The area around Ojai and Santa Paula is an odd and beautiful little corner of SoCal. It's really not far from LA but people barely know where it is. I first saw the bluffs from the ocean as I was coming back from Santa Cruz Island in 2015 which is how it got on my List. Just look at them. Of COURSE you want to get closer to them, right? A piece of Sedona, right in SoCal. Let me tell you, they are best appreciated from below. But I get hikes stuck in my brain; random things get into my head and the only exorcism is TO DO THEM (like this one, or this one.) And my opinion on hiking to the top of Topatopa in particular is:
My particular animus may have stemmed from a) yet ANOTHER bizarre circumstance preventing me from also bagging the Santa Barbara trail this same long weekend, that I've wanted to do for years (this year, a big early rainstorm washing out the canyon; last year, the Federal government closing) and b) doing it while in caffeine withdrawal, with very few calories, and starting off dehydrated (due to unnamed Ethiopian restaurant lunch in LA, no further details) and then drinking tons of water to catch up and getting hyponatremic, to the point of slurring my words and getting blurry vision. I'm SMART! In all seriousness, some of the upper mileage markers must be incorrect. Signs and guides report it at 18 miles, 4500' elevation gain but I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually more like 21 miles. Or maybe I went further than most people do. But witnesseth: it took me 1h40m to go "3" miles downhill quickly at one point? Really? I noticed maybe not coincidentally, once you're on fire road in the lower areas, and you could measure it in a vehicle, the mileages seem correct. It's also not that pretty, and the views are comparable to a lot of others you can get of the Channel Islands up in Santa Barbara, and which you can get to much more easily. Nice woman in blue hoodie, and French caterer, you guys were cool and were the two bright spots. Otherwise it sucks and I'm sorry I did it, I am a grumpy old man and just glad to get it off my list. Also I used this as a resource.
Below, in the haze you can just barely make out - is that Baldy, or San Gorgonio? There is snow from the recent storm.
Above, Oxnard and the back of Malibu, and the Channel Islands are visible in the next two below.
While in the neighborhood, I also bagged Mt. Pinos, another infection I needed to clear - and the highest point on the Grapevine Ridge, right on the line between Los Angeles and Kern Counties, and an easy 3 mile round trip hike (though the goofy Forest Service signs are wrong there too, in the other direction - it's really about 3 miles round trip but by the signs it would be 4.) You can honestly just use Google Maps for the route. At 8,847' there were patches of snow already in late October from the rains a few days before.
Above: just before sunrise somewhere on California Route 33 between Ojai and Frazier Park, which I think gives Route 12 a run for its money as most interesting and varied state highway in California.
Mt. Lassen National Park and volcanic far-northern California is a part of the country most people don't think about - even most people in the rest of California. California is big. It has a whole top half that people forget about. From the Golden Gate Bridge it's 340 miles to the Oregon border.
Lassen is in the Cascades, not the Sierras. The Sierras extend north to about Susanville (the border is the red line on the map - border zones of any kind are always interesting in their own right.) The Cascades begin there and go northward just barely into British Columbia, a product of the subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate (red arrow pointing at the submarine ridge marking the southern plate boundary.) Our first stop on this trip (the middle circle on the map) was therefore the the southernmost Cascade. I used to argue that the often-overlooked Sutter Buttes in California's Central Valley (the southernmost circle) were the southernmost Cascade, but among geologists (see here for Hausback et al's article) this seems to be more of a settled matter today so I must defer to the experts.[1]
Recent eruptions aside, Mt. Lassen is a good volcano for families. I've literally lost count of the number of times I've been at the top, but it's also a hike, not a climb, and it's not a death march by mountain hiking standards. That said, it's 2.5 miles to the top of average 15% slope, starting at 8,500' ending in at 10,500', so it can be annoying.
As you can see above from my awesome mountaineering moves (I call this the reverse glissade) the top is cool and all (there's usually a lot of snow algae) and there are steam vents but the best part of the park is Bumpass Hell, a steaming, boiling, sulfurous, Io-like bubbling volcanic waste in the middle of the park, down the slope of the mountain.
(More here.) They close the trail to it for much of the year because of snow and ice hazards, because they don't want MORE people falling into the boiling acidic mud and cooking their leg (seriously. That's what happened to the eponymous Mr. Bumpass. If you thought "Bumpass Hell" wasn't family friendly, would you prefer "Cooked Human Leg Thermal Area"?) And the rangers REALLY get sick of people asking when the trail will open, so to prevent this they put the data from past years right on the website. I knew we would be going the first weekend of August. Through July, the trail remained closed. I was getting nervous. So I did what any family man would do, which is plug the opening-date data into a linear regression:
The black circle is where the regression predicted the trail would open this year, with a snow depth of 217 inches on April 1st.[2] The red circle is when we would be attempting the hike. I recognized that the rangers were probably not going there every day to stare at the snow, and it's probably at most once a week that they inspected and announced the trail opening (or not), introducing some noise into the data. So the graph did little to address my nerves. Thus, imagine my joy when I checked the National Park website the day before the trip, and it was open! The regression did its job, and it was only off by 4 days, within the noise introduced by weekly checks! Needless to say, I claim credit for not only predicting the future, but controlling both weather, and volcanoes. It's only fair.
