Moments in Dirt and Ink

Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area Locate the trailhead. Abbie plus her boy plus a new member of his lab plus her visiting parents and I all went off on a hike down by Malibu. It should be a nice little loop , except for this creep . How he gets away with it so close to Malibu, I have no idea. The trail had been going there long before he bought the property. And he promptly sued his neighbors to force them to give him the same sort of easement the trail has. A clear case of good fences making bad neighbors. The hike starts at the end of Corral Canyon Road, which heads into the young mountains with many curves and steep drops from highway 1 just "north" of Malibu. The road turns to dirt and gravel and widens into a parking lot just before a gate. The fire road beyond may be used by bicyclists and the various single track trails from the spot may not. Castro Motorway continues on from the end of Corral Canyon. We didn't get to see th...

Angeles National Forest Locate the trailhead. Alder Creek is apparently a "trail that was" in the guidebooks even though I found it on the current (Ha! It's getting rather old and out of date. They need to do a new one.) forest map. There seems to be very little to be found about it online. There's a little on it by one Caltech alum who is so often a great source on the local trails. There's also an errata site for Trails of the Angeles that notes you can hike this trail now, but then says it's not particularly interesting. In the 10 years since folks have known it was open, there doesn't seem to have been a lot of interest. The trail heads both ways from where Upper Big Tujunga Road (Between Angeles Crest and Angeles Forest highways) crosses Alder Creek. There used to be a small lot a hundred feet off, but now it has been blocked by a load of dirt as has all the roadside parking for a quarter mile. One presumes this is to discourage use o...

Angeles National Forest Locate the trailhead. Icehouse Canyon is on a right hand straight (the road turns sharply left) just after Baldy Village. To enter the Wilderness some two miles up, you need to get a permit. We also needed a hang tag to hold the Golden Eagle so we were good and let them count us. That didn't make parking any easier on a Sunday morning. Backpackers and early(er) risers had gotten all the real spaces in the large lot, and quite a few of the imaginary ones. I was able to imagine one more spot on the second time around so we weren't so good on the parking but we weren't blocking anything either. The trail itself goes up at a steady, determined pace. It is about 3.6 miles of constant up. It does not go flat, it does not go down, it just climbs and climbs until it gets to the saddle. There is one junction along the way which is actually just another way up to the saddle but takes about two miles longer to get there. We took this going dow...

Angeles National Forest Locate the trailhead. The "Bridge to Nowhere" isn't really such. Hike information can be found here . The instructions for getting there could be improved quite a bit, though. After getting off on Arcadia in Arcadia, turn north and follow the road out of the city and along the reservoir. Turn right on East Fork Road to cross a large bridge over the river and wiggle around a little more. That road does dead end at the ranger station if you go around the hairpin turn it talks about, but if you catch the road into the Sheep Mountain Wilderness to the left on that hairpin turn you pass a few trailheads on the way to the end of the road. Park in the large lot by the gate on the road and continue down it passing yet another trailhead to some other destination. The trail follows the old road route up to the bridge built for the road. At least half of it is actually on the old road bed, but there are places where the roadbed are long gone and ...

Sketches in the out-of-doors for the month. There's free moments after lunch when conferencing at Asilomar. Another little trek up to the little waterfall. Rustic Canyon is the home of many things, including a Boy Scout Camp. All the way out into the yard.

Angeles National Forest Locate the trailhead. Switzer Falls is found just a short way up highway 2, the first stop past the turnoff to the old highway to Lancaster. We found a spot down by the picnic area, so didn't have to hike down the road. It's a very popular spot and there often are no places anywhere. The trail heads downhill with many crossings over the creek. The water was low, so crossings were easy with many many rocks to choose from. It isn't always like that. There is a campground about halfway down as the canyon narrows tightly heading into a few waterfalls, cascades, and rapids. There the trail stays high passing a few scary cliff edges. Eventually it splits with the long trek to JPL on the right and a downhill sprint to the bottom of the tight canyon on the left. Then there's just a few more crossings to get to the bottom of the waterfall that is accessible. The waterfall, which has a bit of a cascade character to it and is only...

Will Rogers and Topanga State Parks Locate the trailhead. I was tasked with finding a hike again for the day. This one should be "about three miles" which meant six miles total. I found one that was six miles where most of that was a loop going out of Will Rogers State Park. It seems to be a popular place for Easter with egg hunts adding to the usual soccer game traffic. The games we saw looked like they're probably a city league rather than a bunch of kids. We poked our heads into the barn and outside of it are buried a couple of ol' Will's favorite ponies, one for polo and one for roping. The old polo fields were today's soccer fields. Then we hiked up the loop to the local Inspiration point. We hadn't figured out which trail we were coming back along so thought going up that it didn't matter which way we took that loop. Turned out if we'd looked more carefully we'd have seen the arrow on the edge saying "to Rustic Canyon...

Monrovia Canyon Park Locate the trailhead. We took a second trip of Monrovia Canyon . This time we only did the small canyon with the falls, and not a bit of Sawpit that it is a tributary to. This makes the trail even shorter. We didn't quite do the shortest version, but it was very nearly so. As before, the trail is sometimes narrow, often wide, and always easy. It goes past the old flood control barriers... Where there's a creek, there's flood control. Or it seams that way. Sometimes even very large double bits of flood control like this one.