Today was another good one. I slept in til Noon, so two big thumbs up for that. After hanging around the pad for a while I decided a hike was in order, but I wasn't sure where I wanted to go. So, I just started driving and wound up at Rocky Peak, a trail that begins in the Santa Susana Pass in between Chatsworth and Simi Valley. I've been there before, and you may remember me mentioning it and posting photos on Facebook, but the last time I was there was November 2015, so it had been a while.
There are a couple of reasons that Rocky is not a regular hike of mine. The first one is that the "parking lot" is literally just a small dirt square that holds about eight cars if you're lucky, and a lot of the time it's full. The only other place to park is against the hillside at the other end of a freeway bridge, and I won't do that. The other reason I don't regularly visit RP is because it's a Monster Hike, like going to the top of Mission Point, and most of the time I am working and not ready to exert myself to that extent. But today was a day off and I was well rested, and I hadn't been to The Peak Of All Things Rocklike for two and a half years, and so - to paraphrase Joe Cocker - it was "high time I went".
I hadn't planned on doing a megahike, but that's what I wound up doing. I think it surpassed my previous Most Mega Hike Ever that I did back in April when I took the O'Melveny Trail to Mission Point and back. That amounted to five and a half miles round trip. Today I did at least 6 miles (three in, three out), but the thing was, that I had no idea where the trail ended. I had never been that far in before, and when I got to the high rock formations that I had thought was the end of the trail, I saw that it just kept going. I followed the trail for another mile or so, and even then I couldn't see the end, so I thought "well, that's enough for today". It took me an hour to get back to the car, so I know it was at least three miles, and it had to be at least 1000 feet of elevation gain, so for all of that I think it qualifies as my Most Mega Hike Ever, or at least tied with the one in April. The Mission Point hike is steeper, but not by much, and the thing with Rocky Peak is that it never lets up. It just keeps climbing and climbing for three miles (and who knows how much further?).
There were some incredible views from up there, because you are in between two Valleys, so at one point way up high, you can see almost the entire San Fernando Valley on your left and most of Simi Valley on your right, and if it were a clear day you would be able to see the ocean as well, over the Santa Monica mountains to the south. When you get way back on the Rocky Peak trail, you really feel like you are in the middle of the mountains. I did some Googling when I got home because I was curious about where the trail ends. Mysteriously, I wasn't able to find any info about an end point, but one hiker did post that he went all the way to where it meets the Chumash Trail, which he said was at four miles, or another mile from where I stopped. I have also been to the Chumash Trail, way back in 2014. It is located in Simi Valley right next to the Indian Caves that I had been intent on locating at the time. If you go to my 2014 photo album on FB, you will see pictures from that trip. So, I found that the Rocky Peak Trail leads at least as far as the Chumash Trail.
Next time I will go that far. Not sure when that will be, but sooner than another two and a half years for certain. :)
Tonight I watched a movie called "The Prize" (1963), which I found in a Library search for movies with Edward G. Robinson, who rules. He doesn't have the lead role in "The Prize", but that goes to Paul Newman (who also rules, if that even needs to be said), and Newman carries this flick, which is a big budget Hollywood entertainment picture that follows along the lines of a Hitchcock-style suspense film. The title of the movie refers to the Nobel Prize. The year's winners in their various fields have gathered in Stockholm (which must be pronounced as Schtok-holm, thank you) , among them Newman, an alcoholic writer of literature whose work is a critical favorite but doesn't sell. This aspect is played mostly for laughs, as the writers must have felt the need to give Newman a flaw which he would not otherwise have had, haha. Even his relentless boozing is not enough to keep the ladies away, in this case Teutonic Bombshell Elke Sommer, who plays his Swedish liason, and the feline beauty Diane Baker, as the niece of Edward G., who plays another Nobel winner. Robinson has a heavy accent, and though it is not specified which country he is from, we can be sure it is a Sinister European Power, likely from the Soviet Bloc. He is not who he seems to be, and from there the plot takes off.
Being a box office flick from the early 60s, "The Prize" spends a lot of time on International Style, which was au courant then, and it especially overspends time on hijinx, mostly of the romantic kind. Obviously, when you've got Paul Newman in your movie, and Elke Sommer and Diane Baker, you are going to have some very suggestive romance (ahem!), with dialogue that you might hear from a Sean Connery James Bond movie. Newman plays it more self-effacing than that, and so do the ladies because the hijinx is secondary to The Sinister Communist Plot. But the movie runs 2 hours and 15 minutes, and that is the problem. It's still a lot of fun, and it moves, and if you love the sophistication and hairstyles of the early 1960s, then there is a lot to like about any big Hollywood movie like this one.
Had director Mark Robson cut about 30 minutes from "The Prize", and had he focused just a bit more on the plot, he'd have really had something, because the cast has a lot of energy and everything looks great, shot on location in Sweden (with interiors at Royce Hall, UCLA).
Still, I love the time period too much to give it anything less than One & One Half Thumbs Up. The early 1960s was all about possibility, the possibility of going to the Moon, even the possibility of good movies. So give "The Prize" a shot, even if you never see it.
That's all for tonight. See you in the morn after a mega sleep in. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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