Liz and I just got back from an overnight backpacking trip in the local mountains. We had a new tent and other gear we wanted to test-drive, and didn’t want to be too stuck if some of it didn’t work. With this in mind, we chose the La Jolla Valley campground, since the trailhead’s less than an hour from our house, and it’s only a 2.5 mile hike in.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this campground is the only one I know of in the Santa Monicas that doesn’t require reservations, and it’s rare to see anybody using it, so we felt pretty confident we would get a spot. The recent wildfires to the east probably kept people away too. We’d checked the weather and the red-flag status before-hand, along with asking a friendly wildland firefighter friend, and it looked like there was no danger.

We stopped by the booth at Thornhill Broome Beach when we arrived, paid $3 per-person to camp and picked up a parking pass. We then drove across the street to the day-use parking lot, where the trail starts. There’s two trails leading off the lot, the Ray Miller section of the Backbone, and La Jolla Canyon trail. To get to the campground, we had to hike 2.5 miles up the La Jolla trail, which is the one behind the yellow gate, that starts off like a fire-road.

You start off with a moderate uphill grade going along the canyon floor. After about half a mile you cross over the wash, and start heading towards a waterfall. Sadly, with the drought, there was no water left when we got there, but it’s still a nice spot to catch your breath. The trail heads up the side of the waterfall, and then starts switchbacking up the canyon wall. The next half-mile is probably the toughest part of the hike, with poor footing and some steep grades.

At around 1.2 miles, you’ll reach a fork in the trail. Keep to the right/eastern side at this fork to get to the campground. The left/western trail heads towards Mugu peak, and connects with some of the other trails criss-crossing the valley to form some fun loops.

The trail is still uphill, but with a decent grade, and goes through some nice shady brush archways. 1.8 miles in, you get to another fork, this one with a new sign:

It’s hard to tell from the sign, but you actually want to head left/west for the quickest route to the campground. It’s a short connector that skirts a pond, and the first camping spots are just off to the west of it. We didn’t investigate these, we knew there were some more further on, and the way to them looked a bit rough. The trail reaches a fire-road, and there’s camp spots just off this road, a short distance west. There’s no map of the camping spots, so you’ll just need to look for the numbered signs and explore.

We went to site 5, which was secluded, in a small oak grove. There’s no camp-fires or water, but they do have a pit-toilet nearby, and gas-stoves are allowed. Slightly further west along the fire-road is a group camp site, that looks like it could handle up to ten tents comfortably. We did notice the restroom had been knocked off its foundation by a fallen tree, so you’ll need to use the toilet that’s near the individual sites instead.

It was a pretty gruelling hike, we’d brought too much water, and there’s about 600 feet of elevation gain, so we were very happy to sit down at the picnic table and rest our feet. It was actually raining for once, so we got our new tent up as quickly as we could, to keep our stuff dry. I’m very happy with the REI Half Dome tent we got to replace our heavier car-camping one. It was only $99 on sale, but it weighs less than 5 pounds, was easy to put up and kept us dry, which is pretty much all I could ask for.

I saved money on the tent, but more than made up for it with the stove. I fell for the Jetboil a few weeks ago when a friend showed me his on Santa Cruz, and it was so worth it’s $130 price tag. Very light and compact, it heats water up incredibly fast and efficiently, has electric ignition, and is almost immune to wind.

With everything set up , we sat down to a meal and a serious game of Scrabble, as you can see in the lead photo. After some nice instant miso soup and an entree from Mountain House, we closed off the night with some martinis, served in genuine camping martini glasses:

During the night we were serenaded by coyotes, some very close, and there were smaller varmints snuffling in the nearby bushes. There was nobody else camping in La Jolla, so it was a bit spooky to be the only people for miles, especially with a full-moon a few nights before Halloween, but we both slept well.

It was a wonderful trip, topped off with a 5 mile hike to Mugu Peak the next morning. If you’re looking for a beautiful camping spot only 45 minutes from LA, I highly recommend La Jolla Valley. Call Point Mugu State Park on
805-488-5223 for more information, and for other Santa Monica Mountains campgrounds, check out these posts:
La Jolla Valley
Sycamore Canyon
Circle X
Santa Cruz Island

Funhouse Photo User Count: 1.954 total, 77 active. Still slowly but steadily growing.

