Take a Hike in Southern California

Hike date: June 6, 2009–With our list out of the way, the boys decided to leave choos­ing the first hike up to me. I picked Pole Creek and the hills behind our house in Fill­more in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. There’s an old road, so we heard, that starts at Pole Creek and goes back into the canyons, swings up the side of the moun­tain and comes out on Foothill drive. We also knew that the area has been closed to auto­mo­bile traf­fic for quite some time because of an endan­gered frog.

Well, the day came for our hike and we set out. It was a Sun­day morn­ing and the only day both Tyler and Gar­rett had off at the same time. We got per­mis­sion to pass the gate and then imme­di­ately snaked our way down into Pole Creek. We had to fol­low the creek for a short ways, in and out of water, until we were able to come up and out and onto higher ground. If there was ever a road back there…there is no trace of it any more. We had to tra­verse quite a ways through a lot of fox­tail and occa­sional brush to finally come out on a dirt road.

Along the way we dis­cov­ered that our cell phones didn’t work—at least not for a phone call. Tyler dis­cov­ered that the GPS on his phone did actu­ally work. He played around with it a lit­tle and we found our­selves rep­re­sented by a lit­tle blink­ing square on a gray back­ground with a grid on it. And, a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the road was there. Voila! And it actu­ally came in pretty handy. There was one point where the path seemed to go on across the creek and another path went up a steep incline to the left which didn’t look like the right direc­tion to go in—even though the trail looked more used. We decided to try the uphill trail and see whether the GPS let us know if we were going in the right direc­tion. This was imme­di­ately after I twisted my ankle when I stepped on a rock the wrong way. Man that hurt. I just hoped it would get feel­ing bet­ter as we pro­gressed and luck­ily it did.

We fol­lowed the trail up to the top and noticed that, as far as the GPS was con­cerned, we were off the grid. We were a blink­ing dot in the ether and the trail was ‘over there’. So at least it let us know to go back down the hill and fol­low the slighter trail along the creek. Even­tu­ally we came out to an open area where there was a ‘lad­der to nowhere’. It was pretty funny to see that metal lad­der just stick­ing straight up into the sky with noth­ing around it for maybe 100 feet. There must have been some kind of tank there at one time on a con­crete pad. But why just leave the lad­der??? Shortly past the lad­der there was a well used dirt road that went up an incline to the left or went straight and deeper into the canyon. In look­ing at Tyler’s GPS, the road didn’t show that it went straight so we turned left and on up the hill.

Lad­der to nowhere.

Dur­ing my search­ing for any infor­ma­tion on Tar Creek hikes, I came across this very inter­est­ing arti­cle “Tar Creek Adven­ture”, by:  Fred Heiser, 18 Sep­tem­ber 2003. (please report any bro­ken links to me.)

share my blog

4 Responses to “Hike Through Pole Creek”