After I had clawed my way back up the thirty-foot cliff, I sat down on the trail with a thud, passed Marcus the steel water bottle I had rescued from the bottom of the canyon, and began wearily shaking gravel out of my shoes. “Okay, Marcus,” I told the ten-year old student, “you’re going to have to slowly pour out some water for me so I can wash my hands and arms and get the poison oak off.” So the boy slowly and silently unscrews the cap… which then slips out of his grip and tumbles off the trail, down the side of the cliff and rolls once again into the same exact thicket of poison oak on the canyon floor. I staggered to my feet and cried out in disbelief, “You did not just do that! Tell me you did not just do that!” But he did, and this is probably why I prefer to hike alone.
Soon enough, the school year will be over, and I will put aside my responsibilities as an outdoor teacher to venture out into the American wilderness, sending dispatches describing my trials, travails and tribulations back to my hometown in upstate New York. For the moment, I remain in southern California, teaching the basic mechanics of natural systems to children and helping foster a love and appreciation for the outdoor environment. It’s a rewarding career, but not without its episodes of rampant frustration.
I sought to forestall the end-of-season burnout by taking a solo trip into nearby Blue Canyon. Backpacking would help get my body in shape for the volcanoes and other peaks that I hoped to climb later this summer. The trailhead, like the coastal city of Santa Barbara and the surrounding ocean, was trapped within the gray, chilly fog known as June Gloom - a reoccurring weather phenomenon that sometimes burns off by mid-afternoon. But as I hiked north and inland, I escaped the concealing cloud, and it felt as if I were stepping out of a magic portal into an entirely new country. When the mists and tendrils of fog dissipated, the temperature was 30 degrees warmer, and the sun was shining fiercely upon Blue Canyon and the Santa Ynez Valley.
The trail wound down along steep slopes of chaparral, which is a forbidding class of terrain, thick with brambles, thorns, and tough branches. Wandering off-trail is not usually an option. Pathways through the chaparral are perpetually becoming overgrown and enveloped by the surrounding shrubs. Send in a crew to trim the bushes to the ground, and they’ll grow right back, since that’s what they’re designed to do after a wildfire, thanks to their bulbous root systems.
Still, the chaparral has its own sparks of beauty amid the heat, rattlesnakes and poison oak. Yucca stalks protruded high above the foliage, capped by frivolous explosions of white flowers, like piñatas hanging in a dusty Mexican village. The orange petals of the sticky monkey flower brightened the hillsides with the semblance of a thousand outstretched simian tongues. And from time to time I had to wade through a sea of overgrown deerweed infested with bumblebees that foraged for pollen and nectar in the tiny, yellow flowers. My passage along these stretches was like a walk of faith, for I strode blindly, unable to see the trail, amidst the loud hum of the worker bees, hoping none of them would shirk their duty at the disturbance and start acting aggressive.
I found a home for the night in a meadow where each whorl of mugwort cradled a covey of ladybugs, and where eight-inch bear tracks signified the presence of larger creatures. At dusk there were frogs peeping in the nearby creek, crickets chirping in the field, bats circling overhead and a gibbous moon rising above the head of Blue Canyon. I tried the childhood trick of launching stones upwards into the path of bats to temporarily fool them into thinking the pebble might be a tasty insect. Several detected the missiles with their sonar and moved to intercept, but they quickly realized their error and winged onward to more promising fare.
