A few months ago, I was lucky enough to attend a session of the Entrepreneur Mentor Society. Shaun Tan set up the organization to help LA college students learn about starting businesses by meeting experienced entrepreneurs. It’s built around a semester of Saturday sessions, where two or three speakers will stand in front of a few dozen students, and just tell their stories. They always get a great set of folks up front, some famous, but all fascinating. Even better, the students are all busy starting their own businesses, with experienced mentors to offer advice.

LA traditionally hasn’t had the entrepreneurial infrastructure of the tech hubs like the Valley, Austin or Colorado, so the EMS is a big step forward. I started some on-going relationships there with both some of the students and speakers, like Gary Kosman of AmericaLearns. Most of all, I left feeling uplifted and energized by the enthusiasm that everyone radiated!

If you’re ever in LA on a Saturday, and you’re interested in meeting the next generation of entrepreneurs, check out the schedule and contact Shaun.

I just returned from a day leading a trail crew with the Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council. Here’s one of the problems we tackled:

And here’s a close-up:

The trail had washed away, leaving only a few inches for people to walk on!

Here’s the solution, after me, Ed and Liz spent half an hour with pick-axes, saws and loppers. A whole new trail section. Ed’s standing where the old trail was, everything to the left is new.

I spend all week hunched in front of a computer, and it can take months or years before I see the final results of a project. That’s why trail work’s so much fun for me; it’s outdoors, physical, and you see instant results.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 780 total, 70 active. Much the same as before, hopefully I can spend some more time hunched over my laptop tomorrow, adding feed notifications and some new effects.

Moving east from Sycamore Canyon and La Jolla Valley, the next campground I know of is Circle X. It’s owned by the National Park Service, since that part is NPS property, confusingly even though there’s no National Park in the Santa Monicas. A ranger friend once told me there’s over a hundred different public and non-profit agencies who own land in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, as it’s officially known!

One nice thing about it being a National property is that they have a bigger budget than the cash-strapped State Parks, and so actually have a good map and infomation web page up. The camp site is another group one, for 10 to 75 people. There’s water and toilets, and you can drive up to the camp ground. There’s also a ranch house that’s available for day-use functions, but not overnight.

Some of my favorite trails start nearby; Mishe Mokwa, with its great views of hanging rock, and seasonal springs; the Grotto with some lovely rock-scrambling, and Sandstone Peak, the highest point in the Santa Monicas at 3,111 feet that offers some amazing views.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 747 total, 80 active. Much as before, there seems to be a steady stream of new people adding the app, and a smaller number using it each day. Some questions I’d like to figure out are if new users are arriving via messages sent by their friends, or just spotting it on profiles, and whether people tend to change their photo, or just pick one and leave it. I shall need to do some database-crunching to pull out that information.

A few miles to the east of La Jolla Valley is Sycamore Canyon. There’s a fire road that runs along the floor of the canyon all the way from the beach up to Satwiwa/Rancho Sierra Vista in Thousand Oaks, and some glorious side-trails that head off it into the back-country. The road is great for a fairly gentle bike ride, and very popular, and there’s some great technical trails on the west side of the canyon. The east half is designated wilderness, so there’s no biking. Some of my favorite hiking trails go through the wilderness there though, like Old Boney and Chamberlain trails.

There’s a big campground right at the south end of the Canyon, just off the PCH. Sycamore Cove is a large paved site, suitable for RVs, and very, very popular! I don’t think there’s any time of year that it isn’t fully booked in advance. It’s in a great location for exploring the mountains, but I’ve been put off by how busy it is. Probably most suitable if you want a family getaway with access to the beach, it has full facilities including showers and a campground host.

Much less used is Danielson campground, about four miles north up the Canyon fire road. It’s a group site, so you’ll need to have a large group, a dozen or more, to reserve it. Its location is amazing though, you can drive up the fire road to get there, but it’s in a small side-valley, in the center of a grove of oaks. There’s a central outdoor fireplace and picnic area left over from when the park was a ranch, and it will comfortably hold a couple of hundred people.

Perhaps the best way to check it out is the annual Santa Monica Mountains Trail Days camp-out, where a hundred or so volunteers camp Friday and Saturday nights, do trail maintenance during the day, and are rewarded with a lovely barbecue on Saturday evening, as well as some entertainment from the rangers. The heading photo is from this years barbecue. It’s in the last week of April, keep an eye on the Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council site for details.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 681 total, 81 active. Good to see the total still growing, I still need to find time to update the effects, and maybe add news-feed notifications to see if I can boost growth.

I was chatting about local camping the other day, and realized there really wasn’t any good documentation on where you can camp in the Santa Monica mountains. Here’s the only official list I could find, but it doesn’t have much information on the different site. We’ve got some amazing trails, but there is a shortage of overnight spots. There are a few options though, so I’ll try and cover the ones I know about over the next few days.

First up is the La Jolla Valley. It’s on the west side of the Santa Monicas, past Malibu and Sycamore Canyon if you’re driving along the PCH from LA. What’s really special is that there’s a hike-in campground here, with no reservation required, and it’s not usually too heavily used. It’s primitive, without much in the way of facilities, and a friend using it complained about the coyotes sniffing around his tent at night, but for a last-minute get-away it’s hard to beat. Being no reservations, it’s first-come, first-served, so you don’t have a guarantee that you’ll be able to camp of course! The two mile hike in tends to keep numbers down though. I recommend giving the State Park Service a call before making a trip, to make sure it’s not closed because of fire danger, and to hear any advice they might have about using the site.

I’ve prepared a google map showing the campground and how to get to it.  I’ve done it from memory, make sure you’ve got a good local trail map like the Tom Harrison or National Geographic ones, since there’s a couple of forks in the trail that can lead you astray.

