At 3,985 feet, the peak is just under 4,000 feet above sea level, and the hike up via Tunnel Trail and a half-mile stretch of East Camino Cielo is challenging at best.

It’s a hike that can humble you. But it’s also the best spot to get a sense of the place we live.

The views out over the coast and the majesty of the islands — Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel — line up just far enough away to feel mysterious and enchanting, and at the same time close enough for a visit.

It’s a peak where looking out over the vast front side of the Santa Ynez Mountains you can see almost forever: the sprawling South Coast cities; the hazy outlines of the Channel Islands; and up and down the coast. It’s a place to bring the family, share stories, have a picnic or just linger for a few moments.

La Cumbre Peak is also a place that can make you feel small. 

Turn east and the Santa Ynez Mountain range disappears in the far distance near Ojai; turn west and the mountains continue on following the Gaviota coast over the even higher Broadcast and Santa Ynez peaks where they dip into the ocean at Point Conception.

Remnant of the Past

At the very tiptop of the peak you’ll find an old fire lookout that was used a century ago as the first line of defense in the never-ending battle with wildfire. It’s a bit of a stepchild up there now, its glorious past lost in the mish-mash of antennas and other equipment cluttering area surrounding that made forest towers like this obsolete a century ago.

I’ve often wanted to take the steps up and check out the views from inside the tower. Or if I got really, really lucky, have the opportunity to spend the night inside, amidst the starry skies and fantasies of what a night up here might have been like when the only way up was by trail.

Instead I take a chance and park my van near the picnic tables where the sunset views provide a glorious end to the day.

Tale of Two Views

In the early morning as the sun crests the tips of the mountaintops to the far east, the views from La Cumbre Peak are stupendous. Slowly the backcountry begins to fill with light, the hills turning a golden yellow. 

I head over to the picnic benches to take advantage of the panoramic views in all directions. Immediately below me and to the left is the Mission Canyon watershed; turning 45 degrees to the right is the upper end of San Roque Canyon. 

In between, a sharp ridgeline separating the two watersheds leads down to a twin set of rock towers known as Cathedral and Arlington peaks. 

The hike down to them is getting more difficult as the vegetation begins to grow back in after a recent wildfire; but sitting atop either of the peaks, the feeling of being completely surrounded by the steep mountain walls and thick chaparral vegetation provides a unique contrast to the urban sprawl a few thousand feet below.

Sea to Summit

The view from the Santa Barbara Breakwater back up toward the mountain wall is a familiar one for most Santa Barbarans: that of a beachside community nestled against the edge of the mountains — sea and summit — a thin sliver of Santa Barbara County that for the most part houses a great deal of the county’s population.

Though familiar, it represents just a small slice of Santa Barbara County.

Looking Northward

Looking northward from La Cumbre Peak, the view is dramatically different. 

What seems so inviting on the south side of the mountain takes on a less inviting feeling on the north side. Range after range of ridge tops and canyons. It’s a jumble of ridge tops and canyons that seem to defy order — a land known simply as the Santa Barbara backcountry.

This is a part of the county that is not easy to describe or to get a feeling for. In many ways it is foreign land, not easily romanticized and not easily penetrated. Yet both — the front and backcountry — are essential to understanding the place we call home and taking measure of our place in it.

Perhaps long-time historian and newspaper reporter Dick Smith described the backcountry best.

“Viewed from the air, or from an overlook on one of the peaks immediately behind the city of Santa Barbara,” Smith wrote in his book California’s Back Country, “this back country appears as a wilderness of peaks and ridges, deep gorges, narrow, winding canyons and broad valleys.”

“To some,” he added, “it has a forbidding aspect; others see a challenge in its raw majesty.”

For me these were the types of places that suited me perfectly. I’d grown up wandering all over my grandparents’ 160-acre farm in rural Ohio, milking their cows, taking them out to pasture, fishing the nearby creeks — miles of what then seemed like wild country.

It was a wonderful way to grow up and not surprising, when I look back, that one day I’d find the same love of the wilder places in Dick Smith’s backcountry.

Early Explorations

As I began exploring the backcountry in the late 1960s and early 1970s — first trips to Red Rock, hikes up to Gibraltar Dam, then up the Santa Cruz Trail and my continued exploration of the front country trails — I began to learn bits and pieces, with each trip bringing back a boatload of questions.

I’d bring back plants and head over to visit with Jackie Broughton at the Botanic Garden; bug backcountry historian Jim Blakley about what I’d seen on most every trip — and I was even able to have a chat or two with Dick Smith before he died.

As I began to explore even further afield to Figueroa Mountain, down Sunset Valley Road to Davy Brown, or on to Nira and the Manzana River, each trip added to a desire to explore even more.

One hike down the Manzana was particularly inspiring. Several hours downstream I was confronted by my first log cabin, its timbers reaching back to the early 1930s. My first backcountry log cabin!

An hour’s hike later I came to a series of open fields with abandoned farm equipment scattered about, and eventually Manzana Schoolhouse, situated high on the banks where the creek intersected with the Sisquoc River.

