The Point Sal Wrong Turn hike is more story than pictures,…so here goes.

The hike was to be a modest affair.  We were simply going to hike the ridge-line out to Pt. Sal, and then take a different way back.  We had heard that there was an old trail that went along the coast toward the Guadalupe beach north of Pt. Sal .  At some point this trail turned back inland and ended up very near where we parked the car.  This meant you would not have to go up and down the hills on the ridge-line.   This would basically be an EASY way back.  It sounded like a simple plan, -but as the saying goes; plans often go astray.  This plan went way way astray…

Things started of well enough.  I have included the GPS track log recorded by my camera.  The 1st picture just shows the log of the path we took.  The camera takes a GPS position recording every 60 seconds.  This hike lasted 6.5 hours.  That is a lot of data points.  6 of those recorded point were “wild Points”.  You can see they do not match the rest of the track.  They create spikes in the path, but you can easily tell which points are valid.   The Blue Pins along the track indicates where the pictures were taken.  Picture 2 is a large area view.  Picture 3 is from the park parking lot out to Pt. Sal and back. 

We left the parking area at 9:58.  Both of us had recently purchased a pair of hiking poles and we were trying them out.  Later, they would be lifesavers.  By 11:00 we had reached the start of the ridge-line trail.  We were at the GPS  EarthScope project location at 11:33, and at Pt. Sal peninsula at 12:16.  I took a bunch of pictures at Pt. Sal (in the fog) and we left at 12:35.  We were on the trail headed to Guadalupe when WE decided (can’t blame this all on Dave) to turn inland.   Picture 4 is where it all went wrong.  If we had simply stayed on the trail it would have taken us back to our car.  We thought we taking a short cut back to the parking lot.  It turned out we had turned into the toughest terrain on the Central Coast.  The semi trail we were following disappeared after we passed an abandoned shack.  We decided to make our own trail up what appeared to be a short steep incline.

That short incline turned out to be the first part of 3 steep cliffs of death.  Without the hiking poles, we would have been on our bellies scratching and pulling our way up the cliff.  The hiking poles actually gave us enough traction to drag / pull ourselves up the incline.  We reached the top of the cliffs at 14:31.  From there we saw a trail that headed up a moderate slope.  We took that trail, and ended up back on the ridge-line at 14:51.  Our short cut had taken us 74 minutes to get from Pt Sal back to the Ridge-line.  On our way out, from that point to Pt. Sal it had taken 42 minutes. 

Picture 5 clearly shows our short cut took us 3 miles of hell to get us back to within 1 mile of where we started.  Picture 6 is a picture with the key point identified.  Picture 7 is the topography map of our shortcut.  One thing is abundantly clear.  If Dave and I had been leading the American settlers West; the American Indians would still control the west, and the concentrations of English settlers would be around Hudson Bay Canada or Mexico City.

Scroll down and click the 1st picture, and then select next at the bottom right...enjoy...

17 August UPDATE:  We actually hiked the correct trail this time.  I have added one overall picture (9) to show the route we should have taken the first time, and a picture (10) to show how close we came to taking the correct trail.

5 Sept. Update:  I have been using the Map-My -Hike Iphone app recently.  The following is a bike ride from the Pt. Sal parking lot over the top to the beach and back.  I have included some screen shots.  Go to:

http://www.mapmyhike.com/routes/view/127801369

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