As our eyes bounced nervously between the jagged cliffs and jostling ocean waves, our kayak guide Chuck pointed to one more natural wonder to make us simultaneously marvel at our surroundings and ponder our mortality.
"Just steer straight into the cave, hang a hard left, and push off the rocks as needed," he instructed loud enough for us to hear over the ocean.
Another smart-aleck middle-aged kayaker and I muttered the same fearful response: "What cave?"
Like the tight, hidden holes and inlets we paddled through, Channel Islands National Park seems to be hidden and puny from a distance.
Once you're ashore, though, the 250,000-acre spread — the half of it that's above water, that is — feels expansive and worlds away. Never mind that it's just an hourlong ferry ride from the mainland.
A lot of tourists and even many Los Angeles residents don't even know there's a national park out there. The nearest and most visited of its five islands, Anacapa and Santa Cruz, are about 20 miles by boat from the harbor of Ventura, which is 70 miles by car northwest of the Hollywood sign. You can't camp in many national parks that close to a major metropolitan area.
More people know about Santa Catalina Island farther to the south, which is officially part of the Channel Islands chain but not part of the national park.
Catalina has hotels, restaurants and people to carry your bags for you. Channel Islands National Park has only campsites, picnic tables and a subspecies of small, cute and relentlessly obnoxious foxes that'll run off with your bags if you don't keep a close watch.
The history of the park's islands are uniquely Californian, involving American Indians, Spanish settlers, ranchers, an environmental disaster and pioneering conservationists.
Those naturalists spearheaded the park's creation after the aforementioned disaster: A blowout on a nearby oil rig spewed 200,000 black gallons around the islands in 1969. Dead dolphins, seals and an estimated 3,600 birds floated ashore.
I saw strong signs of life among all three animal groups during my two-day visit in April. Fifty years later, the islands are thriving with crystal-clear shoreline, healthy vegetation (above and below water) and abundant wildlife. Those pesky foxes symbolize the islands' revival, as they were nearly extinct in 1969.
A park ranger warned us of those little grubbers in a five-minute spiel on good island manners as soon as we stepped off our boat from the mainland: "We have bear boxes, but we don't have any bears," he told us. "We have foxes."
One boat to another
The big reason Channel Islands National Park is not visited by more people, of course, is that most people don't have a boat to take them 20 miles out into the Pacific. Hitching a ride is not cheap and requires a fair amount of planning, too.
Island Packers, the park's only ferryboat concessionaire, charges about $50-$100 round-trip per person depending on the island and times. There's usually at least one ferry ride per day to and from Anacapa islands and Santa Cruz, and more scattered trips out to the other islands. Reservations are a must. Boats are more abundant in summer, but any time of year they can sell out.
I picked Santa Cruz among the park's three most accessible islands for its wide variety of options. There's a kayaking and snorkeling hut there for guided treks or self-guided rentals. There are also a few historic sites and a wide array of hiking loops, which are also plentiful on the more remote but sizable Santa Rosa Island.
By contrast, the smaller but more dramatic-looking Anacapa Island — viewable off the northeastern end of Santa Cruz — is a giant rock with a very photogenic lighthouse and several overlooks; it's more suitable for a shorter day trip and Instagram (although it does have a small number of windswept campsites.)
Our boat left Ventura just after 9 a.m. It arrived in time for me to trek to my campsite about a half-mile from the jetty, stow my gear and get suited up for my 10:30 guided kayak trip.
"If it sounds like I'm yelling at you, it's only so you can hear me over the waves," the sunscreen-slathered Chuck advised our group of 10 as we adjusted our wet suits. (Water temperature on that spring day was only about 57 degrees.)
What a way to get to know the island. As we paddled our way toward Cavern Point, we saw some brown harbor seals lazing in a cave. We also had several fly-bys from brown pelicans, another dramatic comeback story since the park's creation after pollution thinned out their eggs to the point of near extinction around the islands.