“A schoolhouse!” I thought. Along, I would learn later, stocked with a hard-charging, horse-riding school teacher by the name of Cora Glines.

It was at that moment, I think, that I was hooked! Wanting to see more, learn more, explore more.

Building an Environmental Program

The more I fell in love with the backcountry, the more I felt the need to create a school program that could provide my students with more of a hands-on approach to learning.

Thankfully, I was lucky enough to have Denny Baylor as a principal when I taught at Dos Pueblos High School in the 1970s and 80s. Denny understood the value of hands-on education, and at the time the California state and local Santa Barbara school board supported more explorative and enrichment-based efforts in the classroom.

I took this approach a step further. “What if we built a program that would allow us to provide an environment-based education program and take our students out into the field to experience firsthand what they’re learning in the classroom?” I asked Denny.

Without a blink he said “Yes!”

Thus began my outdoor education program, titled Wilderness Environmental Education. We meet three days in my classroom, and from Wednesday afternoon through Sunday almost every week of the school year we were out exploring our local environments.

Sometimes we’d hike the frontcountry, learning about water issues, the geology, the plant communities and in very indirect ways about climate, the plant communities, how as humans we impacted the environment — even the concept of deep time as a means of understanding our place in the scheme of things.

The program lasted into the late ’70s when at the state level, in the great wisdom of those who felt they knew better, it was decided to prioritize “seat time” and a top-down learning model was adopted.

Like a Giant Right Hand

Would you be surprised if I told you that you can learn a lot about Santa Barbara County from your own right hand?

It’s a concept I used to introduce my students at DP High to provide them with a context for what we’d be learning about. It’s based on a simple proposition: Most of us know a lot about the places we live, but despite this we often don’t have simple ways to visualize how everything fits together.

In my outdoor class we began the year building our own mental maps using an amazing fact — Santa Barbara’s topography almost completely matches the fingers on your own right hand. We’d start with a simple outline using an 11×17 sheet of paper and a pen or pencil.

We’d begin with each student drawing an outline of their right hand fingers with the admonition to spread them out a bit. Then, using the topographical map on the screen as a reference, we’d begin by filling in the names of each of the mountain ranges on their maps, with each finger representing one of ranges.

It’s a mnemonic of sorts, I explain — a way of visualizing complex things by using common references.

• The right thumb representing the long chain that makes up our Channel Islands.
• The index finger immediately behind us as the Santa Ynez range.
• One’s middle finger the San Rafael mountain range situated across Cachuma Lake.
• The right ring finger the Sierra Madres, a range located on the far north side of the county.
• And surprisingly, one’s pinkie finger, which lies just across the Cuyama River in San Luis Obispo County. These are the Calientes.

The students are curious about the reason for adding the Calientes when they aren’t in the county. It’s the start of the kind of dialogue that I love — not boring them with a lecture about how the Calientes are by right a part of the place we live.

I’d almost forgotten that we hadn’t yet added the San Andreas Fault on our maps, and when I do so they answer their own curiosities: all the ranges share a common topographical characteristic.

Even though the Calientes are in another county, they are also part of what is known as the Pacific Plate, and geologically we’ll be riding the same piece of the earth’s crust northward over the next million years or so.

Along with this, we’d also begin adding in the locations of the rivers, larger creeks, cities, the reservoirs, and other important features.

Increasingly over the next year we’d begin building an understanding of the county through classroom dialogue and in the field experiencing it first hand.

It’s the beginning of an ongoing series of dialogues, one which evolved most importantly from my students’ own experiences and the questions they asked.

There are no classrooms anymore in Santa Barbara where this style of knowledge building through firsthand experiences now, though organizations like the Sierra Club, Los Padres Forest Association or the Santa Barbara County Trails Council are doing an admirable job of providing similar opportunities.

With that in mind, I’d encourage you take advantage of those opportunities, to partner with your kids to build their own mental maps though explorations into what Dick Smith called “as generous a chunk of wilderness as can be found anywhere in Southern California.”

Smith’s book, “California’s Back Country,” was co-written with his friend Frank Van Schaick, simply known as Van by his students at Wilson Elementary School. Van and his brother Bill were the first I talked with when I’d gotten the go-ahead to create my own outdoor program.

Van came to Santa Barbara in 1936 at a time when access to the backcountry was primarily still by foot or horseback, or by a rough dirt road by the name of Depression Drive, and it made a deep impression on him. He quickly brought the outdoors into his classroom, and when that was not enough created Camp Connestoga, primarily a summer program devoted to outdoor education.

As James Wapotich noted in his Songs of the Wilderness column, “Without any specific theory on education, he (Van) just understood that kids learn best through experience, and that engaging the senses and doing hands-on work can build lasting knowledge and confidence.”

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This is a beginning of a series of stories about my exploration of the Santa Barbara backcountry, how I came to be so lucky to explore it at just the time when much of it was becoming designated wilderness in the 1960s and ’70s and the window in time I was able to share it with my students at Dos Pueblos High School.

Download the Map. If you’d like to use the topographic map with your kids, you can download a high-resolution version on your computer using your iPhone or Android camera to capture the QR code linking to the file located on DropBox.com.