Event Connector User Count: 88 total, 1 active. I haven’t been focusing on selling this idea to any organizers for the last week, and it needs some time and effort to persuade promoters to consider it.

Last night was the annual Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council board meeting and dinner. Jerry received the Hank Grateful award for the most time worked this year, with an astonishing 366 hours spent fixing up the trails! For just one project, he hiked miles out into the backcountry with a 30 pound post hammer to install over 70 signs. He’s not only a hard worker, he’s also a leader, both day-to-day as a crew boss, and working with the park agencies to make work trips to Santa Cruz Island happen. A good friend and lovely guy, I always look forward to working with him out in the mountains.

He’s not alone out there, many of the regulars clocked up over 200 hours each. Looking around the room that night, I was thinking about the difference all these volunteers make, even though most trail users will never know about them. They’re not doing it for recognition, money or out of obligation, they just take joy in getting things done, in improving the mountains they love.

The awards had the motto "The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more". The happiest people I know are those who love what they do. I love being in a team full of them, whether it’s in the mountains or a conference room.

I just talked to my neighbor, who’s having his back wall rebuilt after a car flew off the freeway into his pool. Liz spent an hour cleaning the ash out of our hot-tub. Dinner was an In-N-Out animal-style burger, but I’ll be working that off with a ride along the beach path in Santa Monica, after a 90 minute commute on the 405. This weekend, fires permitting, we’ll be camping with the coyotes, in the mountains north of Malibu.

I don’t stop to think about it as often as I should, but when I do it always blows my mind. As a kid in Britain I grew up watching this world on TV and dreaming. Now I’m living in it! There’s so many things and people I love and miss in the UK, but this feels like home.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 1,892 total, 109 active. It’s been good to see the active count increasing along with the total. I need to graph this again.

Event Connector User Count: 82 total, 5 active. Still picking up some random users from the directory, but no takers from event organizers.

Yesterday me and Liz made it up to the Angeles mountains just north of Pasadena. Rising up steeply from the valley, the peaks reach around 6000 feet, giving both great views and some punishing climbs. Liz had just bought a Tom Harrison map of the western end of the Angeles, and we picked a promising trail, Condor Peak. I’ve put up a Google map covering the route we took, it turned out to be a lot of fun.

The drive up there was pretty short. We got off the 210 at Sunland, then onto Oro Vista and continued around 8 miles as it turned into Big Tujunga Canyon Road. The road was heavily potholed at the start, but got better, and wasn’t too twisty which made for a more pleasant drive. There was only one other car in the parking lot, and we met them a short way up the trail coming back after they’d only gone a little way.

The trail started off by switchbacking up from the lot, but then descended and headed back toward the road. At about a mile and a half, there’s a side-trail that forks off and heads down to a picnic area near the road, which might be an option as a starting point if you want to skip the first section. One nice feature of the trail is the provision of mile markers. They start off with roman numerals until the fourth mile, which has an arabic ‘4’, and then after that they give up marking the numbers. They’ve done a great job building the trail along some very steep rocky slopes, and they keep a tough but steady grade for most of way. Given the terrain, that’s quite a feat of route planning. It worked out to around 500 feet up every mile, which is work but hike-able for us.

There’s a lot of switchbacking up and along ridges, passing through scrubby chapparal with some of the biggest Yucca I’ve ever seen. After about the fourth mile, you start to get some views over the reservoir, and across to Josephine Peak and into the Valley. We started late, so we made it about six miles up before we had to turn around, at around 4300′ elevation, 2000 feet higher than the trail head. The trail was visible and clear ahead of us, but I’ve only mapped it as far as we walked. It looked like you’d get some really good vistas if you continued up to the eight mile point, and Condor peak at 5070′.

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Funhouse Photo User Count: 1,777 total, 75 active. I ended up working on my day job most of today, along with some halloween decorating, so I didn’t get to make any of the changes I was planning.

