After an easy 61-mile drive to Ventura and Ojai, then turning further inland on Highway 33 (the dreaded Maricopa Highway of yore), park at the aptly named Piedra Blanca Trailhead parking lot: You are at the end of the road in many ways.
You are finally outside and about to hike along the enticing waters of Piedra Blanca Creek.
Our ultimate goal on this 2.5 day/2 night backpack is to day hike up the north fork of the Piedra Blanca to 6,000 ft. Pine Mountain Lodge on our middle day, a layover.
When my teaching colleague Mr C and I folded ourselves into the light backpacks, we knew the miles we faced from close study of the Tom Harrison Maps Sespe Wilderness Trail Map:
» 2.8 miles to riparian Piedra Blanca Camp (3,520 ft. = 1,075 m)
» 0.4 miles on to Twin Forks Camp (3,650 ft.) for two overnights
» 3.3 miles for the day hike to Pine Mountain Lodge (6,000 ft. = 1,830 m)
In June of 2015, when I crossed the wide wash of the Middle Sespe River next to the parking lot, there was some water flowing, and a few inviting green pools.
This time it was easy toting a 30-pound backpack across the (Middle) Sespe River, since it was dry as hardened spit as we endure our sixth year of an Anthropocenic drought.
We hiked along after fording the three wide washes, and avoided the “Sespe River Trail” dirt road turnoff (it’s about 9 miles to Willett Hot Springs), and stayed left, heading west uphill some hundreds of yards.
At this point, about a half-mile in, you’re in Los Padres National Forest.
We soon came to the sign informing us we now had the high honor of entering the 219,000 acre Sespe Wilderness region embedded within the National Forest.
Federal wilderness zones prohibit roads, settlements, bikes, machines like ATVs or motorcycles, agriculture or marijuana grows.
We’re also on the historical “Gene Marshall-Piedra Blanca Trail,” and a final trail sign states that Pine Mountain Lodge is “5.0 miles” ahead.
I recollected a 1983 educational trip in this area with 35 early adolescent students from Crane School on a 15-mile, 3-day backpack.
That was a demanding one-way trek from 7,500-foot Reyes Peak all the way down and out to the Middle Sespe River with two overnights: Haddock Camp and Pine Mountain Lodge Camp.
The first night we had enjoyed car-camping at Reyes Peak Campground, where we acclimatized the students to the needs for a successful and safe 3-day backpack.
When we finally stumbled into the parking lot at the Middle Sespe River, parents met the jubilant students, broiled hamburgers and hot dogs on the spot, and gave everyone cokes and water. (I know, I know, but it was 1983 with different nutritional standards.)
The current backpack-cum-day hike comes 33 years later and in a different season, but Mr C and I aim for the same coniferous paradise at beautiful Pine Mountain Lodge, though we approach it from the opposite side of massive Pine Mountain than we did on the 1983 student trip.
We can rhetorically ask ourselves what’s the point of this outdoors mania?
These back-to-nature movements periodically sweep urban nations like Germany and the U.S., and today some “pre-posthuman” paleo enthusiasts suffer strong compulsions to go into the “interior,” the backcountry, some remote fastness or other where they imagine no one can find them.
It’s leave-your-cell-behind time, drop your urban cares, exit the car, and tread lightly into your idea of “wilderness.”
Now that we’re fully consumed by the Anthropocene Age, where the entire planet is a zoo of sorts, the only goal these days is simply to get outside, wander in the fragrant glen at Pine Mountain Lodge, and simply move about beneath blue and gray skies.
Going outside into the hinterlands involves crossing over into regions that contain at least some wild places and spaces. Romanticizing such scattered regions has led to vivid poetry and rapturous music, and these are scenes children love especially.
That 1983 trip was utterly challenging, but several of those former students remember it well, and they say they’ll never forget the awe and the beauty along with the blisters and the cold.
On this mid-October 2016 adventure, we’ll enjoy two rough “dirt camping” nights at Twin Forks Camp, three miles in and pitched where the North Fork Y of Piedra Blanca Creek joins the main branch.
Upstream there are deep swimming holes, but not as full in this drought: We were overjoyed that the water at camp was running at all (filter all water).
We enjoy intensified outdoor austerities at this un-improved site with no wooden table, no level spot for tents, and no permitted fires. There is an iron fire grate, but the mandatory shovel is gone.
We’re currently in a Level IV fire restriction phase, and we only used my tiny gas stove to boil water; you will need a California Campfire Permit and can download one free here.
