Palomar Mountain State Park

We took the weekend and went camping at Palomar Mountain State Park in San Diego county to see the fall colors and explore the hiking trails that Scott has been reading about. It was beautiful and only took 1.5 hours to get there. It had the same feel as the Sierra Nevadas. We've been doing a lot of local hikes that have been great, but we wanted to explore some big time nature. And believe me, this place exceeded my expectations.

We hiked so many trails that my legs are sore today. And I forgot my tennis shoes, so I did everything in flipflops. On the drive we even talked about how great we felt about the trip because neither of us thought we forgot anything! Scott couldn't believe how in the world I could go camping and hiking and forget my shoes. Oh well. It worked out. Yes, the hikes were difficult in my flipflops, but I was mostly placing my steps carefully so I didn't touch any poison oak, which was everywhere along the trails.





We loved hearing all the woodpeckers and then searching to see them on the trees. Our campsite was Woodpecker Lane I think. We saw a ton of them. They are really pretty with red heads and a ring of white around the neck. They would peck holes in the pine trees and put acorns inside of them so that in leaner times they would be easily retrievable for a meal (Scott read about it in his hiking book). I wish we got a shot of the huge pines with millions of holes filled with acorns...quite an amazing sight. And I don't know what kind of trees produce acorns, but everywhere acorns were dropping from the trees. We never got hit, but you could hear them dropping all around you. One did hit my car and made a big bang. We had fun gathering acorns, colorful leaves and huge pine cones that I have already used to decorate the house for fall.



The deer were unexpectedly plentiful on the mountain. We saw 11 deer during our stay - 1 buck, 2 fawns and 8 does. We tried to catch some shots, but they blend in so well they are hard to make out. If you look in the middle of this photo you can see the little white dot - a deer's behind!

We brought a small bag of match-light briquettes that turned out to be a dud - it only burned for like 5 minutes. So, we had to gather wood and had a hard time keeping our campfire going strong, but we finally got it big enough and were able to cook our tinfoil dinners and s'mores - yum!

One other little glitch we had was that our tent was on a slight slope that made it difficult to get comfortable because we kept sinking to the bottom of the tent in a heap. Not to mention the drum happy campers that sang and drummed til their hearts content and we couldn't catch much shut eye. Who knows what time it was when they stopped, but we eventually fell asleep. Ah, the joys of camping!

The night sky made up for the less than stellar sleep, the stars were so abundant and brilliant that we star gazed for a while and saw about 10 shooting stars. I think star gazing was the highlight of the trip for me - I can't believe how many stars are in the sky that we can't see here in the city. The Hale telescope is located on Palomar mountain and we went to the observatory. They only let scientists and astronomers use it at night, but the museum showed some images from the telescope that were incredible. Very similiar to the Hubble images I've seen. Very neat.



And, the view from the top of the mountain was incredible. We were 50 miles inland and could see the ocean and way in the distance we could make out the tall buildings in the San Diego skyline. We couldn't believe how far we could see at our 5500 feet elevation. It was really fantastic.