Event Connector User Count: 77 total, 7 active. Not much change, but I did run across the Web Community Forum in my research. They look like a very clued-up team focused on using social tools to build communities online, and they already have a high level of Facebook integration on their blog, with links to themselves, their group, and an event for their upcoming conference.

That’s the view from our house, those clouds are all smoke. There’s a large wildfire a few miles upwind of us, and we’re getting the full show, red sun, falling ash and all! We’re in little danger here since they built a mall on the grassland across from our house, but I hope that the fire-fighters we know like Frank Padilla and Dave Updike are taking care.

There’s two major local fires. With winds gusting up to 90 mph for the next three days, and a drought that’s left the brush dry as tinder, they could both cover a lot of ground before they’re controlled. Down in Malibu, on the south side of the Santa Monica Mountains, the fire’s smaller but in a heavily settled area and has already taken out some houses. The Castaic fire’s to the north of us, it’s much bigger but is burning through wild back country. There’s also a lot of smaller blazes as the wind knocks down power lines.

We know from our trail-building experience how much fuel has built up in the Santa Monicas. In some places, there’s dead brush above head-height, it’s been decades since a fire’s been through. I’m hoping there’s been enough warning for everyone to get out of harm’s way, because those sections will burn hot and fast.

Santa Cruz Island sits about twenty miles off the southern California coast, and is an amazing place to camp and hike. Never inhabited except by the Chumash Indians and a few sheep ranchers, visiting it is like a trip back in time. Completely undeveloped, without paved roads, power lines or pretty much any other reminder of modern life, it’s impossible not to relax!

There’s daily scheduled boat trips from Ventura, it takes about an hour, and you’ll often see some dolphins or whales as you cross the channel. You cross the shipping lanes, so you may be lucky enough to see a container ship up close too. Call me crazy, but I think they’re one of the wonders of the modern world, and always inspire a sense of wonder. Go to IslandPackers.com to reserve your boat ride.

With over one hundred square miles of back country, there’s a lot to explore. I’d recommend picking up a commercial map before you go, such as National Geographic’s, but I’ve also created a Google map showing the trails I’ve hiked on the eastern National Park side of the island. You can check out the map to build your own trips, but I’ll describe a few of my favorites here.

Cavern Point Loop

The landing point for the eastern side of the island is at Scorpion Harbor. This is the quickest and easiest loop, at 1.6 miles, though it does have some steep sections of uphill. You start off up the cliffs on the north side of the harbor, on a tough uphill climb. If it’s clear, at the top you’ll be rewarded with some great views of both the mainland, and the rest of the island. You then follow the trail along the top of the cliffs to Cavern Point, a bare patch at a cliff-top, where you can look west along the rugged coast. You can then take a fire road back, past the ranger’s huts, but I prefer going a little further along the trail, and then following a trail down a gully to the lower campground. When you’re going down the gully, check out the stone dams built to check erosion. They’ve lasted for decades, despite being dry stone construction, and were built by Italian stone-masons all over the island.

Once you’re at the lower campground, follow the main fire road east back to the pier. Breathe deeply as you pass through the eucalyptus planted by the ranchers. They may be non-native (like me!), but that smell always brings me back to the island.

Potato Harbor

A 5 mile out-and-back, this is a good intermediate hike. The route takes you up to Cavern Point first, but then takes you along the cliffs to a beautiful sheltered cove. Here’s a photo showing the view you’ll get if you make it:

From Cavern Point, you can just follow the cliff-top path until it joins with a fire road. Take that for another mile, and you’ll be there.

There’s a route known as the Quad Trail that branches off near Potato Harbor overlook. This is mostly unmaintained, and unmarked on most maps. Me and Liz followed it for a couple of miles, it had a lot of punishing uphill, but was generally clear and in good shape. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re an experienced hiker.

Smugglers Cove

You can head over to Smugglers Cove by following the fire road up the hill on the south side of Scorpion Canyon, visible from the pier. You won’t see it whilst you’re hiking on it, but there’s some magnificent rock walls supporting the road, built by the Italian stone-masons. It’s around four miles to Smugglers, but there’s a lot of uphill, so it’s harder than you might expect.

