Los Padres National Forest

Day 52:  Teresa, Mike, and their son Charlie arrived in the week hours of the morning after a long airline delay and expensive taxi ride on their return from visiting Mike’s family back east.  We enjoyed a visit with them in the morning over a pancake breakfast before heading south to our next destination, Wheeler Gorge in Los Padres National Forest.

We elected to take Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway along the Big Sur coast, rather than the much faster and more direct Highway 101, and the views rewarded us for the extra time spent on the road.  More than once we rounded a sharp curve or crested a hill to see a great view—the highway hugs the steep and rocky shore—but there was not often a safe place to pull over with the trailer to try to get a photo.  Cutting inland at dusk toward our campground, we had more hills and hairpin curves going over a range of big hills, through a valley, and up into the gorge through three narrow tunnels to where we were staying.

Day 53:  The hike we had picked out for today was up the road from our campground some 35 miles or so (more switchbacks—very steep hills and valleys up to a 5,160-foot-high pass at Pine Mountain Summit), but as we approached the turnoff for the trailhead, we saw fire trucks parked on the side of the highway where they had been putting out a forest fire during the last few days.  The trail we had picked was closed—the fire was out but the crews were still checking for hot spots.  Luckily we knew of an alternative hike nearby, so we hiked to the Piedra Blanco (white rocks) from another trailhead off the same road.  This is chaparral country, so we were seeing a lot of shrubs, trees, and flowers new to us easterners.  The white rocks are a rounded whitish sandstone formation sticking up out of the gray shrubs and reddish sandstone and soil typical of the surrounding valley.  One formation was shaped a lot like a giant elephant or mammoth, perhaps 150 feet high.