The outstanding vistas from camp feed hungry urban refugees, and do enhance some mental easing.
When not hiking about the parched hillsides, I’m simply sitting around on available comfortable rocks near camp on the layover middle day of our three-day trip.
Outside here in the Sespe’s nearly primordial foris… simply absorbing the light and water sounds.
Foris is the Latin root word for our forest (Italian: fuori = outside), and we also derive the living out-of-doors concept from the Romans’ idea of forest.
For the Roman Tacitus, the word for the world beyond the enclosed city was developed countryside was foris (forest).
When one is outside and in the foris, and shorn of most of the magical 21st century tech powers – car, planes, stores, iPhones, internet, guns – then brute physical reality achieves complete dominance, like Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz.
Yet urban humans – like Tristan, Lancelot, Jesus, and Gilgamesh — learn from their “40 days” in wilderness and outside the “gate” (also foris), they return to civilization refreshed and with new ideas.
Often they’ve suffered a reduction of their male arrogance and paternalistic thinking. One secret pleasure on this trip is to avoid thinking about the presidential election and a certain billionaire mogul’s antics.
Since I’m trying to be a little bit “paleo”, neo-primitivist, but also safe, I do carry space-age gear like sleeping bag, 2-pound tent, cook gear, two dried meals, water purifier and medical kit.
But at the same time, I have intentionally abandoned iPod (iPhone won’t work out here), watch, Kindle, cold-weather clothing, and I have never carried a firearm.
Mr C and I had chosen to spend the two overnights a bit deeper along Piedra Blanca Creek at the Twin Forks Camp because we knew the 6.6 mile day-hike without backpacks on the Day 2 layover would surely prove challenging.
The trek became a minor ordeal for me, and I enjoyed the excruciating exercise outside in the clean air with Pine Mountain Lodge looming ahead.
On this 3.3 mile uphill ascent from Twin Forks, you move from a riparian woodland zone and arroyo willow thickets through a hard chaparral ecosystem (chamise or Adenostoma fasciculatum) and then to the fragrant conifer bowl of the ‘Lodge.
My physical issue was that I’d gotten out of my regular hiking routine after two long trips to Germany, so it wasn’t surprising (but was depressing) that I had lost some power in the upper legs.
Ascending the 2,400 feet from Twin Forks to Pine Mountain Lodge was very strenuous even though it was a mild mid-October day, bright with temperature around 75 F., and a pleasant breeze.
However, I had taken my electrolytes, carried ample water, and at the top could just stretch out in the sun after inhaling raisins and nuts for a quick lunch.
There is a spring somewhere at Pine Mountain Lodge, and we had utilized it in 1983, but the pine-strewn basin encompasses a large area, and neither Mr C nor I explored around much. We didn’t locate this crucial water-source.
We felt confirmed in our choice not to backpack to the balmy outpost, and recent reports at a reliable link indicate that while one hiker found water at the ‘Lodge in August, the latest report noted just a “trickle” (Oct. 17).
If you undertake a hike to alluring Pine Mountain Lodge, bring your own water and even more if you plan an overnight.
A large sign at Pine Mountain Lodge shows that backpackers could go ahead on trail 22W03 to 3 Mile Camp (2 miles) or all the way up to towering Reyes Peak (10 miles).
While I’ve also made a one-day workout hike to the lodge directly from the Piedra Blanca Trailhead parking lot, it’s a 13-mile monster with an over 3,000 feet of elevation gain on the way in.
We chose this easy backpack because we had verified a few weeks earlier that there was still plenty of flowing water in Piedra Blanca Creek, both at the Piedra Blanca Campsite and our preferred Twin Forks site.
I recommend bringing kids along on the portion to Twin Forks, but they need to be over 8 or 9 and pretty fit in order to make the further trek to Pine Mountain Lodge.
4-1-1 — Pine Mountain Lodge via Twin Forks
Driving directions: It’s 61 miles from Santa Barbara’s Westside to the parking lot called “Piedra Blanca Trailhead”: drive Highway 101 south to Ventura and the Highway 33 offramp and it’s 41 miles to Ojai. At Ojai, stay on Highway 33 toward “Meiner’s Oaks/Wheeler Gorge/Rose Valley Recreation Area” for another 14 miles, then turn (right) at the well-marked “Rose Valley Recreation Area” sign, and drive six miles to the end. Park here at Sespe Trailhead and “Piedra Blanca Trailhead”.
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity, and has written extensively about the local backcountry. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity, and has written extensively about the local backcountry. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
