The Channel Islands are one of the least visited national parks in the system, even though they’re only a few hours drive from LA. They’re protected from the hordes by a moat: you need to take a hour’s boat ride. There’s no roads webbing these islands. There’s no access for those who prefer to experience nature from a couch in their poorly driven RV. So Edward Abbey’s theory that cars shrink the size of our parks rings true here; the Channel Islands are quite small in land area, but if you stand in the middle of Santa Cruz Island, it feels enormous. We do express distance in terms of time, not miles, and in this park twenty miles is “all day” instead of “half an hour” away. Valleys paint upwards in all directions, and there’s no little concrete bunkers toilets anywhere nearby. There is a campground, but unlike most park campgrounds you’ll find no generators, no RVs, or even showers here. They provide you with a couple water spigots that swarm with bees, and lockers to secure your food from the other wildlife.
August 2015
I went there for the first time almost ten years ago. I was in LA for a trip that was nominally work related, but was mostly about visiting friends in LA, so I tacked on this side trip to the end of it. A day to drive to Ventura, a day to sail out and hike around, and then a day to brave the LAX Airport and return east. It was late August, a spectacularly clear day to a New Englander, ho-hum to southern Californians.
The boat ride turned out to be a bonus I did not plan for — the Channel that you cross to the eponymous islands is a major Pacific migratory route. On that August morning there were dozens of whales and hundreds of dolphins playing and swimming around during their long commute. A fair few people were on the boat just for the marine show, and would never set foot on the actual islands. I can’t say they chose their day wrong, though they missed much.
I landed on the island and almost everyone else went off to one of the organized kayak tours on the island. A volunteer ranger asked those of us who were hiking to meet briefly for a short introduction, and I was the only one. “Did I choose wrong?” I asked. “Is this not a great hiking place?”
“No,” he assured me. “Usually it’s about half and half.”
“I got lucky then,” I said, and meant it. And I asked him about my choices. There were two trails that were interesting to me; one went up the spine of the island, up the central hills to a high point at the top. The other followed the east coastline bluffs and ocean below. Both end at some point north of here, and you had to turn back. I didn’t think I could do both. Which should I pick?
He looked me up and down and decided I was Worthy. He said “It’s not on the map, but the trails do connect in a loop. If you want to, just follow the coastal route here, and at this point ” — he stabbed the map with his thumb — “you’ll see a fork inland. There’s even a sign there, I don’t know why the maps don’t print it. If you’re feeling like you have enough time and energy and are up for a little bit of climbing, take it and it’ll join up with the central trail in the hills.”
I had my mission. I launched off along the bluffs, watched the green clear waves crash below, and drifted my hands along the tops of the tall grass dancing in brown waves. The island is an open clean place, the world around visible for miles, without another soul around to bother anyone. My late Mémère would dub it “the kind of place you can fart as loud as you want”. You can even see over the channel back to the suburbs mainland, but I tried to avoid looking that way, and pretend instead I was here on this island in an earlier, unmolested and unlit age. My cell phone then had zero signal. I considered chucking it into the ocean, but the sentiment lost to my impulse not to pollute the waters.
I reached the fork easily enough — this trail was mostly flat after a short climb up to the top of the bluffs. So I ate a quick lunch, and launched up the left fork with gusto. The Ranger had declared me fit and competent to do it! Here I go! I climbed a hill, and then the one behind that one, and then the one behind that. The ocean behind me grew bigger and bigger the higher I got, and the breeze was a little cooler. Another hill, another. It was the type of landscape where you couldn’t see the full peak, just the next one you had to reach once you crested the last.
As I climbed up the series of hills, I started to look at my watch. I could hear the boat operator’s warning: “If you’re a day tripper, and you don’t make the 5:30 departure time, congratulations, you’re now a camper!” And the minute hand was still relentless. So I had a choice. I could turn back now and make the boat landing fine, but not if I went much further. Or I could commit and go forward, hoping I had enough time to cover the unknown miles and hills between me and the end of the loop. Maybe the next hill crest was the last one, and I’d see the boat launch an easy mile or two away. But the trail could also loop around a lot more than I knew, and I’d still be looping when my ride departed, and my phone was not yet capable of telling me exactly where I was.
I summoned my nominal adulthood, my faint legacy of Boy Scout wisdom, and my general respect for nature in its many forms, and decided to take the prudent path. I was a rule follower as a kid, and old habits die hard. It didn’t hurt that I was nearly out of drinking water, and the sun was hot. Downhill sounded good to me right about then. So I turned, and covered ground I’d crossed before, and made the boat with 40 minutes to spare.
And I almost immediately regretted it. We attack ourselves most harshly for the things that make us most ourselves, after all. “You always wuss out of things like that. You never get the best stories because you’re risk shy.” I could hear the other 9 year olds mocking me for not jumping off the higher diving board. And that was just the start: that incomplete loop bugged the hell out of me for years. I strongly suspected that I had turned around at the three quarters point, and therefore my caution made my return much harder. If I’d just gone forward a bit more, I would have punched over the top and been treated to an easy gradual descent over new terrain. My pedometer, and a trail map later confirmed it; I’d managed to hike almost 14 miles on a 9 mile trail loop.
