I was once again heading to San Diego to meet up with the wife for the Memorial Day weekend, stopping at UCSB to pick up our daughter to join us. I would get to UCSB in the afternoon after she was finished with classes, but in the meantime I had planned some hikes in the Los Padres NF. I'd spent the night at the Colson Canyon Campground off Tepusquet Rd, a primitive and rather crappy campground, even by the low USFS standards. The place was overgrown and neglected, like much of this part of the forest. Not surprisingly, I had the place to myself on a Thursday evening, and I had a very quiet and enjoyable rest there that night. I was up the next morning, seeking out a few summits in the area.
Peak 3,115ft
This near-P1K is located less than a mile NE of the campground. There is an
active quarry located on the peak's SSE Ridge. The quarry road is
gated at the
bottom where the forest road goes over a saddle between Colson and Rattlesnake
Canyons. The forest road was also gated at the saddle, so this was as far as I
could drive into the forest. The quarry road has no signs, but there was also
no opening for foot traffic, making public use of the road uncertain. A white
truck drove up it just before I started out, so I knew the quarry was still
active. After squeezing through the gate, I hiked up the road, figuring I had
plausible deniability. The skies were heavily overcast and it seemed I might be
hiking up into clouds for a second day. At least the weather was nicely
conducive for hiking. Less than a mile up the road, before reaching the quarry,
a junction is found with an unused road to the left. There is some nice
stonework here,
indicating more love at some point in the past. This 
old road leads
nicely towards the summit, though the tall grasses were wet with dew and I
would find my boots and pants 
fairly soaked before I was done. I spent
about 40min covering the mile and a half distance to the summit, the last
quarter mile 
easy cross-country where the road bypasses the summit on
the west side. I found 
no views, no obvious highpoint, no register, no
love. On a clearer day, there would be good views to the east into Bear Canyon
and southwest to Tepusquet Peak. After 
returning to the car where I'd
left it at the saddle, a large petroleum truck came rumbling up
the road to service the quarry. Seems this place is pretty busy.
Sierra Madre Mtns PP / Tepusquet Peak
Fail - These were the summits I was really after, particularly the P1K which is the most prominent summit in the Sierra Madre Mtns. There are telecom towers on both summits with decent roads reaching to the twin summits from Ruiz Canyon off Tepusquet Rd. I have been eyeing them for a number of years now. Though heavily signed for Private Property and No Trepassing, I had driven up Ruiz Canyon the night before to check it out. Signs continuously warn of locked gates and no turnarounds, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Gates were open and I noted several possible turnaround areas. Something called "The Fort" is signed for regularly, with private spur roads going to homestead along the canyon on the left. The Fort turns out to be an eclectic collection of Old West-type buildings that were the long-term project of Elwin Mussell who started it in the 1950s and worked on it up until his death in 1980. The Knight family currently maintains it, all of this information gleaned from the Internet later, not through my visit. I decided I had pressed my luck on the road and turned around before reaching the first major switchback, near where The Fort is located. Maybe someone with more chutzpah than I can drive up and see if this is a viable way to reach the summit.
In perusing the satellite views, one can't help but notice old firebreaks/trails
running along the ridges to the north and northeast. The USFS
Alejandro Trail starts from where I had parked, going partway up one
of these ridges before dropping into Alejandro Canyon. An unmaintained
spur trail continues up the
ridge and it was this line I thought was my best option. I found the Alejandro
Trail decently maintained and a good thing, too, since it switchbacks up a slope
loaded with poison oak. Where it breaks out onto the ridge, the poison oak
disappears and the chaparral takes over, particularly manzanita. I found the old
cut going up the ridge and made good progress at first, thinking I had run into
some good luck. Maybe the hunters were keeping this route open? The route
slowly deteriorated, however, despite the breaks 
I could see ahead. I
broke out the clippers I'd brought with me and began crudely cleaning the trail
so I could get through, but it looked like it could be hours of work. I made
decent progress still, and consoled myself that the return would be much faster.
At a saddle I suddenly came across a section with 
poison oak that
caught me by surprise. I spent a few minutes surveying the terrain before
deciding I couldn't
get through it without infecting my clothes, something I wasn't really prepared
for. I decided to turn back, about 4/5mi short of the main ridge. As I was
returning back along the route, the clouds began to rise and thin some, and I
was treated to 
a view
of the two summits looking tantalizingly close. Darn.
