seemed to fall. Slower and slower they fell, until I realized they were floating. It had started to snow!

On another occasion, during the peak of a hot Central California summer, I decided to ride to Cerro Alto from my house, climb the peak, and ride home. It would be a lunch ride. For lunch, I ate three bananas. At the summit, I felt awful. (I cannot recommend a three-banana lunch followed by a strenuous climb in a 95-degree oven. That might work for banana bread, but not me.) I barely made it home, crawled into the garage, and lay flat on the cold cement until I had enough strength to reach the bathroom for a cold shower. Then I collapsed onto the bed with my feet elevated. When Care Bear returned from the grocery store, that’s how she found me. Our home blood-pressure cuff showed alarmingly low numbers. My skin was cold and clammy. Karen’s diagnosis: heat exhaustion. (I recovered without a trip to the emergency room.)

Such hubris. Hubris!

Last year marked what may have been my final mountain bike ascent and descent of Cerro Alto. For that ride, I chose the wrong bike. My 27.5” full-suspension trail bike with dropper post was down for maintenance, so I took my 29” hardtail instead. The first is safe and forgiving on descents. The latter—not so much.

It was getting late, and the light was fading when I started down a trail I know well. At a familiar rock stair step, I grabbed too much front brake and launched myself over the handlebars—a classic rookie mistake. As I floated through the air in a Superman pose, I felt oddly at peace. Time slowed. I rotated 180 degrees and found myself staring up at the darkening sky. Pretty! As I admired it, I watched in wonder as my $5,000 carbon bike floated by overhead, bound for parts unknown. We both reentered planet Earth with nothing more than a few scratches. It was invigorating.

These days, I hike Cerro Alto. No more black-diamond mountain bike descents for me.

Hiking has its own rewards. I meet people (and their dogs). On a recent hike, I ran into a former student who had just quit his IT job in the city to return home to SLO County. He is now making chocolate. He had some in his pack and graciously shared it. It was excellent!

To access the main Cerro Alto Trail, hikers must pass through the Cerro Alto Campground. Most park at the lower, unimproved dirt lot near the highway, outside the campground gate. There are the usual Forest Service warnings posted: beware of ticks, poison oak, rattlesnakes, bears, and mountain lions. It is also a “fee area.” A dispenser of fee envelopes (similar to a tissue box) stands nearby. The envelope is dropped into a narrow iron box known as an “iron ranger.” The fee is ten dollars per visit.

In the old days, this was an honor system. I would typically deposit ten bucks each month, which seemed appropriate.

Then, during the “Adventure Pass Era” (1997 to 2015), trail users could buy an annual Los Padres Forest Adventure Pass at Big Five Sporting Goods for just thirty-five dollars. What a bargain!

That brings us to 2016, when a dark cloud settled over the land.

That was the year the Parks Management Company (PMC) took control. The U.S. Forest Service issued PMC a Special Use Permit to manage roughly 52 developed recreation sites (campgrounds, day-use areas, and some trailheads), including Cerro Alto and most of Big Sur.

Gone were the trustworthy public servants in crisp uniforms and shiny trucks, faithfully emptying the iron rangers. In their place appeared a cross-section of humanity in T-shirts, driving golf carts.

The takeover took effect on November 1. The honor system vanished. So did the Adventure Pass. Nor did the Parks Management Company want to honor my National Lifetime Senior Interagency pass. I was now expected to pay ten dollars every time I parked, which amounted to hundreds of dollars a year. PMC employees were very aggressive about collecting day-use fees. I came to think of them as the “Campground Management Mafia” (CMM). It was my own little private joke. Haha!

Paying cash to a private company for access to public land did not seem right. Thus began a game of cat and mouse at the Cerro Alto trailhead as I evaded the Campground Management Mafia. Fortunately, I was usually on a mountain bike, so I was a pretty fast mouse. I could usually get in and out without confrontation, only to find a threatening note on my windshield. The Campground Management Mafia grew frustrated. There were hand gestures. Profanities. They wanted their ten bucks. A Humphrey Bogart voice in my head said: “This feels like a shakedown. And I suspect skimming.”