Whenever we stopped, Chuck offered instruction or pointers. He showed us how one cliff with a hole in it looked particularly like an elephant. He told us to cling to giant bands of kelp growing up off the ocean floor to use as anchors — then ate some. Underwater, the plants create "kelp forests" that are popular with snorkelers.
As for those caves, it was scarier watching someone disappear into a cliff — and waiting to see them come out another side — than it was paddling through them. One of the caves, however, was tight enough to raise my fear level as I had to lean flat and let the ocean pull me through. It did.
Fox vs. pig vs. man
Camping in one of Santa Cruz Island's 31 main campsites was a nice halfway experience between car camping and backpacking. Tall cottonwood trees break up the sun and wind, but the sites are open enough at night for grade-A stargazing.
There are no cars, of course, so that part is great. But the sites are near enough to the harbor that some campers lugged roller coolers and loveseat-sized folding chairs with them onto the ferryboat.
Those brown foxes — officially named island foxes — were the only critters to worry about at the campsite. One of them would come moseying through every 15 minutes or so to see if I'd left anything out for them. I had a slight moment of panic during one visit wondering if they know how to open an aluminum can and are into West Coast IPAs, but apparently no.
The story behind the foxes is like a cross between a Darwin lesson and a "Duck Dynasty" episode. They evolved as a smaller version of their mainland cousins based on preying habits. For thousands of years, they weren't preyed upon — until pigs arrived on ranches in the mid-1800s. The animals escaped and the resulting feral pigs nearly brought the foxes to extinction.
The nonnative pigs themselves had to be killed off in the mid-2000s, a controversy that pitted animal rights activists against conservationists and some rather overjoyed hunters. (Nearly three-quarters of Santa Cruz Island's 97 square miles are closed off to the public and now managed by the Nature Conservancy.)
I've camped around feral pigs before and will take cute, little, irksome but harmless foxes any day. Score another one for the conservationists, I say.
The rest of my getaway was mostly spent hiking. I did four treks, ranging from a couple miles to an 8-mile doozy. Each hike was sharply different.
Right after my kayak tour, I trekked through the brushy and flower-strewn Scorpion Canyon up toward the bare Montaña Ridge, where I saw a deserted oil well and the western and northern edges of the island (at once). Later, I hiked out along the stunning and often sheer North Bluff Trail to the Potato Harbor overlook to watch the sunset.
It would've been a truly Zen moment of a sunset, as I had the awe-inspiring vantage point — overlooking several inlets and sharp points of land — all by my happy self. But a bunch of noisy seals and maybe sea lions, too, were barking so loudly at each other at the bottom of the cliff a few hundred feet below me that I felt like yelling "Shut up!" as if they were noisy tenants in a downstairs apartment.
The longest hike came the next day, to Smugglers Cove, which ends at a long, open, rocky yet graceful beach near one of the two former ranch homes on the island. Plant life along the way ranged wildly from fields of tall, amber-wavy grass, to clingy cactuses and coastal sage scrub, to bright wildflowers. The skies were also clear enough for me to look back toward Ventura and make out some of its surrounding Santa Susana Mountains.
By the time I loaded onto the ferry for the 4 p.m. return to the mainland, I was whooped. Leaving the island was a real drag, though. I wished the boat ride had been longer, as I left feeling like a scuba diver with the bends from coming up to the surface too quickly.
Cell reception on my phone came back up about halfway to the mainland, and with it came work — which at least waited until I could send a video of dolphins swimming around our boat to my daughters back home. Fifteen minutes after I stepped off the boat, I was stuck in traffic singing Guy Clark's "L.A. Freeway" in my head. Only a few hours later, I was checking in at LAX for a red-eye flight home.
That short adjustment period, however, served as a long-term reminder of how easy it'll be to head back out to Channel Islands National Park the next time I'm in L.A.
Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658 @ChrisRstrib
