Camp For Tramps: Part Two

Yesterday, I started to tell of my first camping trip in years. Where I left off, we had just bought our supplies, and were headed to the campsite. From there, it was off to Malibu Creek Canyon State Park. We opted for the lovely and scenic but not terribly practical Pacific Coast Highway. It works once one gets to it through a variety of surface streets, but the homely 101 would have gotten us there faster. We would take it home at the end of the trip. We got to the park and found a reasonable if congested campground. Others voiced disappointment, expecting apparently that we would be more remote and enjoy greater privacy. I might have told them that one only gets that at the end of a long hike. Campsites one drives to are often little better than RV parks. This one was pretty good by comparison, heavily populated and trafficked though it was. I could have done without the high proportion of paved surface.

Fairly soon after we got situated, it was off for some hiking. We came up with a plan to see the site where the show 'MASH' was filmed, and got a basic idea of what trail would get us there. A stop at the visitors center and the acquisition there of a map helped. Evidently we were perhaps not entirely welcome in the eyes of the center's staff of two, who it seems were soon to close up and hoped to get a jump on the process. The arrival of our group's six members put a damper on that. They offered us little reason to stay after getting that map. We speculated various lurid reasons why they sought to keep the center free of any members of the public. Oddly, when they advised us that water bottles could be filled outside, they called the device a 'stanchion', as opposed to a faucet. I gather there must be some significance to the distinction.

The hike itself was a pretty pleasant one. We didn't get into any physically demanding sections of trail, but did cover a decent amount of ground. Altogether, we might have done eight miles between the main hike and a second one to an alleged 'lost cabin'. True to its name, the cabin was nowhere to be found. Making up for that was the dramatic manner in which the trail ended with a precipitous dropoff, as though the cabin had been swiped away by some grand monster's paw. My guess, though, was that they had no theme or concept for that trail, and seized upon the lost cabin idea since the very absence of a cabin lent credence to the mystery and intrigue. A 'Cabin Trail' would have to produce a cabin, and would be all the less exciting for it. It's smart marketing.

Our timing was good, as darkness fell within minutes of our return to camp. There was just enough time to get dinner and all other things squared away before it was too late. Our arrangement was like this: we had a large tent and a smaller dome tent next to each other with entrances facing one another. In front of those and towards the road were our fire pit and picnic table. We had our various foodstuffs and miscellanea on the latter, securing our most critical possessions in the cars and tents while we were away hiking. The dinner of bratwurst was fairly satisfying, and most everything we had to eat stretched just far enough. We talked a while about the sort of things that guys like us would, which is to say independent music and bad movies for which we had to make the best pitches we could. It's not exactly women and who's the best boxer, but that's just not who we are.

Tomorrow, I'll say what happened when we went to bed... and after.