Hiking in the Santa Barbara Foothills: The Playground

Filed in archive on November 21, 2005

Way back in the day it was not uncommon for a group of us to charge up to Bolinas Ridge for a sunset salutation. When I moved from the Bay Area to attend college at UCSB I feared that there would never be a place quite as exquisite to watch a sunset as our hometown favorite of Bo Ridge. Well, as I would discover the Santa Ynez Mountains contain equally breathtaking vistas. To the west the suburban community of Santa Barbara is spread before you with the Channel Islands standing up like they are attached to the continent across a body of sheet glass, light-blue ocean. To the east is the San Rafael Wilderness and an endless chain of mountains fading off into the distance. The word spread quickly from one of the guys in our dorm at UCSB about where to watch a sunset. He was a native Santa Barbaran and had spend some days rock climbing up at Lizard's Mouth and said: "it is a cool spot to watch our life-giving orb drop a display of fantastic colors as it oozes into tomorrow for someone on the other side of the planet." OK, I put that in, but it sounds better than how he described the process.

Now, Lizard's Mouth is a wonderful place to watch a sunset, especially with a harvest full moon rising up out of the opposite side of your consciousness, and I have detailed some experiences there on an earlier weblog. The topic today is finally making it to The Playground -- a place that I had heard about more than a decade ago, had always meant to hike to, and never did until a few days ago.

Wow! This place was an alice in Wonderland for the bouldering community! A cross between a natural weather-made Stonehenge and a southwest, sandstone climbing park. How could I have never jumped around on these massive conglomerations of boulders? When I began to lose elevation on the trail going out to The Playground my doubts about the validity of this rumored holy site began to balloon. At a certain point though, I was provided a glimpse of the crown boulders from a high point in the trail. It already seemed special. Magical. More Chumash spells on whitey?

From the eagle's nest vantage point, a section of boulders larger than fifty feet in height and god knows how wide, I took a moment to breath in my community that was painted on the vista below. The airport. The campus. Downtown. All of it like tiny tinker toy sets, make-believe, unimpressive. That must be part of the reason I seek higher ground on hikes: to cast my gaze down upon that maelstrom that is called civilization. It doesn't quite seem to fit in with the rest of the scene - ocean, islands, mountains, chaparral and the calls of birds in the manzanita brush.

I leap treacherously from boulder to boulder at a section where they line up like giant's stepping-stones. I am so proud of my achievement that I have to set up the camera and film myself doing the jumps a second time. This is a memory that is not good enough just in to be encased in brain cells, I want some digital proof. Someday I will look at that footage and say: "What the hell was I thinking?! That is a 25 foot fall off either side!"

ER Harris