Photo Tour: Henry W. Coe State Park
Radio Relay Point Panorama
Panorama of about 180 degrees from "Radio Relay Point" east of Coit Lake. (See vicinity map below.)
Use navigation bars on your browser to scroll across the whole image,
which is over three times as wide as your screen.
The image, a composite of six photos, is curved at the horizon, such that the horizon on the left side tilts
toward the left, that on the right side toward the right. This is why Pine Ridge, for example, appears much
lower than Blue Ridge, even though the latter is only 200 feet higher.
Notes on places and the names:
Most of Bollinger Ridge is north of the park boundaries.
Pacheco Camp is down in the canyon out of view.
"Pacheco Hump" is my name for the prominent hump on Pacheco Ridge which you see from Pacheco
Camp, and which is just south of where Coit Road crosses the ridge.
"Hartman Peak" (just above "Pacheco Hump" in the photo) is my name for the summit which is the high
point of the Hartman Trail due east of Mississippi Lake. It has also been called "Heckbert Hill" by Kevin
Gilmartin and Barbara Bessey, editors of The Ponderosa, the newsletter of the Pine Ridge Association.
This name honors Al Heckbert, longtime backpacker in the park and author of an article describing the
difficult Hartman Trail.
Zimba "the Peak" is the summit marked on the USGS map as "Zimba"---the name for the surveyor's
benchmark there. This name is coined by the surveyors, and is presumably derived from the name
"Orestimba." I like to call it Zimba the Peak on a whimsy, since this is echoic of "Zorba the Greek." It is
just outside of the east boundary.
(Another benchmark on a summit just south of Zimba is called "Orgas" which I suppose is a combination of
"Or" from Orestimba and "gas" from Garzas. Two other benchmarks in the Robinson Mountain area are
named "Snod" and "Grass". The name of a former owner of the property was "Snodgrass"---not likely a
coincidence!)
The name Wilcox Ridge will be familiar to users of USGS maps. This is the name of the northeastern-
most USGS quadrangle you need for full coverage of the park. The ridge itself is outside of the park.
On exceptionally clear days, you can see the Sierra Nevada in the distance, the crest somewhere around
125 miles away from this point. Crisp winter days after storms are often clear, but you can also get good
views in the summer when an inversion layer traps fog and haze in the valleys, as in this photo taken in
August. The closest part of the Sierra Nevada is more to the northeast than the east, due to the angle of
the range.
Red dot marks the location of this view point less than half a mile east of Coit Lake
(about a one mile walk from the dam).
Henry W. Coe State Park, California
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