We should own a house on Friday. I know, right? Craziness. Anyway! April, 2011, we went for a nice piece of a hike to Sandstone Peak, in the Santa Monica Mountains. It was a super fabulous beautiful, and a nice 6+ mile hike I was happy to finally kick out. With only just over 1000′ of gain, it was still enough of a walk to be worth the effort.
taking an early break
I can’t recall if Joe or I actually proposed this, but either way, he had wanted to take Evan out to try hiking, so we headed out to Sandstone Peak in the Santa Monica NRA. I had done a little of this trail several years before when Joe, Vera, Erin and I had sort of gone climbing (mostly I watched), but here we did the rest of the loop. We started at the Mishe Mokwa portion of the backbone trail, and just…started walking. There is a little bit of steep at the beginning, but soon you get to some nice views of Echo Cliffs and Balance Rock. It was a really pretty day out, and I really enjoyed taking in the views. At one point, we could hear rushing water down the canyon we were above, but we never really saw it. As we came to a promontory just past the Cliffs, we stopped for a break, and took some photos of the surroundings.
Cliff walls
The trail does a quick turnaround just at split rock, which is…a large rock with a split in it, near the creek. There are a couple of picnic tables there, it would be a nice place to stop for a bit if you wanted to drive that far up to go out for a short picnic. As we went past there, there is a turnoff for the trail up to Balance Rock, but it was woefully ovegrown (past the helpful sign explaining that it is not NPS maintained), and we were forced to conclude that we were not going to find our way over there, so we kept on our way. As we continued on, there were some really excellent rock formations, including one that looked to me like some kind of polynesian islander // buddha head, and others that were just giant holes in the wall.
Dude, the rock has a *face*. I wouldn’t lie to you.
Yup. It is, in fact, balancing.
At this point, the trail takes a lazy loop left, and we headed through a large, flattish, grassland area, studded with rocky formations on either side of us. After a little back and forth, the trail twists over to an almost ridge walk, from which we took a quick spur trail over to (one of many in the world) Inspiration Point. Named in memory of a young man who died at 15 or 16, this is a plaque on a stand, that also has a set of labels of nearby mountains. After stopping there for a bit, we continued the little bit farther on to the actual summit of Sandstone Peak. there is a sharp ridge there with a steep drop, so you want to be a little careful on the one side, but it was fun to clamber around. There is another plaque on the top, with a register book (and a virtual cache, since this is National Park land). We hung out there on the top for a bit.
Dedicated to Scout William R. Plants
Team at the summit. I *just* noticed the dude taking a selfie in the background
We halfway missed the main loop trail continuation, and instead scooted our way down a really steep slope until we met back up with the main trail, and from there it was just a short walk back to the car. Well, I take that back – it was about 1.5 miles of the total 6.3 mile hike, but after that point, it was, nonetheless, just a quick bit of “basically, we’re back now” 🙂
Get down any way you can. Get down with your bad self.
Have a bonus flock of pelicans
