Guides and Trips
Trips
Kenyon and I set out this morning for our first "real" Whitney training hike that would give us a consistent and gradual (yeah right) elevation gain to reach darn near close to 10,000 feet above sea level.Hit the road at 6:30am, arrived at the trail head at 8:30ish even though we took a back-country dirt road that ended right at the Vincent Gap parking lot. Sorry about the car Kenyon! :) Anyway, we parked, got...
Took a brief afternoon stroll through Sage Ranch with Albackore2 to grab a few more caches that have been placed since I was there last. This was my third visit to this park over the past several years and this time we took the clockwise route. Parked down below to avoid the $5 iron ranger and started our late afternoon journey heading west.This loop trail must be heavily used because it's impossible...
Backbone Trail - Penny Road - Eagle Junction - Musch Trail
Topanga State Park, California, United States
Hiking | 4.6 miles
Hiking | 4.6 miles
Here's a quick little 2-hour/5-mile hike that gives a beginning hiker a taste of uphill and downhill. Your first mile affords you a nice 800' ascent and the remaining hike is a 1600' descent. The only quirk with this hike is that you'll need to do a "car-bridge" which involves two cars parked at either end of the trail. I did this with a geocaching friend of mine, Bill Widger, as volunteers...
Mission Point & Jones Junction Conditioning Hike
Granada Hills, California, United States
Hiking | 5.9 miles
Hiking | 5.9 miles
Mission Point is a great location to view the San Fernando Valley, Sylmar, Sunland, Burbank and much more. During the day it's a gorgeous view ... but at night, it's spectacular! We could see all the way to the Palos Verdes hills.This was my first true "night hike" with the Calabasas Day Hikers (CDH) on Meetup.com. A small group of just five souls ascended the hill the "direct" route, straight up from...
Phantom Trail / Twelve Days of Christmas
Agoura Hills, California, United States
Geocaching | 4.8 miles
Geocaching | 4.8 miles
We had a group of 14 geocachers on this brisk, windy Sunday morning. Since we were doing the Phantom trail, we decided on the Phantom 14 as our geocaching name we would place on the logs. Most of the people on this trip have never hiked this trail before. We started around 7:30am and finished around 11:00am just in time for lunch at Wolf Creek.Some other cachers told us how difficult this...
It was drizzling all night, but we said if it looked clear in the morning, we'd hit the muddy trails and finally knock off a few of these Dragon caches that have been placed in the remote area hardly visited by anyone but off-road bicyclists.So, we started at the most northerly trail head off Bell Canyon road and our exit point would be another Bell Canyon trail head situated off Morgan Road. When we started...
Johnson Motorway Rocky Peak Chumash Trail
Rocky Peak, California, United States
Geocaching | 7.3 miles
Geocaching | 7.3 miles
It's been a few months since I've been out hiking, so this hike told my body that I was really out of shape! The morning started out at 25 degrees in the canyon and warmed up just a hair as we started on the trail. Couple of car-bridges allowed us to all start at the same place and break into two groups at the top.The first section takes you through a very...
Set out to grab some more of the newer Backbone Trail caches with some geo-buddies. Started just north of Trippet Ranch where there's a place to park for free. Quick jaunt onto the Musch Trail and the Backbone trail from there. We all needed to head out far enough East to reach a very recently placed cache called bbLA's Crack Rock. Then we turned back around and headed down Topanga Fire Road,...
This is a nice steep stretch of the Backbone Trail starting from Malibu Canyon Road to the top of Mesa Peak. The primary parking lot and trailhead is just south of Tapia Park but you can also park across the street and north of the bridge for free. Last week we hiked another trail further west from here and this hike will bring us to the junction of Mesa Peak Motorway and...
Another hot, yet very nice hike in the Santa Monica Mountains/Malibu from the top of Corral Canyon Road along the Backbone Trail and down Puerco Motorway/Canyon Road. Although Google Earth would make you feel that the first portion is nearly "flat", I can tell you for a fact it is not!Starting at about 2000' elevation we crested a few peaks above that including Mesa Peak at about 2200'. Little ocean breeze teasers...