There’s a lovely grove of Cypress trees visible from the fire road. You can take a short-cut through this grove on a single-track trail, and it’s a perfect spot to recover from the struggle up the first hill. Planted for the rancher’s daughter to enjoy, it adds to the Mediterranean atmosphere.

Turn to the east when you get to a junction with another fire road, and you’ll be headed to Smugglers. Once you arrive, you’ll see a grove of olive trees planted by the ranchers, which always makes me wish I’d brought the rest of a martini. Smugglers Cove has an old Ranch House, but the best part is the beach. Exposed to the Pacific, you often get majestic surf rolling in.

Scorpion Canyon Trail and the Old Oil Well

A 4 mile loop with plenty of climbing. You start off heading west along the Scorpion Canyon fire road, and then continue along Scorpion Canyon trail once the road ends, after the upper campground. There’s a trail heading uphill near the end of Scorpion Canyon. It’s possible to continue up the canyon too, rather than taking this Old Oil Well trail, but it’s extremely rocky and technical, so I wouldn’t recommend it. Here’s a photo Liz took as we were exploring up the canyon a couple of weeks ago:

The Old Oil Well trail is very hard work, you gain a lot of elevation over a short distance. At the top, it joins up with a fire road, and a few hundred feet away is an old oil drill, with a drilling head left next to the trail. This is from an exploration effort many years ago, they dug down several thousand feet, but all they found was water! It was cheaper to write off the equipment than ship it back to the mainland, so here it sits, slowly rusting, good fodder for future archaeologists.

You can take the Old Oil Well fire road back down to get back to Scorpion Harbor.

Montanon Peak Trail

This is the longest and hardest trail we’ve taken on Santa Cruz. It’s 4.5 miles each way, and takes you to the highest point on the eastern island, Montanon Peak, at 1808 feet.

You start off by heading to the Old Oil Well, either by the fire road, or the Scorpion Canyon trail route. Once you’re at the well, continue west along the fire road. The trail itself is pretty well marked, with some signs added recently. Along the way, keep an eye out for the aircraft crash site. I don’t know the story behind this one, but there’s some old wreckage still visible as you pass over a rise.

The trail heads up to a local landmark known as High Mount. There, a trail splits off and heads off 12 miles west to Prisoners Harbor, a trip which I’ve never done myself, but hope to soon. The area gets fog rolling in from the ocean, so make sure you dress warmly. There’s some spectacular lichen and moss, here’s another photo from Liz:

Stick to the ridge, and head south and uphill, and you’ll find yourself at Montanon Peak. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you see a small hut, and some solar panels, for the radio equipment that’s housed up there.

I recommend taking the same trail back, but some maps do show a partial connector to Smugglers. We tried to make a loop down that way on our last trip, and it was a really horrible experience. The trail is non-existent, and getting down involves some scary rock scrambling. Liz had a nasty fall, and was lucky not to be injured beyond cuts and bruises. I’ve included the rough route we took in my map, but marked it in red, and I highly recommend not following in our footsteps!

Funhouse Photo User Count: 1,638 total, 77 active. I’m wondering if the stats are having a problem, since this seems to be exactly the same as last night?

Event Connector User Count: 61 total, 8 active. I just refreshed, and went from 48 total to 61, so there’s definitely something wild and whacky going on with Facebook’s statistics.

Me and Liz led a crew at the COSCA annual trail work day today, and we’ve got the CORBA Fat Tire Festival tomorrow. They’re both 6am starts, and we’re not exactly natural morning people, so we’re knackered!

I was hoping to complete a mini-guide to hiking on Santa Cruz Island, but bed is definitely calling. You can check out the Google map I finished showing the trails, but you’ll have to wait until later for photos and a description. I also had some fun learning about Outlook extension writing, I feel an article brewing on that too!

Funhouse Photo User Count: 1,638 total, 77 active. Not many adds, and almost as many removes, not sure why!

Event Connector User Count: 55 total, 8 active. A few more people finding it through the directory, no progress on new conference sign ups.

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.

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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.