Las Trampas

A few weeks ago while walking in Redwood Regional Park, I saw what looked like cliff bands off in the distance to the East. I did some google maps surveillance and discovered that they were most likely in Las Trampas Regional Park. Today was the day we planned to check them out, and although we got a late start, I was excited to see if they were climb worthy, or useless rubble piles. Unfortunately, in my excitement, I didn't look at a topo map of the trail that I had planned on taking, and it turned out to be a bit of an uphill slog with Zoe. It was made worse by the fact that when we finally got to the ridge line the wind picked up. This wasn't a problem for mom and dad, but Zoe strongly objected to it, and I had to start jogging down the other side to get out of the wind. Here I am before the run, and already bushed

And here we are on the other side:


We got out of the wind under some BOULDERS (yaaaaay!) which turned out to be sandstone, but coated in lichen. Some of them look climbable though.
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After feeding Zoe, we took stock of where we were. We still were not where google maps showed the cliff band, so we went down the other side and found this:

which looked a bit low angle and also covered with lichen, but potentially interesting. This particular rock wasn't even visible on Google Maps, actually.

It was at this point that things got a little unpleasant. The cliff band was supposed to be off to the North, but there was no discernible trail. Worse yet, we were running out of time: the park service locks the gate to the parking lot at 7 pm and it was now close to 6:00. We bushwhacked a little through the tall grass and wild sage, but quickly abandoned hope and began heading back up to the ridge via established trails. Once at the ridge trail, we took the Cuesta trail back down towards the lot. Both the wind and Zoe were now howling, and we had to hand carry her for most of the way back down to the car. I think the 7 pm gate locking might be a bit flexible, as there were still plenty of cars in the lot at 6:45 and people were casually grilling in the picnic area. Here is our approximate route, and here is a 1.6 Mb PDF map of the park. From the map, it looks like ~1300 ft of gain total, and nothing like even the approach to Ceuse, but MAN was it tiring!

It's a beautiful park, but next time we'll leave a lot more time for walking the trails.