A Trial of Trails

I'm football illiterate, so on Super Bowl Sunday I tend to be contrarian. We try to do something outdoorsy and active rather than spend the day on the couch. (Not that I disdain plopping on the couch. There are 364 other days where I do that quite admirably.) Today we braved a hike on some of the trails up and around Palos Verdes, or rather, "PV" for the locally inclined. Our first attempt was the short and sweet George F Canyon trail off of PV Dr. East. We love the trail because it has little number markers every hundred feet or so. The kids have never been treated to such suspense and excitement as when they are counting off the numbers. Discovering anew that #9 is indeed just a stones throw beyond #8 is an excitement of pant-wetting proportions.

Unfortunately we found other aspects of the trail to be pant-wetting. On Friday night we had gotten a killer rain storm (at least by California standards) and the affects were quite evident on the trail. Large gullies cut through the packed-sand pathway where the running water had carried away the soil. (L and N learned the term "erosion.") The early part of the trail was moist, but had dried out enough to be passable. We got to marker #4 when the trail dipped a little and ran beside and eventually over a small brook. The brook had swollen greatly with the rain and evidently branches and brambles that had been swept down the hillside had damned up the stream as it went under the bridge. This diverted the stream onto the trail, flooding a large swath with an active flow, and leaving a hundred feet or so beyond the actual water an impassable mud bog. Not that L and N didn't attempt to pass it. L learned the hard way that shoes plunged into two foot deep mud sometimes prefer hanging out with the mud than retracting with your foot.

Bummed and thwarted, we returned, a little mud besmeared, to the car and considered other alternatives. We decided to simply drive up to Del Cerro Park at the top of the hill at the end of Crenshaw Blvd. We go up there a lot and the kids love the view. We pulled in, disembarked and crossed the park, climbing up the little hill to the cliff edge that gives fantastic vistas of the San Pedro channel and (if you're lucky) Santa Catalina island about 22 miles to the south. It was a beautiful view and the late afternoon winter sun was thin and golden.






One of the things about post-rain LA is that the smog all gets washed away, the skies clear up and you get incredible views, but you also get incredible wind. Up on the cliff end of Del Cerro park you don't have much shielding you from the breeze and Stacy quickly found it too chilly, though the kids couldn't seem to have cared less. We headed back to the car, again thwarted.



Stacy and I were particularly bummed because, with what seems like weeks upon weeks of rain, the kids were starting to get a little psychotic and cabin fever was setting in. We had hoped to have the hike burn a little energy, provide a little mellowness, and thereby (indirectly) contribute to our children's life expectancy, which had been trending dangerously downward with each in-house spaz-out. I opened the car door gloomily to let the wild animals in - and that's when I had one of my fortuitous bursts of inspiration. The car was parked right alongside the wide expanse of park. The car was warm. We were cold. The kids were oblivious. The answer was simple: