Dayhike at Santa Margarita Lake, California

Recently I started a new job which starts work at 2:30 in the morning and finishes around 11 a.m. and involves split days off [if you guessed retail/night stocking you are correct]. This really threw my outdoor activities a curve. However, I did manage to get in a day hike two weekends ago.

I made a day hike at Santa Margarita Lake [San Luis Obispo County] California where our bushcraft group [CENTRAL COAST BUSHCRAFT/Facebook] had planned to do our 3rd annual gathering at the lake's Khus back country campground. Unfortunately things fell apart and we decided to call it an outing and do the annual later.

A few members still decided to go out and have some fun. Not wanting to let them down, I decided to hike out and visit for the day, having to be back at work the following night.

The hike to the campground was 4.4 miles. I took my day pack with all necessities in case I changed my mind and decided to stay over. Pack load went around 20# total. The lake is very low due to the drought, but still the Fall season was beautiful:



 



 As we reached the cutoff for the campground, my buddy snapped my picture:

 

 

On the trail in we encountered a new member and his son hiking out:

 

I am not sure if he has a BCUSA handle so I won't use his real name. He and his son had spent the night. As I said, the hike in is 4.4 miles [8.8 round trip] and this young bushcrafter managed his own pack. I was very impressed with him and it is so good to see a Dad raising his boy up right in the woods tradition. I admire them both very much.

We encountered a horsewoman on the trail and she told us she'd seen a young man with a kayak encamped at the campground and we were pretty sure it was one of our newer members [again I do not know if he's on the forum either]. When we arrived at camp we found him there as we'd suspected:

 

Now I really admire this young man too, because he paddled 90 minutes from the marina with his pack load in an inflatable kayak to reach the campground and was scraping bottom the last several yards. Even had to walk through mud to reach shore, but he did it! He set up a nice campsite for the night:

The Khus campground was really nice. Grills, a very clean solar latrine, and a nice fire circle with benches. The only downside to this campground is it is heavily used by riders and there are corrals and hitching rails and thus it is somewhat smelly from horse droppings:

 

We are thinking of having a gathering their in Spring 2014 and we'll post that up on the BUSHCRAFTUSA.COM forum if anyone is interested in coming out.

Hopefully we'll get some rain this winter and the lake level will come back up and then we could maybe have some fishing too.

Kind regards,

Goblin Ranger






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