On a really quite beautiful day, Nathan and I decided that we wanted to go for a hike, but nothing too absurdly ridiculous. After consulting Afoot and Afield, we decided to go try this 6.5 mile figure-eight loop of a hike in Topanga State Park. This covers about 1200′ of gain total, and cuts through many different ecosystems. Wooha! Onwards.
The Eagle Rock
On a stupidly nice spring day, we wanted to go for a hike, so after staring at the book for a bit, we picked this route. We drove on out to Topanga, and tried to park, only to find that they charge like 8$ for parking or something, so we ended up parking on the street just outside of the park instead. I realized upon our arrival that this was also the location of an orienteering event I had known about but decided not to go to, so that was the source of one of the larger crowds of people there. But as it is such a lovely, accessible location, there were a fair amount of people there anyway, though it wasn’t too bad.
Musch Meadow, just steps away from the parking lot
A Mariposa Lily in the field
Just past the parking lot, we started walking for a few feet on fire road, but quickly turned off onto the Musch Trail, that cut through Musch Meadow. The grasses were beautiful shades of green, just starting to turn colors, most lovely, before we went into a more wooded area. After the brief detour through the trees, the trail keeps going through various chaparral and grasses, with all sorts of blooming flowers and varied landscape for us to feast our eyes upon, until we got up to Eagle Junction and rejoined the fire road.
Meadow *and* trees *and* chaparral, oh my!
Turning left, we walked a short piece along the fire road until we could climb up the back side of Eagle Rock. It is a pretty neat rock formation, and there were a good number of people out there. Once you get to the edge, there is a great view both down and out across the park. It was really excellent.
View south from the rock – nice
That really is only the midpoint of the hike, and from there, you continue along on the road, lots of lovely grasses, pretty flowers, etc. Definitely some side trails leading off that looked like they could be fun and promising, but alas, that day we were just heading back. I did take the time to stop and look for a couple of geocaches, however, a couple of which were basically right on the trail, even though I ended up totally clambering down an awkward rock, much further than I needed to go to get to one of them 🙂
Nathan taking some pics of
A view of the rock from the far side
