Friday May 9, 15.4mi/24.8km

Ridge of Montecito Peak (7.4/1920ft) to Santa Ynez River (30.8/1620ft) (CA) -8.0mi skip LC Hotsprings

I packed up my campsite at 6:30 and had the most amazing undercast view of the coast below.

The trail was quite nice and I cruised along as I climbed another thousand feet up to Cold Spring Pass.

I even saw a couple morning joggers along the way. And I saw like five rabbits, none of whom seemed all that concerned to get out of my way.

The top of the climb had this little trailhead parking area and a strange water collection tank.

I used the ladder to climb up to the top and get some water through a hatch. after a nice break enjoying the views I continued down off the pass into the next valley.

So many new wildflowers here!

The view down into the valley where I would be spending most of the rest of the day.

There was lots of wildlife today, mostly the animal and insect variety, but also this unwelcome vegetation.

This wildlife was loud, but I couldn’t get close enough to identify them.

It seemed like every three or four miles along the trail there was a little campsite.

Once I got down into the valley, I noticed the trails were significantly less maintained and used.

The trail would alternate between wooded areas and a big open meadows.

I passed by the next campsite around noon so I decided a picnic table would be a fine spot to have lunch.

After lunch I immediately had to cross a little stream, fortunately someone had lined up rocks, so it was a dry crossing.

And a mile later I joined a road. At least, the guidebook called it a road. There’s no way this thing had been a drivable road in this century, it was very overgrown and washed out in a few places.

I basically paralleled the Santa Ynez River all day, and where there’s water there’s wildlife. Snake!

I came to this campground, “P-Bar Flats”, it was all overgrown and unmaintained but otherwise all the picnic tables and toilets and infrastructure was there. It kind of felt like a zombie apocalypse campground.

An hour later I hit another campground with the same eerie abandoned feeling.

This one had a couple of deer roaming around who were eagerly munching on grass.

There were two hot springs on the route today, Little Caliente and Big Caliente. Both of them are on out-and-back spurs from the main trail. I couldn’t get to Little Caliente because the road was washed out in several places, so I turned around and returned to the main trail. Big Caliente, however, was accessible.

It even had changing rooms!

That hot spring was down a 2.7 mile spur road, so it was easy walking but I had to keep alert for snakes.

By the time I had returned to the main route from Big Caliente hot springs, it was almost 6pm and I searched for a place to camp. This whole valley is quite brushy so I ended up just camping in the dry river bed for Santa Ynez River.