Sycamore Canyon is one of the my favorite places to bike in the Santa Monica Mountains, and I’m not the only one. The two main trail heads are in Thousand Oaks in the north, and off the PCH at Sycamore Cove on the coast. I usually take the main fire road that runs south through Point Mugu State Park, and then branch off and explore some of the less-travelled back-country areas

There’s some breath-taking views, technical downhills and heart-pumping hills, and maybe a few rattlers, coyotes and bobcats if you’re lucky! Even though it’s a popular area, there’s enough trails that you can easily for hours without seeing anyone once you’re off the fire-road. I’ve mapped out my favorite routes on Google, but if you don’t know the area I’d recommend buying a commercial map, such as the Tom Harrison’s for Point Mugu or the National Geographic’s for the Santa Monica Mountains.

Starting from the north, you have a couple of choices for parking lots in Thousand Oaks. I prefer the dirt parking lot at the south end of Wendy Drive, which is free, easy to reach from the 101, and has a nice single track over to the main fire road. You can also park in the Rancho Sierra Vista/Satwiwa parking lot, which is right next to the start of the fire road.

The road is paved for the first few miles, and quickly heads downhill on a section known universally as the Asphalt Hill. Going down is fun, but as I learnt on a hot August afternoon when I was fresh off the boat, make sure you have enough water for the return or you’ll get heat-stroke! At the bottom of the hill, it’s a lot more wild, with a great section running through oak groves, gently downhill along the side of the creek.

The first big junction you’ll reach is with Ranch Center Road. The main fire road continues straight, and you branch off to the west to get to Ranch Center. The road is roughly paved, and has some decent uphill sections, followed by a great downhill to the old ranch buildings that led to its name. From there, you can take Wood Ranch trail back to the main fire road, and also get access to a lot of other side-trails.

You can either take the main fire road south for a couple of miles, or take some single tracks on the other side of the creek that parallel it, and join up again by the Wood Canyon junction. The first single track is Sin Nombre, recently opened to bikes, and so-called because it’s never had a name on its sign. There’s some fun technical sections, and it leads onto Two Foxes, a similar single-track.

From the junction of Wood Canyon trail and Sycamore, you can take the fire road three miles down to the beach. It’s a pretty gentle downhill, but in the rainy season you’ve got about a dozen stream crossings to navigate.

Off Wood Canyon, there’s one of my all-time favorite trails, Guadalasca. Built about 15 years ago by my friend Frank Padilla, it’s a sweet single track snaking up the mountain, with some great views and lovely switchbacks. Watch out for some patches of poison oak towards the top.

As an alternative for the hard-core, you can take Hell Hill up to the same Overlook Fire Road that Guadalasca connects with. As you might guess by the name, it’s not for the weak-hearted. An exposed, steep fire-road, it doesn’t take any prisoners.

Once you’re on the Overlook road, you can take that down almost to the beach, and meet up with the main Sycamore fire road, or there’s another challenging single-track you can take instead. Wood Canyon Vista trail is rocky and technical, with a lot of great views over the canyon as the name suggests.

There’s a lot more single track trails that I haven’t listed, but those are my favorites. Be careful not to take any trails heading east from Sycamore fire road, that whole area is a protected wilderness with no bikes allowed. Most of the trails have steps, close brush or other obstacles so biking them would not be much fun anyway.

If you want a gentle ride without anything technical, I’d recommend starting at the beach end, taking the fire road to the base of the Asphalt Hill, and taking the same way back.

For a bit more of a workout, with some mildly technical sections and decent uphills, start at the TO end, turn onto Ranch Center Road, take Wood Canyon, and then the main fire road back to the trail head.

More hard-core bikers will get a kick out of the Ranch Center-Guadalasca-Wood Canyon Vista-Two Foxes-Sin Nombre loop. This gives you some solid elevation gain, and a lot of technical single-tracks.

View Larger Map

Funhouse Photo User Count: 1,166 total, 60 active. Continuing the same trend as the last couple of weeks, pretty slow growth.

Event Connector User Count: 34 total, 9 active. I fixed a few more bugs, and added some more feedback to show progress for the friend checking.

Liz and I returned from our trip to Santa Cruz Island last night. We had a wonderful time, camping under the eucalyptus with Richard, Kelly, Eric and Jennifer.

