The hook
The epicenter of the earthquake that stopped the 1989 World Series is a small sign in the woods, and you can hike to it.
01Why it's worth it
The Forest of Nisene Marks is about 10,000 acres of recovering redwood canyon above Aptos, and its odd claim to fame is seismic: the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the magnitude-6.9 jolt that halted the World Series and dropped freeways in Oakland and a span of the Bay Bridge, started right here. A sign marks the spot along the Aptos Creek Trail, a few miles in, in plain-looking second-growth that gives no hint of what it set loose. The forest is its own comeback story. It was logged to nothing by the 1920s, cut for lumber and for charcoal to bake marble into lime, some of which went into rebuilding San Francisco after 1906, and the Loma Prieta Mill ran until 1924. The Marks family gave the ruined land to the state to be restored, and it has come back into one of the largest and least-crowded trail networks in the Santa Cruz Mountains, with old mill sites and trestle bones hidden in the regrowth.
02How to experience it
Enter on Aptos Creek Road in Aptos. The lower park is flat and easy; the upper park and the epicenter are a long haul up the Aptos Creek Fire Road, better by bike than on foot if you want to reach the marker and turn back in a day. Most people come for the trees and the quiet more than the plaque, and that's the right instinct. Winter rain fills the creek and the crowds thin out.