Wandering through Carrizo Plain National Monument

It was Labor Day weekend a week ago, and I figured spending an entire three day weekend in my apartment is kind of lame.  Not knowing L.A. well enough yet to find much to do on the spur of the moment, I cracked open the atlas and started looking over the page with Southern California for anything that sounded interesting.  My eyes centered on “Carrizo Plain National Monument”, a silver dollar sized green spot on the map about four inches from Los Angeles.

I didn’t bother googling the place before leaving; I decided I’d figure it out when I got there.  I grabbed my pack, chucked my bike and a few water bottles in the Cherokee, and set out.  After a couple hours up I-5 and then across a few state routes, I found myself out here:

A national park this is not.  Although I eventually came across the visitor’s center about 40 miles from the entrance, it was closed.  Other than that, there are a few information stands with 8 1/2 x 11 maps and a few warnings about rattlesnakes.  In nearly 400 square miles, there’s no gas, no food, and no water.  Few roads are on the map, and many are unmarked.

I spent most of Sunday roaming around between points on the park map, rationing the three bottles of water I had with me.

One of the main geological features of Carrizo Plain is the San Andreas fault.  According to the notes of the monument map, the fault is readily visible here:

What you’re looking at is a bend in Wallace Creek.  To my untrained eyes, this is nothing out of the ordinary;  That’s kind of what creeks do, in my experience, they bend.  But if you’re a trained geologist, you’d probably get a lot more out of the experience than I did.  This is just one of those times that I wish I had a lot more knowledge about the natural wonders that I walk through.

Anyway, here’s a photo of my bike looking all badass:

One thing in Carrizo Plain you don’t need to be a geologist to appreciate is Soda Lake (Although it would help.)  Soda Lake is only a lake a few months out of the year, the rest of the time, such as now, it is a dry basin.  Because there is no outlet, the water simply evaporates, leaving behind a layer of alkali salts, which builds up year after year.

From a far enough distance, the white lakebed actually looks wet.  I can only imagine the crushing, and possibly deadly, disappointment early travelers may have experienced here.

By this point, it was late afternoon, and I had it in mind to hike along the Caliente Range for a few hours until dusk and then move on for the night.  Looking at the 6 ounces or so of water I had left, I decided I should refill before setting out.

When you’re in a desert basin with few people and less information, and working with a map of questionable validity, refilling a few water bottles can be… frustrating.  Long story short, I wound up all the way in Santa Margarita, about 50 miles and over an hour away, before I found a faucet I could use.

According to my atlas, there's a town, like, right here.

Right. A sign like this would have been helpful 82 miles ago, in the other direction.

It was pretty much dark by the time I got to the trail head.

Not to worry though, there was a half moon out, and the trail was actually a decommissioned dirt road.  I didn’t even have to use my flashlight to follow the path.  It was one of the better night hikes I’ve taken.  Without a tripod though, my camera was basically useless.  I got it out anyway and used the moon to goof around with long exposures:

On my camera, the viewfinder is closed when the shutter is open, meaning I couldn’t actually see what I was doing.  So there’s little to no art to this;  I just jostled and wiggled the camera around and saw what happened.

By this point, it was getting rather late, so I turned around and started heading back, doing my best no to somehow lose the trail and wind up totally lost in the desert in the middle of the night.  As it was, it was past midnight when I got back to my car, so I decided to sleep right there at the trailhead, which afforded me a pretty good view the next morning.

After I worked the kinks out of my shoulders, I bcaktracked my way south out of the monument, stepping out of the car a few times.

I had actually planned on spending most of Monday in Topanga Canyon, a freewheeling community of about 8,000 people just east of Malibu.  A random guy at a coffee shop had told me earlier that they have a big to-do every Labor Day, and it’s a pretty wild time.  When I got there mid-morning, there was decidedly little going on.  There was a guy wandering around with a pretty festive beard, but that was about it.  It turns about their big to-do was the previous day.  Oops.

I drove through Los Padres National Forest to get there, so at least it wasn’t a completely wasted trip.

I wound up at home and exhausted later that afternoon.  All in all, not a bad weekend.

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