18-Apr-2011 -- My journey begins on the nearby freeway as I suddenly watch my numbers line up for a nearby point of confluence. I decided at that point to go for it. Little did I know what the day would hold. Without much to go on but only gps direction I parked at a spot east of the confluence which I thought was pretty close; about 2.5 miles east of confluence.

I began the hike by navigating around private property and barking dogs. The many trails accommodated me. I soon was following along a trail that followed the ridge line going upward. I was exited as I was getting withing 800 yrds. but as I got closer I realized to get on the right ridge I would have to follow a horse shoe shaped path up to the top and back down to avoid the valleys. At that point I decided just to go down and cut across the valleys. This is when things started going bad. The grass was wet and I ran into poison oak in the valley areas. I couldn't seem to cross at any point. I didn't feel like back tracking and decided to go down from there and then find a road to walk back to my car. As I got lower the brush got so thick that I was struggling to go a short distance and soon found myself crawling underneath the brush slowly down and then walking in the streams till I finally hit a road. Now I was in a private neighborhood and two security guys in a van slowly descended upon me. They offered me a ride to the front gate but that put me much farther from the place I had parked 2 1/2 miles away and then kept driving me till I finally got out at a gas station down by the freeway. I was soaked and I began walking down a highway and people seemed to be very aware of my condition. After a long walk down the highway my gps pointed north to the parking area and I cut up a field which led 2 miles up and down over steep hills to my car about 5 hours after I started. At this point I was exhausted and celebrated my trip over a hot fudge sundae at McDonalds. It probably would have saved a lot of time to research the maps ahead of time!

You can see my progress and pictures in realtime motion at everytrail (click on statistic mode to see realtime motion.)