A very hot summer hike in the Santa Monica Mountains. Started at "Free Parking" geocache at 7:30ish. Swung around the bend to hookup with the rest of our team that started on the Musch Trail off Topanga Cyn Blvd. Little did our group know that we'd be waiting for the rest of the group for 1 hour and 45 minutes! Yikes. Our groups merged around 10:15 and it was already 90 degrees! ...
Off on another geo-hike this morning to grab two very difficult Mystery caches and all the others along the way. The Hummingbird Trail is used by mountain bikers and is very steep in most places. Switchbacks do go all the way to make it a bit easier for hikers but you'll see many "shortcuts" that the bikers take. We started at 7AM on a very cold (39 degrees at the trail head)...
2011-11-25 Chandler Fire Road - Verdugo Hills
Verdugo Mountains / Burbank, California, United States
Geocaching | 6.0 miles
Geocaching | 6.0 miles
Out with a big group of the S F V G's Black Friday Finders, call us that please After all the turkey and trimmings we ate Time to burn calories, a thousand and eight We didn't expect such an elevation gain but at least we knew it wasn't gonna rain It was a 'leisurely hike' some of us said The rest of them could have stayed in bed But it was...
2011-1008 Hawaii "Waterworld Fresh Water" http://coord.info/GC5B98
Kukuihaele, Hawaii, United States
Geocaching | 0.0 miles
Geocaching | 0.0 miles
While in Hawaii, we decided to go after one of the easier caches on the island. Rated only a 4/4, Waterworld Fresh Water http://coord.info/GC5B98 was an interesting hike. At the top of the hill we were only 600' away from the cache - straight down. This cache is located very near the spot where the survivors in
the Waterworld movie discovered dry land and fresh water.The road down the hill into the Waipi'O...
2011-0918 Newhall - O'Melveny aka Bee Canyon
Newhall, California, United States
Geocaching | 7.3 miles
Geocaching | 7.3 miles
Three geocachers set off on an early Sunday to grab 30some caches in the Michael D. Antonovich Open Space located roughly between Newhall and Porter Ranch. Nice cool morning, but we knew it was going to warm up real quick especially once we reached Mission Peak and headed into the SF Valley. We dropped off a vehicle in the Neon Way cul-de-sac and bridged our way over to the Newhall trailhead. It's...
Hiking and caching today with a group of 12 in the far West foothills of the Santa Monica Mountain range inside Newbury Park. Got an early start at 7AM just in case the heat that we've been experiencing hit us again. A forecast of 73-82 depending on what channel or website you visited. They all had one thing right - possible showers! As we were signing our last cache log, we all...
2011-0905 Labor Day Las Virgenes
Upper Las Virgenes Open Space, California, United States
Geocaching | 4.3 miles
Geocaching | 4.3 miles
Naomi (Albackore2) has been wanting to get out on the trails with me and the SFV Geocachers for while now. We decided this would be a good weekend to start building up to those bigger hikes and since the weather appeared to be so nice today (cloudy and cool) we waited until 10AM to hit the trailhead. Well, by 11AM and the halfway point, the clouds were long gone and the sun...
Group of eight finally attacked Ladyface mountain today. Rated a 5 out of 5 on at least one website, we knew it would be a tough one, not in length, but sheer elevation and decline. Ladyface did not disappoint! Started around 7:15am at the bottom of Kanan Road in the middle of the two trails leading up to the peak. The initial elevation climb of 1200 feet in about 1 mile, although...
Andy and I took off early this morning to grab about 15 caches in Griffith Park that neither of us had yet. We didn't get them all, but most of them. We ended up doing about 5.5 miles in 3 hours. It was a perfect morning to do this, as the weather was excellent and being a weekday the park was almost void of people. We finished up around 10AM and headed...
Eight of us took off early this Memorial Day Monday morning for a quick geocaching trek from Rocky Peak and over down into Corriganville. Not the easiest terrain and there's no direct path that hits each of the caches, so there's lots of little offshoots that one has to hike and most of those are all uphill. The weather was perfect, sunny, with a slight breeze and temps in the high 70's...
