For many people at Berkeley, Spring Break is a time to forget about the stresses of Berkeley life by going home and seeing family and old friends. Most people are at that point in the semester where a break is desperately needed and well received. I, however, did not go home  for Spring Break. I, along with my four roommates, Alex, Logan, Spoon, and Daisuke, spent the break at Logan’s house just outside of Los Angeles.

Last year, Logan and Daisuke came to my house in the Bay Area and, after I showed them the secrets of San Francisco, decided to go on a four-day backpacking trip in Henry W. Coe State Park, just south of San Jose. We experienced three days of pouring rain and hiked out a day early; I guess we had it coming since we had no tent. We all decided that for our next Spring Break we wanted to go somewhere dry, and Southern California seemed to fit the bill, especially because we could stay at Logan’s house and see Los Angeles afterwards.
Fast forward to Fall Semester last year: instead of doing my reading for a Political Science class one day, I decided, just because, to look up places to go backpacking in SoCal. I did a quick search of the local protected areas, the Los Padres National Forest and the Angeles National Forest, and soon found a place called the Sespe Wilderness in the eastern part of Los Padres, about an hour from Logan’s house. After reading a little bit more, I typed in “Sespe Wilderness” into Google Images. To make a long story very short, I got almost no Poli Sci reading done that night.

After another semester of dreaming of the Sespe Wilderness, and reading about it and other hiking spots in the Greater Los Angeles Area (there’s a great blog, nobodyhikesinla.com, with lots of pictures of many cool places), I started bugging my roommates about going backpacking there. Daisuke and Logan were in almost immediately. Alex joined in soon afterwards, and, after a little convincing, Spoon came aboard. Neither Spoon nor Alex had gone backpacking before. But after last year’s trek, both Daisuke and Logan were into making a Spring Break hike an annual tradition. I obtained a map of the area and, after talking to a Forest Service ranger over the phone, laid down my route. It was to be a thru-hike (where you start at one place and hike to another) 28 miles over four days, with two hot springs and, if we were lucky, we would get to see California Condors in the wild.

Monday came, and Logan’s mom very graciously drove us to the Piedra Blanca trail-head in the mountains above Ojai. We took the obligatory “before leaving” photograph, and hiked into the wilderness to escape civilization and all the stresses that come along with it. We had to cover nine miles to our campsite at Willett Hot Springs. It doesn’t sound that bad, and well, it wasn’t, except for having to cross Sespe Creek 7 times, barefoot in ice-cold, knee-deep, and fast-moving water, with 40 pounds on our backs. Add on some slippery rocks and, voila, a challenging day of hiking. Fortunately, we had met a group of people from UC Santa Barbara who were also going hot spring-hopping in the Sespe, and we leapfrogged from crossing to crossing.
And then disaster struck. Well, sort of. We had unknowingly gone off the trail and had started bushwacking through all kinds of prickly desert plants. Yet we kept convincing ourselves we were fine, especially since we saw other footprints on the trail. Finally, we saw the Santa Barbara group crossing the creek. Two of them had decided to find a better place to cross, and we followed. It was a bad idea; after some scrambling around rocks and some more bushwacking we gave up and crossed the creek in a place abound with slippery rocks, poison oak and dangerously fast-moving water. To make it worse, a 25-foot cliff separated us from the trail. So up we climbed, causing a miniature rock slide in the progress. By the time we regained the trail, we had 4 miles to go and less than an hour of sunlight. We made into camp just as the sun set over the horizon.

Day two: After a night of not-so-delicious backpacking burritos (freeze-dried filling on day old tortillas, and according to Logan, the filling was so bad that it affected the flavor of the tortillas) making a campfire, and swapping stories with the Santa Barbara group, it was time to head for Sespe Hot Springs, 5.5 miles away. We started hiking, and while the trail was hard to follow, the cairns other hikers had laid down prevented us from climbing another cliff. The canyon’s colors changed from green to brown to a deep red as we pressed eastward, and each climb brought another breathtaking view. At the Johnson Ridge Trail we turned north and, after a mile, we arrived at the hot springs, and our campsite shaded in between a small grove of palm trees.

No wonder people from all over Southern California come for these hot springs. The water temperature was just right, hotter than your average Jacuzzi but not scalding. Each pool fed the one below it, and, according to Daisuke and Alex, the flowing water gave a welcome massage to whatever body part was laid under it. It was just what the doctor ordered; the five of us could almost see our stresses flow away as we rejuvenated from the previous days’ hikes. Once we had our fill of the hot springs we played hearts, ate dinner, and decided to roast marshmallows over another campfire.
On Wednesday, we bid a tearful farewell to Sespe Hot Springs and started the almost eight mile trek to our last campsite at Cow Spring. This was also the day that we said goodbye to Sespe Creek; it turns away from the trail just after the hot springs. We had two major climbs: the first one led us into a valley full of yucca plants and other prickly things, (note to self: wearing shorts here wasn’t a great idea), while the second one, after even more bushwacking and climbing switchbacks into the Sespe Condor Sanctuary, brought us to another part of wilderness I had never seen before. To the west we could see the Topatopa mountains rise above the clouds, while the eastern half of the sanctuary abutted with green plants and gentle slopes. That night in camp, after watching the sun set over Sulfur Peak and the clouds roll in, we went to sleep and got ready to hike out the next day.

As we hiked out on Thursday, I took in the valleys below along with the gentle slope of the mountains on either side, and had to remind myself of the economics midterm I had yet to start studying for, as well as to grab some friends of mine and go on another trek this summer. When we hiked out at Dough Flat trail-head, we finished the remainder of our food and headed towards Logan’s mom who was waiting for us at a closed gate two miles down. We headed towards Logan’s house, contemplating our next adventure. A canoe trip in Florida? The Grand Canyon? Perhaps. Only time will tell.

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