BURNEY FALLS
I don't know how I missed these after 25 years living in this state. First, maybe not a necessary point for anyone else besides me: they are NOT McCloud Falls, with which I often confused them in days past. You can swim and wade in McCloud Falls if you can tolerate cold water, but Burney Falls is colder still, remaining at a toasty 42 to 48 degrees Fahrenheit. As we descended into the valley the temperature dropped by at least 20F in 0.3 miles. I was trying to figure out on the map what stream or river the falls were on, and the answer is - they are the beginning of a river. If you look at the top of the falls, you can see the water is coming directly out of the ground. Definitely the most unique and I think most esthetically pleasing falls I've ever seen.
Below: it's good to see that visitors to the park are so considerate that they risk a fine for vandalism by carving an underline into the sign, emphasizing the strength of the waterfall, so as to warn would-be swimmers of the danger.
THE LAVA BEDS
Lava Beds National Park is the greatest national park you've never heard of. Great for families, full of "actionable" geology, native history, and two of the less-proud chapters of American history. The Lava Beds and neighboring Tulelake really are smack up against the Oregon border. It's inland high desert, so it doesn't look much like what people expect the area would. (You want redwood trees? Go to the coast. Redwood National Park is a mere jaunt of 286 miles to the west.)
The Lava Tubes, Cinder Cones, and Ice Caves
There are hundreds of lava tubes in the park, caves formed by the movement of lava underground. Some of them are big - you could drive a truck through them. Others are small and you spend most of your time inside crouching. There are some developed for tourism, many of them within 1/4-1/2 mile of the park. By "developed" I mean, one of them has lights, and others just have a ladder leading down into the darkness. The undeveloped ones are holes in the ground you crawl into. I thought this would be a tough sell for a young kid, but after initial hesitation, this was by far the favorite part of the trip. Sentinel Cave in particular was pretty cool. There are lava flows and cinder cones throughout the park as well. You don't have to be a geologist to see them and understand what formed them.
Above: the interior of a cave without light (Duh. Although, it really is an actual photo.) Below: with light (Sentinel Cave.)
(Above: a collapsed cave.) We also visited a cave outside the park that has year-round ice in it (the aptly named Jot Dean Ice Cave) but it wasn't quite as nifty as I remembered - no River Alf, no floating hair, and not a flashing eye to be found. Maybe because I forgot to bring any milk of paradise, or honeydew to dine on. You can see a couple tubes just peeking above the surface in the pictures. I've read that just in the Lava Beds park proper they discover on average six new caves per year, and there are doubtless many more to be discovered in the surrounding national forest.
Above image inside the cave from Steven Johnson's Flickr page. Below, landscape around the cave, and below that, a very ominous sign. "Other occupants"?
Any trip that doesn't have a (positive) surprise is suboptimal, and for this one, it was the fantastic dark-sky talk given by a ranger at the Lava Beds. I really can't recommend it enough. Learning about the stories behind the constellations (not just the Greek ones), and seeing shooting stars and Milky Way so thick against the sky you imagine you can reach up and feel its texture.
The History - A Stolen Home, and an Unwanted Home
There are petroglyphs carved into the sandstone of a cliff face, dating from when there was a lake there. Of course we don't know what they all mean; you can imagine people fishing a thousand years ago, sitting on tule mats and making some of the dots to count up their catch, others to tell a story or protect against disease or snakes. Some of them are definitely snakes. Amazing to think of how different we are from the people who made these signs, and wonder whether in the distant future someone will try to understand what we write today.
Credit above to Sierra Nevada Geotourism, and below to Wiki.
And we are different from the people who made these symbols, because the Modoc people were removed from their land at gunpoint. Their first encounter with white people was with Fremont's men, marching south, who mistook them for their traditional enemies, the Klamath, who they'd split off from six hundred years prior. (Imagine aliens landed on Earth in Russia, the Russian army shot at them, the aliens took off and landed again in the U.S. and attacked us to get revenge. That's what it was like.) Twenty-five years later the army came to remove the Modoc, the Modoc realized the land they had been marched off to was terrible, escaped and went back to the Lava Beds - where they used collapsed, un-roofed caves as a place for trench warfare. Two hundred men, women and children held off two thousand Union troops for six months, at one point making the mistake of thinking if they killed the Union chief (General Canby) that the Union would withdraw. The Modoc War only ended when the Union cut off their water supply, beginning the process of draining most of the lake that their answers fished on and made petroglyphs next to. (First photo below of one of the trenches in Captain Jack's Stronghold credit tripadvisor.)
