Take a Hike in Southern California

This was just a great South­ern Cal­i­for­nia hike! It was unevent­ful, not that I am always look­ing for event­ful hikes like our last hike down Tar Creek, but the day was beau­ti­ful and being out­side was just all around good. We left Ven­tura and headed up High­way 33 past Ojai and into the moun­tains. We arrived at Camp Schiedeck at around 10:15 and took off around 10:30. Since we needed to be back to the car by 6:30, we cal­cu­lated are turn­around to be 3:00. Our plan was to see how close we could get to Pine Moun­tain Lodge campsite.

Most peo­ple think this hike involves going to Rose Val­ley and hik­ing up the Piedra Blanca camp­site with an ele­va­tion of around 500 feet. While this is an extremely beau­ti­ful hike with many great look­ing rock for­ma­tions, start­ing from the oppo­site end as we did proves to be a lot more chal­leng­ing with a 4000 foot ele­va­tion gain. You really feel like you are in the wilder­ness out here!

Piedra Blanca National Recre­ation Trail

Our cell phones didn’t work here so I couldn’t let Norma know that we had arrived and were start­ing out. Sure wish satel­lite phones were not so expen­sive. The trail­head starts at Lower Reyes Camp­ground at 4000 feet. We took off down the trail and it almost imme­di­ately started going up. And it kept going up for the longest time. This shouldn’t have sur­prised us being that we were at the bot­tom of a moun­tain in hopes to hike to the top of it.

At one point early on we came to a trail off the right side. Which trail do we take? In look­ing at our trail map, we didn’t see any trails inter­sect­ing ours at that point, but that didn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean much. The Reyes Peak Trail meets the Piedra Blanca quite a way along the trail at Had­dock camp­site. This was not it. Besides, we were less than ½ hour into the hike. We also didn’t like it because the trail we thought we should stay on went in the cor­rect direc­tion and this ‘oth­er’ trail made a sharp turn right-which didn’t seem correct.

When any of you try this hike in the future, please go ahead and take the trail to the right—even though it feels wrong– it is the cor­rect trail. We chose poorly and took the trail going to the south­east (the gen­eral direc­tion of the Piedra Blanca).  We quickly paid a huge price in terms of energy drain. This ‘wrong’ trail steep­ened and the dirt turned loose which was slip­pery and hard to climb.

I slowly ascended though the dry, open, semi-desert land­scape. It fas­ci­nates me how much life such a land­scape can sup­port. Col­or­ful wild­flow­ers, thick, fra­grant lilac bushes, yucca plants with giant flow­er­ing stalks and other plants I didn’t rec­og­nize cov­ered the dry hill­sides. Lizards, snakes and squir­rels scur­ried through the brush. I knew moun­tain lions, bob­cats and coy­otes were about too, but I didn’t see any.

We were steadily going uphill and in true form for me, I had to stop mul­ti­ple times to give my legs a rest and catch my breath. I felt like I was doing bet­ter than on the last hike, but… The new exer­cise reg­i­men I set up for myself was start­ing to pay off. Five miles of walk­ing with two sets of stairs in between while also wear­ing 5 pound ankle weights. I was still not happy with my per­for­mance at this point. I’m hop­ing I can do some­thing more about it for the future.

We finally got to a spot where we were on top of a knoll and it looked like the hik­ing would be either down­hill or lever for awhile. We stopped here for a few min­utes, shed our packs and had a short snack break. This was also a good place to take some pho­tos. In the dis­tance we could see the Cuyama Val­ley and to its left is the Dick Smith Wilder­ness Area. Another great place to do some hik­ing in the future.

On top of first ridge look­ing down on Cuyama Valley.

The hike down into the next canyon, while beau­ti­ful, was nonethe­less unre­mark­able. It did give you that good smell of being outdoors—mostly of pine. We even­tu­ally landed at Upper Reyes Camp­site. It’s a nice camp­site secluded beneath a group of very large pine trees. Our easy hike down­hill even­tu­ally turned to another long and steady ascent. There were many switch­backs and again, I had to stop many times to rest.  The trail to this point was well used and wide and there was no rea­son to think that it wouldn’t con­tinue to stay that way since it is a National Scenic Trail.

As we were on our way up, we kept look­ing across the canyon at the tall peaks of Pine Moun­tain and won­der­ing how we were going to get to the top of them since they were so steep. I did remem­ber that the trail moved in an almost par­al­lel track with the ridge, but off angle of about 5 degrees. We sur­mised that we must be head­ing toward an area that was not as steep as what we were look­ing at. It was the only thing that made sense. There is no way we could have hiked up the side of those mountains.

We finally reached another high point in the trail and started our descent down into another canyon. Up until this point our hik­ing was mostly out in the open with very lit­tle cov­er­ing. Ahead we saw a lot of trees and that it would be pretty shady for the hike down. It was, but we had some visitors—nasty lit­tle flies. Flies kept both­er­ing us all the way down to a creek. I believe it was Beartrap Creek. We landed in Beartrap Camp­site which is a very nice camp­site next to it’s name­sake stream. We stopped at this point for a 30 min. rest, relax­ation and lunch. Once we were able to stop sweat­ing so much, the lit­tle flies left us alone and we were sure glad to be rid of them.

Look­ing past rock sheets towards Cuyama Valley.

Nice rock for­ma­tions on oppo­site side of canyon where lit­tle flies were.

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