Wednesday May 14, 20.9mi/33.6km

Sespe Hot Springs (88.6/2680ft) to Log Cabin Camp (109.5/1530ft) (CA)

I left a camp at 6:30 and said goodbye to my neighbors through their tent.

It was an easy mile walk back down to the main trail. The trail junctions are all signed, but they are so old and faded it’s almost impossible to read them.

I crossed the Sespe river a few more times.

And then had a short but steep climb up over a ridge dropping into another river basin.

The descent from the ridge was a nice surprise – fresh trail maintenance!

Instead of a brushy trail like many of them in the Los Padres NF, this one had all the bushes trimmed back so it was an 8-ft wide corridor.

Once I had descended to Alder Creek, I was now on its namesake trail. And the good trail continued for 5 miles, all the way up the next climb. It was a nicely graded trail so after many switchbacks I was at the top of a ridge with all these cool colored rocks.

The trail goes a few miles out of the way to connect to a local trailhead, I didn’t need that so I decided to make a shortcut. Up a wash, of course.

Eventually the wash ran out and I had to push through some bushes at the end, but I reconnected at a point 3 miles up the trail, even though my shortcut was only 2/3rds of a mile long. Sweet, I saved over 2 miles. The trail I reconnected to had lost its well-maintained status, the guidebook describes it as a wilderness trail. It wasn’t hard to follow it was just very brushy with negligible trail tread. At least it had good views.

It descended steeply into the Agua Blanca River valley, where I was surprised to see a dilapidated picnic table at the end of the trail near the river.

I decided to have lunch there in the shade, though the table was of little use, it could barely support the weight of my backpack. I finished lunch around 12:30 and the rest of the day was occupied by following the Agua Blanca River downstream. There’s basically no trail, so it’s basically 8 miles of hiking in a shallow creek.

It was kinda fun for a couple hours. I was seeing all sorts of wildlife and some pretty big fish.

Every time my splashing scared some fish out of their hiding places, I noticed they always fled in the upstream direction. Statistically I would expect about half of them to also flee downstream, so there must be some built-in instinct for them. It was a peaceful walk.

The sound of rushing water was a little loud, and I didn’t realize how loud until I could barely hear this snake rattling.

I’ve seen snakes everyday on this hike, and more often near rivers and water. I basically never see them on the desert hikes! After a couple miles I noticed the canyon started to narrow.

Apparently water snakes are a thing here. I don’t know what kind but they always quickly fled from my splashing.

And this isn’t the best picture but there’s a turtle hiding under that rock.

The canyon narrowed even further, and I noticed I was on a spot on the map called Big narrows.

So skinny.

Some of the spots were pretty deep, in a few places the water was deeper than my waist, so I had to get creative to avoid those.

The first four miles of creek hiking to the narrows were pretty slow, about 1 mile per hour. After the narrows, the creek became less rocky and more gravelly and it was easier to walk fast. Plus there were plenty of parallel old creekbeds to hike in.

By 7:30pm I had covered the other four miles of the creek walk, which meant it took me 7 hours to hike eight miles in a creek today. It was super cool and very beautiful but I was exhausted and stopped for the night at Log Cabin camp.