The Santa Cruz Mountains

From Hirsch, I followed the line of the fault to Tomales Bay and the waterside inn and restaurant Nick’s Cove, then on down through San Francisco to the Santa Cruz Mountains. There, I stopped for the night in Los Gatos. That was mostly, I admit, so that I could make a breakfast pilgrimage to Manresa Bread, the source of the crunchiest, butteriest kouign-amann pastries anywhere. (Fight me — head baker Avery Ruzicka is a genius, and I stand by that.)
But Los Gatos was also where, back in 1989, my aunt Amy was living when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit and tossed her house down the side of a mountain. (If you think of the San Andreas Fault as a big river running north to south, then the Loma Prieta fault is one of its minor tributaries.) She’d gone grocery shopping and was in the driveway, just getting out of her car when this happened. My aunt was unharmed, and she had earthquake insurance, but it’s worth noting that afterward she moved to Bodega Bay and lived the rest of her life on the water.
My destination was Thomas Fogarty Winery, just past the Windy Hill Open Space Preserve, and when I got there, I asked proprietor Tommy Fogarty Jr. if he remembered the Loma Prieta quake. “Absolutely. I wasn’t here myself, but we figured out pretty quickly the quake sure was,” he told me. “Our winemaker was driving down to Santa Cruz, and buildings started landing on the road on Highway 17.”
Even so, and even with my aunt’s story in mind, mass destruction was hard to envision as we stood there on the winery’s redwood-railed deck, surrounded by tables of weekend wine tasters, all cheerfully chatting while sipping Fogarty wines. Bay Area residents live with the prospect of earthquakes the same way everyone I knew growing up in Houston lived with the idea of hurricanes: They happen sometimes, no question, but on a day-to-day basis, you just get on with your life.

Below us, the Fogarty vineyards stairstepped down the slope: Portola Springs at 1,920 feet, Rapley Trail at 1,650 feet, Razorback Vineyard at 1,400 feet. The fault itself lay buried at the bottom, under a lot of multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley homes. I sipped one of the Fogarty Chardonnays in the glass I held. It tasted like white wine, not like houses falling onto a highway.
When I left Fogarty, I headed south, crossing the spine of the mountains to the Santa Cruz side. Outside Corralitos, Sante Arcangeli Family Wines winemaker and owner John Benedetti and I clambered up a rickety ladder to stand on the roof of an old barn at his Split Rail Vineyard. An unparalleled view over forests and vineyards toward the Pacific spread out before us, making me less conscious of the fact that I was standing on a sloping unrailed roof with a 40-foot drop to the ground below.
“We’re standing on an uplifted piece of the Pacific Plate — old lake bottom from the Pliocene, Purisima sandstone,” Benedetti said. “You’ll find fossilized shells here.” He pointed toward the next ridgeline, toward the ocean. “But that mountain is mostly Franciscan clay. And behind us,” he said, turning, “the east side of the appellation over there, on the North American plate, that’s an entirely different world. In other words, it’s San Andreas Fault all the way around us.”