There’s also a group campground by the parking lot, which I’ve had some great times at. It looks out over the beach, with the sound of breakers alternating with coyote howls most evenings. I won’t be spending too much time on the group campgrounds though, since they usually require a minimum of between ten and twenty people to book, which is hard to arrange for most people. If you can gather that many folks, they can be a good option though, since there are a lot more group campgrounds than individual ones, and they never seem to be as heavily used.

In my next post, I’ll cover Sycamore Canyon’s camping options.

Funhouse Photo User Count: 617 total, 75 active. It definitely looks like growth has slowed since I implemented the server changes. It’s good to have such instant feedback, but it’s a shame I’ll need to wait until the weekend to try to improve the user experience.

After all the coding yesterday, me and Liz spent the evening on a bike ride in the Simi hills. We started off at the south end of First Street and went exploring on a different route than usual. We were lucky enough to see the ocean from the top of one of the hills, that’s the gleam at the bottom of the picture.

There’s no good map available of the loop we normally take, so I’ve experimented with Google maps. Here’s a link to the one I created, and I’ve embedded it below.

View Larger Map

I did manage to achieve a first yesterday when I made it all the way up ‘heart attack hill’ without stopping. This is a really steep section of fire road that I’ve always made it 50 or 75% up before having to walk, but it looks like all the lunchtime riding I’ve been doing in Santa Monica, including a hill-climb up Temescal Canyon, paid off!

I just got back from a gruelling hike up Mount Baden-Powell in the Angeles mountains, the range that surrounds the north of Los Angeles. They’re a different beast than the Santa Monicas, higher, steeper and more rugged, pure heaven for someone who grew up in a place flatter than Kansas. In the winter, I often see snow on the peaks above me as I’m driving through a heat-wave in the Valley!

Yesterday, me, Liz and a few friends from work did a 2,800′ climb over four miles, to get to the peak at 9,400′. That was a killer, especially with the elevation gain. We, of course, ran into the obligatory old bloke near the top, who had hiked twelve miles to get there from the other end, and was happy to tell us about all the 17,000′ one-day elevation gains he’d done. My excuse is that all some of these retired folks do is go tearing around the mountains all week. How am I meant to compete with that, sitting in front of a computer for ten hours most days?

On a clear day, you can look down on the desert 8000 feet below to the north, and out to the Channel Islands in the Pacific to the north. The only down-side is that it’s so wind-swept and snow-covered in the winter, that only a few hardy plants survive at higher elevations, mostly gnarled pines and a few tough shrubs. The Santa Monicas are still my favorite haunt, with all their wild-flowers and waterfalls, but I love having such a spectacular range on my doorstep.

When I first talked to a recruiter about jobs in the US, my only criteria was ‘anywhere but LA’, since all I’d heard was traffic, gangs and Hollywood. Of course, all the offers I received were in LA. I accepted one, since I was only coming over for a year or so. That was six years ago! This picture shows one big reason why I stayed.

The first week I was here, I stayed in Thousand Oaks, a suburb of LA. I knew I wanted to get some hiking in, so I looked for big areas of green on the road map, and headed to one about 10 minutes drive away. Once I stepped out of the car, I knew it was something special. Ahead of me was Boney Mountain, and a wilderness 10 miles deep to the ocean. A mangy looking dog was trotting loose on the trail nearby, so I followed it. Pretty soon I found myself in the middle of a whole bunch of mangy dogs, making funny yelps that I assumed meant ‘I wonder if he’s edible?’, and I realized I’d wandered into a pack of coyotes.

It was evening, so that was a short hike, but as soon as I had a weekend free I set off for the ocean. I found waterfalls, cliffs, flowers, lichen, deer, bobcats. I fell in love, it was like nothing I’d ever seen. The Santa Monica mountains are an amazing secret of LA, an area around
40 miles by 8 miles of wilderness filled with spectacular trails. You can hike for hours and not see another soul, just half an hour from the 405.

I kept finding excuses to get out in the mountains, met Liz while when we both were volunteers repairing trails, and fell in love again.

The photo is of Boney Mountain from the ocean side, from a hike we just did today. If you’re ever in LA, look up Topanga, Point Mugu, Rancho Sierra Vista/Satwiwa (where I saw the coyotes), Malibu Creek, or one of the dozens of trail heads out in the mountains, you won’t be disappointed.

I’m just back from a week’s vacation in Chicago, and I’m now down in San Diego attending SIGGRAPH. The picture is of "Cloud Gate" aka "The Bean", a sculpture in Chicago’s Millenium Park.

This was a great trip, especially as I discovered Denver airport has tornado shelters:

Sadly I missed out on seeing any twisters, but I did get a proper rainstorm in Chicago, which was heaven after LA’s measly three inches in the last year.

I’ll be done with the conference and posting regularly in a few days. I need to complete my series on marketing browser plugins by covering some of my greatest mistakes, so you’ll have a good idea of what not to do!

Actually, a probable possum. The cats alerted us to something sneaking around the woodpile last night, and it turned out to a giant-rat-like critter. After our initial hopes of an ROUS, some poking around in google images lead us to the possum hypothesis.

As well as giving me the chance to say ‘possum’ a lot, which is a treat in itself, it was also another in the list of cool American critters I’ve been lucky enough to see. It joins coyotes, tarantulas, scorpions, bobcats, rattle snakes, king snakes, racoons and black widow spiders. The black widows are also prone to hanging around our house, which adds a certain edge of danger to walking to the hot tub at night!

If you want to see more nature in LA, a good place to start is the Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council. Liz sits on their board, and maintains the website, including a trail and plant of the month.