Gary and I are in a campground, surrounded by mountains. Beautiful scenery and we awake in the morning and look up at the sunrise on them. But, there’s a serious problem: we don’t just enjoy looking up at them but we want to be there. We look at the ridge line and imagine walking the trail along it. We imagine being up there and looking down on the campground. We have a serious affliction.
We can stand in our campground and see the switchbacks winding up to the top of one of the mountains in back of us so we know there’s some trail there. We’ve even spent some time driving down the road that we thought might lead to the trailhead. Nope, it leads to a private road. Another road leads to - another private road. Shucks. We can’t see a way to get there. But we have some alternatives. We can also see on the maps that the Pacific Crest Trail runs right across the road to the campground. Bingo. This in one of the Scenic American Trails which begins at the Mexican border and winds through deserts in southern California, up through the majestic peaks of the Sierra Nevadas and on through Oregon and Washington ending at the Canadian border. We are planning one small teensy weensy stretch of this trail.
However, yesterday, when we were in Barnes and Noble discussing trails and drinking some coffee, the woman at the next table leaned over and told us about Vasquez Park which had ‘trails everywhere'. Sounds like our kind of park and she took out a piece of paper and a pen from her purse and wrote down the directions for us. When we got home, we checked it all out on line and realized that the PCT goes right through Vasquez Park. Thus, we could start at the park and get onto the PCT.
We got up at our usual 7:00, ate our usual breakfast and started out. We didn’t think we had to start early since it was so close and we didn’t expect to hike too far. In other words, we didn’t plan an all-day trek. We took the back way there rather than the highway to see some of the countryside. We’ve never seen so many horse ranches - there’s money in these here hills. Lots of private roads, lots of huge fenced in areas with enough paddocks for each individual horse. Lots of Astin Marins and Lamborghinis.
The park was everything she had promised: beautiful, full of trails and she had told us that it had been used for many movies and television shows like: 'The Lone Ranger', 'Zorro', 'Little Miss Sunshine', 'Bonanza', 'Blazing Saddles', 'Star Trek', '24', 'The Six Million Dollar Man', 'MacGyver', 'Austin Powers', 'Star Trek 11" and 'The Flintstones'. One rock is even called the 'Captain Kirk' rock.
We started out, found the PCT and took off, enjoying all the spectacular rock formations.
The trail crossed some escarpments and then headed down to a stream bed. The lushness of this area was astounding in the desert landscape we had just traveled through above. We even got to rock-hop across the stream bed. Then we found this tunnel which goes under the highway. We could hear the exhaust brakes of the semis above and the gurgle of the stream below.
On the other side of the tunnel, we wound around hills and finally climbed up to where we decided to eat lunch
and turn around. This area through which the trail winds is called the Angeles National Forest. Somehow, being from Iowa, this does not quite look like the forests I’m used to. I guess I’m used to oaks and elms and pines. Here are manzanitas, cacti and sagebrush. We could see the mountains ahead and above us but they were way too far away and we will save them for another day.
We did find some wildlife on our trip. Luckily, when we hike, we usually don’t find any life wilder than this. We do see wilder life scat but not the wildlife associated with it
9.5 1100’
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