Stagecoach Road is a skinny mountain road that wanders on both sides of CA-154 not far from our campground. The curvy but quite scenic blacktop passes underneath and beside the Cold Creek Bridge which was quite an engineering landmark back in the early 1960s, when it was built. My grandfather used to come up to Stagecoach Road every week during construction and shoot off a few frames with his Super-8 movie camera. At the end of construction, he had a neat, stop-action movie of the construction and about the only thing that was wrong with it was the weather and the sun angles changed on days he shot film making the lighting strange.
Along the road under the bridge, in a shady canyon with little parking space, is the Cold Creek Tavern. Before even I was born, the stage from Santa Barbara to points north use to pass over this road, stopping at the Tavern to feed passengers and change horses. The hills are steep here; horses probably didn’t have a long range in this terrain.. It is a challenging road with a motor vehicle. Driving a wooden box pulled by horses or, even worse, riding in a stage over this route must have required considerable intestinal fortitude. Abrupt dropoffs to deep canyons run alongside the lumpy paving.
We followed the road up to the top of the pass where we turned back north toward our RV park, stopping at the Santa Ynez Valley overlook. It is a great, wide view of the scenery from here. As we approached our campground, we came across about 30 turkeys engaged in their scratch-back up-and-look-for-goodies feeding behaviors. They were sporting some extraordinarily colorful plumage and Peggy and I found a superb birdwatching spot very close to the large birds and lingered for quite a while. Peggy and I both admire turkeys but I feel their heads look pretty puny next to their large bodies, particularly when males are trying to show off by puffing themselves up and making lots of their feathers fan out. The females make little funny noises that sound like Butters, from South Park, singing. It’s nice.
We got some pictures of our favorite birds. Click here