Maybe I can talk a few hardy souls into coming back here someday to open this
route back up. On my way back down Colson Canyon, I checked out another possible
route from the north, but this one looks impossible. One needs to cross Colson
Creek to reach the start of the old route but the whole creek in this area is
wall-to-wall poison oak.
Only the impervious can make an attempt via this route,
and I'm anything but impervious to poison oak...
Los Machos Hills
I still had lots of time before I was due at UCSB, so I drove north to the
Rock Front OHV
area to pay a visit to the highpoint of the Los Machos Hills,
a sub-range within the Los Padres NF. I
had been here on two previous occasions, most recently in November. The Jeep
made exploring this area far easier, and great fun, too. I followed a series
of roads into the OHV, eventually finding my way past the Paradise Campground
and onto a ridge 
running north
to the Los Machos Hills. Here I was confronted
with a sign saying the road ended in a mile, which it did, at a
private property boundary. This contrasts sharply with
the OHV map
found on the USFS website which clearly shows a 4WD road reaching to
Los Machos Hills.
The map must be more than a decade out of date because it has been
at least that long since the public has been granted access to that part of the
forest. The road continues through a corner of private property before
re-entering the national forest where one can then legally hike to Los Machos
Hills HP. Judging from the lightly used tread on the road within the private
property, I didn't expect to see anyone up this way during my short visit, so
I simply parked the Jeep and went in on foot. It's about 2mi each way to the
highpoint, taking about 50min along 
various roads in various stages of
being reclaimed by nature. It's a very scenic area with wonderful
grass and oak woodlands mixed with chaparral along the ridgetops.
The first 1/3mi goes through the private property to 
a second gate,
the other side of which is the forest lands, unused for quite some time now,
but still serviceable as 
a hiking route. I made
my way down to a low saddle before hiking back up along the old roadbed. The
last parts are just 
a narrow cut
in the chapparal, used by motorcycles back in
the day. It would take a good deal of work to clear out the brush to make it
useable again. I found the summit with 
limited views
because of the high brush on all sides. I picked out what looked like the
highest rocks to call the summit and left 
a register there,
before 
returning.
Condor Point / Broadcast Peak
I spent the next two and half hours driving myself back out to SR166 and then south to Goleta to pick up my daughter for a short afternoon hike. It seems it was happy hour at UCSB - students were 2-for-1 all afternoon.
Jackie and her friend Kelly
piled into the Jeep with me and we drove up into the Santa Ynez
Mtns above Goleta. My goal was a modest hike to Condor Point, about a mile and
a third from West Camino Cielo Rd, the main access road that runs along the
crest of the range. The road had only recently reopened after the Thomas
Fire had burned over much of the range the previous Fall. Though not suitable
for low-clearance, any high-clearance vehicle can navigate the sometimes rough
West Camino Cielo Rd after the pavement ends west of the gun club. We spent
about an hour driving to our starting point on the crest. Condor Point juts off
the main ridgeline 
to the south, conveniently serviced by
an old firebreak that
can be used by hikers and cyclists to access Condor Point. As we hiked along,
I was amused to listen to 
Kelly and Jackie
discussing gravitational lensing
(an effect of space-time warping), among a host of other topics, while I
followed behind. Their chatter was pretty much non-stop, in sharp contrast to
my solo hiking the past few days. It wasn't unwelcome, mind you, actually
entertaining. Strong winds
in the afternoon that made for unusually clear skies, with the
Channel Islands visible in great detail off the coast to the south.
Much of 
the landscape we hiked through had burned in the fire, but it
was already recovering with new green and plenty of 
wildflowers to add
color. After spending about an hour on 
the roundtrip hike, we
continued west in the Jeep to pay a visit to 
Broadcast Peak,
a 
tower-topped summit I had missed on a previous visit. The highpoint
is actually a small boulder inside the perimeter fence,
easily breached. Jackie took the opportunity to climb a ladder to the
roof of 
one of the buildings before we called it a day.
After this quick visit, we got back in the Jeep to drive back down to Goleta, utilizing paved (but winding) Refugio Rd. Back in Goleta we got poke for dinner before I dropped the two of them back off at their dorm. I went off to find a place to spend the night with plans to come back and get Jackie in the morning to continue our way south to San Diego.
Continued...