We had a chance to explore a few undeveloped and unmarked trails on the island too, with one thirteen mile hike that left us both pretty shattered. There isn’t much information about hiking the island available, so I’ll be trying to put up some notes with Google maps over this week.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 1,090 total, 109 active. It was good to see the steady growth continuing, especially since I’ve been focused on my day job and other projects, and haven’t done much to help it recently.
Event Connector User Count: 9 total. I’m currently wrestling with Facebook’s directory submission process. It was initially rejected as not showing any content, which I assumed was because the reviewer wasn’t invited to any events, so I just resubmitted it unchanged. It’s now been rejected for violating the ToS because it "stores user data beyond the context user session or specified timeout". This is very odd, because I’m actually not storing any data at all on my server, it’s all generated live through the Facebook API!
I’ll be adding a privacy policy note in the hope of clarifying this. There does need to be a two-way channel of communication between developers and the reviewers, at least somewhere I could add a note clarifying what I’m doing.

In this installment of my guide to local camping, I’m going to cheat. The Channel Islands, just off the Ventura coast, are geologically part of the Santa Monicas, but not geographically. Tomorrow, me, Liz and some friends are off to Santa Cruz Island for a long weekend, so here’s the rundown.

The islands themselves are amazing. If you’ve never been, or have only visited Catalina, you really should head down to Ventura Harbor and catch a boat over, even if it’s just a day trip. Only Catalina is inhabited, the rest just have a few rangers, and it’s like going back in time. IslandPackers are the only regular boat service out there, they run daily trips out to most of the islands, and as a bonus you’ll often see dolphins and whales on the way.

Anacapa Island is the smallest, with an old lighthouse, and less than a mile of hiking trails on the top. There’s no access to the beach because it’s surrounded by steep cliffs, but you do get some great views of the sea-lions basking at their base. There’s also a massive population of very tame gulls, when I visited I was literally tripping over their chicks as they happily wandered in front of me! There’s a small campground, but I’ve never been tempted to stay, since the island itself is so tiny. It’s part of the Channel Islands National Park, so you can go to recreation.gov if you want to get a reservation.

Santa Cruz Island is my favorite. It’s the largest island, and is divided into two halves, with the east side part of the National Park, who allow unsupervised hiking. The western half is owned by the Nature Conservancy, and you need permission and a guide before hiking on their trails. The west has been public land for longer than the east, so the vegetation has had more time to recover from the sheep farming, and is a lot more typical of the chaparral, with lots of sage bushes and other shrubs.

For the eastern side, you’ll land at Scorpion Harbor, site of the old ranch house. There’s a trail you can take to Canyon Point right by the landing, and you can continue on along the cliff-top to Potato Harbor, which is where Liz took the picture at the top. The campground is half a mile up a fireroad from the beach, at the bottom of a gentle canyon, surrounded by eucalyptus trees planted by the ranchers.

It’s divided into two sections, upper and lower, which are only separated by a few hundred feet. There’s drinking water and pit toilets in both, but no showers. I prefer the upper campground, but most of the spaces there are for groups of 11 or more. During the summer, it’s heavily booked, so you’ll need to get in early, but you may have more luck with some of the group spots. One enduring memory from a previous trip is a large group of local Chinese families arriving, complete with a video karaoke system and portable generator! Luckily, the rangers preserved the tranquility by confiscating the generator for the duration. As part of the National Park, you go to recreation.gov to reserve.

Here’s another great photo Liz took showing the campground in the early morning:

On the Nature Conservancy side of the island, there’s a campground called Del Norte. It’s for hard-core backpackers only, since it’s a tough 3.5 mile hike from Prisoner’s Harbor landing to get there, and there’s no water available. The trail was in very poor shape on our last visit too, it was so overgrown the rangers actually got lost trying to mark its location so we could work on it! We spent a couple of days with weed-wackers destroying the fennel and clearing it out, but that was over a year ago. You can see some of the pictures from that trip, including the campground, here. You’ll need to reserve with recreation.gov if you do want to camp there. One option is camping at Del Norte for a day or two, and then hiking over Montagnon Ridge to Scorpion, but that’s a rugged 12 mile walk with lots of elevation gain.

There’s several other islands open to visitors with camping available, including Santa Rosa, San Miguel and Santa Barbara, but I’ve not made it out to any of them yet.  They’re all part of the National Park too.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 966 total, 55 active. Still creeping upwards at a slow rate.
Event Connector User Count: 7 total. My adwords campaign was just disabled by Google, because my keywords, "Facebook event promotion", included a trademarked term. This took me by surprise, but wasn’t too much of a loss since I wasn’t able to get much of a click-through or conversion rate on this attempt. Luckily, it only cost me around $2 to experiment, so I count that as a good investment. I’m waiting on the app directory listing, to see how that affects things, and I’ll be thinking about other approaches to try.