Take a Hike in Southern California

We took a good look back up the ravine into the first falls. There were some high school kids jump­ing into the water, laugh­ing, yelling and hang­ing out under the falls. The small caves behind the falls are pretty cool when you are stand­ing behind the waterfalls.

Look­ing back up the ravine, first falls.

Head­ing back down the creek towards the last falls, we ran into even larger boul­ders we had to hop over or find a way around. Things went smoothly until we came to a place we couldn’t eas­ily nav­i­gate. It was too steep to just scram­ble over and we didn’t want to get wet by going through the creek water.  At the only log­i­cal place to try and get down, we noticed there was a slight ledge about half way down. Tyler lay on his stom­ach and we locked wrists to lower both Gar­rett and me down to the ledge. Once on the ledge we could walk along the edge hold­ing onto Tyler as we got close enough to the ground to hop down. Once Gar­rett was down, we tossed all the packs and walk­ing sticks to him. Once I was securely on the ledge, I helped Tyler over the side and then down to the ledge. From here we hopped down and were home free!

Oh, by the way, my beau­ti­fully crafted walk­ing stick had bro­ken in two a ways back as I was using it sort of like a pole vault. Right before my feet hit the ground on the other side of the creek, the pole snapped in two. It was incred­i­ble. It just kind of exploded right in the cen­ter with a loud crack. Then it was no more. Luck­ily I was bal­anced enough, and close enough to the ground, that I caught myself. One walk­ing stick down. Well, there goes the idea of using hand­crafted walk­ing sticks from old tree branches.

It didn’t take us long to get to the last falls. Even though we couldn’t see the over the falls, it was quite a ways down. There was a nice deep pool at the top edge of the falls where the water even­tu­ally ran over the side. The sides of the canyon were pretty steep. Impos­si­ble to climb on the right and next to impos­si­ble, but do-able, on the left. What to do at this point? We looked back the way we had come and decided we might not be able to get back up. Remem­ber the ledge stuff?

By now it was around 3pm and we could see where Tar Creek joined Sespe Creek. Dur­ing my ear­lier research on the Inter­net I found a map that showed a clear trail from the Sespe back up to where our car awaited us. It was the same trail we left ear­lier to go down Tar Creek and to the falls. If we could get down to the Sespe some­how, we would be able to find that trail and take it back out to the car. Since we couldn’t repel down the water­falls, we had to get around the falls in order to get down to the Sespe. To do that, we had to scram­ble up the hill­side of loose dirt, dried grasses and bushes to reach the top and from there we hoped to find a way down to the Sespe.

This is where every­thing just went totally wrong. It took a few failed attempts, but we finally scram­bled to the top. Once there it looked like we were on top of the world—at least the Sespe world. We decided to stop there, take a few pho­tos and have lunch.  There was no sight of a trail down.

Top of The Sespe where we had lunch.

Look­ing down to where Tar Creek merges with Sespe Creek from where we had lunch.

The con­clu­sion to follow…

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