The Parks Management Company actually had no legal authority to collect parking fees, so in a sense it was still an honor system. But it certainly no longer felt like one. And not once did any PMC staff on the ground at Cerro Alto mention the existence of an annual PMC day-use pass.

Besides, I wasn’t parking at the upper, improved day-use parking lot inside the campground with the trash cans, running water, and fancy bathrooms. I was parking a mile away, outside the entrance gate, in the dirt by the highway.

I wasn’t alone in my dismay. Yelp reviews were ugly. Then, at midnight on May 11, 2018, the Sand Dollar Beach kiosk burned to the ground. The kiosk marked the entrance to a PMC-managed parking lot about an hour up the coast from Cerro Alto. Someone had carefully removed the American flag and placed it in a traffic cone. The “Parks Management Company” signage was removed and set inside the kiosk. Then the kiosk was torched. The message was clear: Public lands, yes. Privatization, no.

Things cooled off for a while, though my cat-and-mouse game continued.

Then they heated up again in 2022, when Los Padres Forest Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service seeking documents related to the Parks Management Company’s fee structure. Transparency was the main issue. Where were all those fees going?

Finally, in 2023, the Parks Management Company announced a major camping fee increase (from about $20 per night to $30 per night)—without public input. The PMC campground I visit most frequently shows no improvements. In fact, it’s in worse shape than ever.

Once I stopped mountain biking Cerro Alto, I was no longer a fast mouse. I was a vulnerable mouse. By then I had learned of the Parks Management Company’s annual day-use pass, available for fifty dollars. So I caved in and bought one. The Mafia had won.

Shame. Shame!

My 2025 pass arrived late. Very late. But it did arrive.

My 2026 pass never arrived. Fifty days had passed. No one at PMC would answer my queries. Was I being punished?

This time, I did not want to return to the Cerro Alto trailhead without a pass. I did not want to be confronted by the Parks Management Company. The only other alternative was to park out on the busy highway and ride or hike in. That plan came with its own risks. Crossing the highway was threatening to life and limb. So I stayed away from my beloved Cerro Alto. I became depressed and irritable.

I decided to go to the top (figuratively) and contacted the head ranger for the Santa Lucia District. He personally championed my cause, despite the issue being far below his pay grade. He even assigned a forest technician to help track down my missing pass, all during a time of tight budgets and short staffing. A true hero.

After repeated mailbox pilgrimages, I finally woke up to this email:

Hi Dave,

I have talked with the Forest Service, and I have refunded your annual pass fee, which will be credited to your card. I will also be sending you an annual pass as soon as I return to my desk. I will be dating your annual pass for two years for all your troubles. I cannot apologize enough for the inconvenience.

— Parks Management Company

Thank you, Ranger Ben. Thank you, Forest Technician Helen. You are both exemplary public servants.

Thank you, Parks Management Company, for stepping up and doing the right thing. I formally apologize for dodging fees all those years and for impugning your reputation with my own personal moniker. Hehe! I hereby consider your gesture a suitable armistice.

If you’re looking for me, I won’t be parked at the lower unimproved dirt lot below Cerro Alto Campground. I’ll be up in the improved lot, on clean pavement, next to the water spout and bathroom—about fifty feet from the start of my favorite local national forest trail, climbing my way to the top!

Footnote: The Parks Management Company’s contract is up for renewal this year. Could change be in the wind?

Total Tally

Emails sent to PCM customer service: 16

Texts to District Ranger: 1

Voice Mails to District Ranger: 1

Emails to District Ranger: 4

Phone Conversations with District Ranger: 1

Emails to Forest Technician: 5

Phone Conversations with Forest Technician: 2

Days elapsed since going online to order my pass before it arrived: 52 days