We live super close to tons of hiking trails in the Santa Monica mountains. I know there are people from all over LA proper who would love to hike these trails, but don’t because they’re so far away. For me, they’re about 10 miles away, so it would be a shame not to take advantage. I finally dragged Trinity out to one of the trails.

However, when I first did my research via Local Hikes, I was actually aiming for the Newton Canyon trail. Ah well, we ended up walking along the Backbone Trail instead.

According to this map, we walked into the Backbone trail from a free parking lot along Kanan Dume Road and took several meandering paths that eventually ended up onto a wider one used by the mountain bikers. I saw on that site that mountain bikers are rude, but I didn’t see much of that today – its not hard to hear them coming, so if you do, just stand back and let them by. Kind of like what you do with cars, folks.

Trin made me take a picture of this footprint, theorizing that its proof of Sasquatch. He says it’ll be worth money someday.

There were tons of super cool trees along the path. It appears that things are a little dry right now, but I think things are beginning to flower and bloom now. A lot of these trees look like they’re straight out of Pan’s Labyrinth.

Trinity was a little concerned about the spectre of mountain lions, rattlesnakes and various other wildlife that might want to eat us. I mentioned that if he’d really wanted to avoid animals, we should have gone earlier in the day, since animals (I hear) mostly like to go out at sundown, when its cooler. Fortunately, the only wildlife we saw was a bunny (it’s that little brown dot along the path), and we didn’t have to fight him.

Trinity’s not much of a nature fan, but I think he had fun. Plus, the fact that it was all free made it all the more fun.

This is my favorite picture of my favorite little spot in this canyon. If you are more adventurous than I, you can scale down a slope from here and find a little creek.

We only walked the trail for about an hour, since we’d set out at about 4 and I didn’t much like the thought of becoming an item on the City News Service wire. But I’ve already got a promise from Trinity that we’ll come back on another Monday soon to find that trail I was really gunning for.