The memory of it caused me to push myself more. I started hiking more seriously, chosing the longer paths and harder loops. I carried a bit more gear, a bit more water and some filters as a matter of course, extending my range. I looked beyond the most popular hikes and started choosing the less traveled ones, the type that had signs warning you and made you sign in and out of a little book so they’d know if they had to send a chopper to come collect your body afterwards. I found valleys and notches and hilltops I don’t think I would have before, if I didn’t have to beat myself up about wussing out on the Channel Islands.
But of course, despite that, I still had unfinished business on the Islands themselves.
March 2023
Work brought me to southern California again in March of 2023, and it was finally time to address this nonsense. I booked a boat ticket, another stay in Ventura, and packed my good boots to a tournament that otherwise would never require them.
This time, I would tackle the loop from the other direction. That would get me up the spine and done with the big climb first, and then I could descend slowly in full vision of the flat bluff-side path for the end. I had solid boots and poles to counteract my naturally ill-coordinated nature. I had the full route on AllTrails now so I would know exactly where I was. And I had twice as much water, even though the rain was rainy and I would not need it all. And once the boat released us, I started right away up that hill spine trail, determined to see just how much time it actually took me to do that loop. I would conquer this unfinished challenge now in full spirit, and yet also know the full extend of my decade-ago shame.
That winter was a true California rainy season, the first one in years. The island was shocking green, not sere and brown. Last year’s tall grasses were matted down while their green children grew up around them, and the trees and bushes exploded with flowers. Clouds drifted back and forth, caught by the hilltops. For a good hour, I had no view other than the mist that clouded around me. My rain jacket came out early and stayed on the rest of the hike.
But rain doesn’t stop a New Englander with a penchant for the outdoors. I climbed up a bowl valley, then followed switchbacks up to a ridge line. This view was more compact and hemmed in, thanks to the clouds, but it still felt like a big place, its size defined by the limits of how far we could go on foot. Our world is larger when we’re on our feet. Consider how big a state Rhode Island seems to be if you’re in a car; but now think about how large it is if you have to walk from Newport to Warwick.
I wasn’t totally alone this time, but saw a whopping six other hikers along this eleven mile trail. If you change your pace just a little it’s easy to avoid other hikers, and maintain your own bubble. I surprised a few foxes, following along narrow saddles, and kept going. I could taste the easy victory ahead, and looked forward to sitting on the clifftops for a hour afterwards watching the waves, before I had to return on the boat.
I didn’t stop for breaks much, apart to snap a very few photos, and kept my pace going. After a while, the trail drifted downwards and I found myself below the cloud line again. I could see the open plain and bluffs and green grasslands again, but had not yet reached the point where I’d turned back last time around.
And so it was here that my self-hating theory of cowardice and shame, a guidestar of self-improvement that had driven me up hundreds of miles of trails and backwoods over the last decade, was proven total bullshit. I marched along the circuit of the bluffs again, less spectacular this time because the emerald green waters were pregnant with mud runoff from those rains. I took the last three miles at a fast pace, no stops, and strolled up to the boat launch with time to spare.
But… not that much time. I was the last one on the boat, and about 20 minutes away from being declared a camper. I now know that I had not been a wuss at all ten years ago. If I had not turned around, I would have been absolutely screwed. Whatever the ranger saw in me that led him to suggest that I could do the full circuit and be just fine was apparently a mirage.
People tend to attribute a lot of physical ability people of great height, but the fact remains, I wouldn’t have ended up a 6′ 6″ debate coach if I had any athletic talent.
I was a bit subdued on my muddy boat trip back to the civilized shores. In the script, I’d be now thinking “See! I totally could have kicked that islands ass all along!” But instead I was observing how my own ass had been gently kicked today. I was wiped out and stiff, ready to wash off all that mud and nasty exercise, then go drink a bucket of water and mildly overeat. One of my guiding stars of the last decade in nature had been proven a lie.
—
When you travel with people, you don’t tend to focus on others around you. Travel alone, and you can hear an awful lot of ridiculous things. Overhead bullshit in National Parks can be pretty special. One lady at Acadia complained how the rocky shoreline wasn’t better designed for her stiletto heels. A German tourist in the Canyonlands wondered why the mesas were built with no access to the top. A wheezing dad started kidding-but-not-kidding about wanting an escalator at Zion. And a redfaced man yelled at a park attendant who stood between his RV and an unstable cliffside road.
Most of the real nonsense boils down to the expectation that the park was created for us to enjoy. In a legal sense, that is true, but the park is not just lines on a map and the legal fictions that force us to respect that part of the earth more than the rest. Nature itself is not there for our purposes. The cliffs and bison and trees and rains move to their own agenda, and if you try to count on them to follow your schedule, instead of adapting to them, you’ll just be disappointed. Santa Cruz Island was not built, is not crossable in an afternoon, and does not care about how long you have until the boat departs.
So I unlearn the lesson. Caution is good; it’s one of my life goals to never meet a search and rescue party the hard way. But I think the real lesson was one I never noticed; instead of spending afternoons in nature, since that failed challenge in 2015, I’ve been spending weeks there. When the path ahead and your ability to follow it outstrips your schedule, the easiest thing to change sometimes is the schedule. So next time I go to the Channel Islands, it’s time to bring a tent.