06-04-2011 Tar Creek

I got an email from a guy in Australia who was going to be in Southern California and wanted to know if he could tag along on a hike. Sure, I didn't have anything planned, so I told him if he wanted to hike Tar Creek I'd be happy to go out there with him.

It was a pretty standard Tar Creek hike. We didn't see anybody as we made our way to the bottom falls. The water temp was 61F on my thermometer, but it felt like low 50's when I jumped in. We didn't see any condors down there.

As we got ready to head back I saw a group people coming down with their two dogs. Pretty lame I thought. If you have a dog you take out on the trails a lot that's one thing. But Tar Creek is no place for a dog that's not used to more then playing in the back yard. At the 70ft falls we saw more people coming down. One guy was barefoot hiking and it made me chuckle.

Does anybody think that adding some chain to the anchors at the condors perch might keep people from leaving their webbing behind? I'm interested in hearing anyone's thought's on this.

Back at the Cascades there were a lot of people swimming and jumping in the water. I saw a few more house dogs that I could tell were going to have a tough time getting out. Then a class A jackass showed up with three dogs. For some reason (I think he was really stupid) he threw a stick off the to the left of the waterslide. I yelled, "What the fuck are you doing?" I thought the drop was too high for a dog to jump comfortably. One of his dogs (it looked like a year old lab pup) went chasing after the stick of course. The rock slopes upward then has a high angle slab about 6ft long before a free fall of about 10 or 12ft into the water. So when the dog got to the edge of the rock and saw how high above the water it was it tried to turn around and scramble back up the rock. But the face was to steep, so the little guy just ended up tearing his paws against the rock. After laughing for a second or two the jackass reached down to pull his dog up by the collar, but that slipped off and fell into the pool below. So he had to grab the dog by the scruff of its neck and pull it up. I was a bit disgusted by the episode. We left and hiked back towards the trailhead. We found empty beer bottles on the trail that hadn't been there when we came down.

It was nice hiking with Australia. He was a nice soft spoken guy. Like all Aussies he felt compelled to talk smack about New Zealand when I mentioned my family lives there. I'd be annoyed if it weren't so predictable.