Just outside the park is the monument to Tulelake internment camp, where almost 30,000 Japanese-Americans - those considered "troublemakers" among interned citizens - were sent during World War II. George Takei was here as a boy. I'm torn about this. It should be recognized and we should remember it and teach our kids about it so we don't make the same mistakes in the future. But somehow, once something like this is cleaned up and formally recognized, there's an artifical safety and sterility to the place, like it's behind glass (e.g., see the better-known Manzanar internment camp in the eastern Sierra.) The first time I saw it, I only knew where to look by looking it up ahead of time, and it was just piles of cinder blocks and rusting barbed wire, with no interpretive plaques to filter and protect us from reality. Image credit to discovernikkei.org.
MCCLOUD FALLS
They were cold this year. There was a bit of wading. Definitely no swimming. You want to see people being happy swimming, check out the video. (Narrator: they were not happy.)
MOUNT SHASTA
Well there it is man! Looming over most of the proceedings, and especially impressive when approached from the east via Route 89 (image credit newsfromnativecalifornia.com.) Please also enjoy this historical image of of this dashing and, dare I say, rougueish fellow conquering the mountain ca. 2003.
Footnotes
[1] You might understand the attraction to the idea of the Sutter Buttes as the southernmost Cascade - if you look back up at the map, there's a smaller ridge parallel to the southern boundary of the modern JDF plate, south of it, that comes ashore at Point Arenas and would pass immediately underneath the Buttes on the way to the northwest corner of Lake Tahoe. The Sutter Buttes are about 1.5 MA old, newer than the Cascades, but about the same age as the coastal volcanoes like Mt. Konocti at Clearlake, and the volcanics NW of Tahoe like Granite Chief and Red Star Ridge along the Western States Trail.)
[2] It's actually kind of amazing there were only 217" there on April 1, given California's historic rain and snow year - although the further north you went, the less remarkable it got. People in Washington State we visited were surprised to hear how wet it had been.
I took a lot of pictures of wildflowers in the Marin Headlands today, then used the good old MS-Paint color picker (eyedropper icon) to pull out a pure color from the petal where it's illuminated by the sun, and a where it's shaded.
It's amazing how we think of an object as a single color, and yet objectively it is multiple colors as the light is incident on our retina because of shading, and we still understand it as a single continuous object.
Wildflowers are pretty as hell bro.
I'm very much an amateur so if any of these are misidentified, I appreciate your correction in the comments. Also if you find the colors interesting please take them for your own purposes.
This is the full "spectrum" of colors I sampled shrunk down to see all at once.
The first three reds are Indian paintbrush species. There are 20+ species of Indian paintbrush and their ranges overlap significantly, so if you can distinguish and identify the paintbrush species, thanks in advance for doing so in the comments. The last one is live forever, an endangered Dudleya succulent species whose red leaftips are much more brilliant when "purified" by this sampling method. Protect our coastal succulents - they're targets of criminals that are digging them up on masse and destroying them (seriously, read that, it's unbelievable.) Also saw some Dudleya on the trail, which has red-tipped leaves (impressively red when directly sampled.)
The top orange one is a harlequin flower (sparaxis), a South African invasive, then sticky monkey flower, and finally you damn well better know our state flower.
Respectively, again the (center of the) harlequin flower, field chickweed, the yellow part of the Ferdinand iris petal, French broom (invasive - die), goldenfields, and blue-eyed grass (the second stupidest flower name in this post.) Centers of flowers are often yellow, I wonder why. Then again, we're probably missing the important part of the story - flowers are "designed" for bees who can see into the UV.
A nice green leaf, and then the stem of the goldenfields (a more minty green like sage) and the green part of the liver forever - again, amazingly yellower than it seems when seen in situ.
Hound's tongue (one of my favorite despite having the stupidest name ever - maybe they're hallucinogenic when ingested or something), then the sky just above the fog and then immediately overhead, and finallly ceanothus.
Lupine (my favorite, which smelled amazing in this warm day - I used to say they smell like mothballs, but they're actually awesome and much less purple and more blue when purified), blue eyed grass, and again Ferdinand's iris.
Pink is not a real color on the spectrum, but we'll pretend. Checkerbloom (I think), white bindweed, and checkerbloom again.
For white, yarrow, then the sky both in the fog and above it (in situ, seems gray, not blue). Then for black, I was wondering where I would get it from, and had resigned myself to just using the tiny black rim of the harlequin flower, but then as if reading my mind this fellow helpfully landed right in front of me near the trailhead and started cooperatively strutting back and forth. I happen to be fascinated with ravens and the Pacific Northwest art tradition around them.
Solvitur ambulando! Note the thick brow-ridge and the death-grip on the beverage. You can email this handsome devil at mdcblogs@gmail.com. "[If you are depressed] go for a long walk...and if still depressed, then walk again." -Hippocrates ca. 410 BCE
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