Man. March in western NY is way freaking colder than in California. Not that I miss it or anything. Wait now… Anyway. Packed the first box today…I mean, moving in like 6-10 weeks, so, sure. Why not. The owner of our current rental has been getting it painted for the last week, so it’s looking all new and fresh. Anyway, time to delve into the past, for a good day out in the Santa Monica Mountains.
We had a day! I’m not sure how I picked these places (…I’m not even 100% sure I picked them in advance), but either way, Nathan and Greg and I headed out to some of the various parks in an around Malibu (fine, closer to Agoura Hills…), as most of the Angeles were still closed off after the Station Fire. We hit up Paramount Ranch (which is actually part of the Santa Monica Mountains NRA), and Malibu Creek State Park. Afterwards we got some food and beer, and all in all had a pretty fine. day.
Note – there are to be no martinis, do you hear me? None.
We headed out for a nice day of walking, and went to Santa Monica due to the continued closure of much of the Angeles, and wanted to try and see some of the stuff I’d never been to before. Our first location was the Paramount Ranch. We got to the parking area, and did a loop I more or less picked off of the map (what map? this map!. We started with “the town”, followed by the Hacienda Trail, cut over to the Medicine Woman trail, cutting over the backbone trail, then back along the Bwana Trail, before ending up sort of straggling across the field, finding bits of trail here and there as we tried to get our way back to the parking lot. We then had to keep going along the Bwana Trail until we got to a creek crossing from where we could loop around on trail, and then walk back on the road to where we had parked.
The first part of this was heading over to the Western Town, which is a set with a bunch of buildings that Paramount used back in the 20s through 50s, and continued to be used from some filming up through 1980, when the NPS bought it. Again in the 90s, they filmed much of Dr. Quinn here. So, it was pretty cool to see the sets, even if they are not actual buildings. There was one cool older building where we could go in, and see what it was made from, the molds they had made to make it look like “logs”.
US Marshal Greg! Better watch out.
Farmer’s Exchange. Possibly funnier as three words.
We then continued , and turned onto a real trail. It quickly became half muddy trail, and everything was green and fresh, which was really fabulous. Everything smelled green and wonderful. At one point, some women on horses passed us, and I was sitting and thinking about how nice it would be to ride horses around there, and only partially to avoid having to step in some of the mud we were going through 🙂 It was much much grassier than I am used to seeing around here, with some amazing trees, though we did see a few cool succulents. Heading along and walking through a meadow area, we saw a big standing pool in the trail that had millions of little bubbles in it. Never did figure out what they were all from. And continuing along the trail, we saw a ….crawfish, dead, in one of the water pits. Yeah. Where did that come from? (Ah – ok, they’re invasive and wrong and apparently yet another thing we can blame on over-watering. Stupid lawns.
Taking pictures of all the bubbles . I also really like that tree reflection.
Where are they coming from? Who knows!
Seriously…a crayfish? The what now?
We continued on through the grasslands, playing on some old pieces of rusty metal, and then enjoying the river crossing, and the walk back, where we saw some people flying model planes. Just really gorgeous day out. Anyway, once we got back, we drove around a bit, and eventually made it over to the other park, Malibu Creek State Park, after taking a bit of a windy back road through the hills, which was pretty beautiful in and of itself.
Just, seriously, no tetanus please? Man, I’m such a buzzkill.
Immediately after pulling into the park, we had to pull over because there was a great blue heron visible just from the side of the road. Awesome! Then we parked in the lot, and started walking down one of the main trails. I decided I wanted to find some geocaches here (I don’t think I did so at Paramount…right, because it is federal land), so first we started going up this hill that had a water tower on top. I did eventually find the cache, and then we went all the way up the rest of the hill to see this crazy multi-colored water tower. It was actually pretty cool looking for age. Then Greg and I went down the Really Steep Slope, almost falling a few times, then realized we had left Nathan behind, so we waited around for him. We walked over to the bank of the creek, but there was far too much water to cross, so we started walking on the wide trail / road next to the creek.
birdie!
Unsure if it was supposed to be those colors, but whatevs
We continued along the creek for a bit, getting to where there was a bridge over to the Visitor Center, but it had just closed. There were some signs there about the Indians who had lived there in the past, so we, you know, read those, then we went back over the bridge, and kept walking up the creek. As we went farther, there started to be more and more rocks, and we also got to a rock climbing area where a lot of people were getting their climb on. As we went further, we got to a really cool area with a lot of pools, that looked like it would be pretty neat to hang out in during the summer, but was perhaps a bit brisk and darn then. We did see a bunch of teens (German, I think) continuing to explore up canyon, but we were getting kind of tired and hungry, so we decided to turn around then, and we retraced our steps through the canyon and oaklands back to the car.
Actually a real amount of water
Climbers just doing their thing. As they do. Chalky!
On the way back, we stopped as planned at the Ladyface Alehouse and Brasserie, which we had wanted to check out since Nathan and I saw them at the LA Beer Festival. It was definitely a bit more put together than I would have expected, and definitely a little pricy, but certainly tasty.
