Shipwrecked

Living near the beach in Los Angeles means decent trail hikes are tough to come by. Malibu has a lot of trails but it is about an hour drive away. Close to home is Rancho Palos Verdes which has a few designated trails, mostly short and crowded. There's a long trail with variations at the top of the headland that wraps all the way down to the beach, it gets packed on the weekends though. I wanted to try a new one which had reviews online saying it was narrow, steep and overgrown with vegetation. That sounds perfect. My friend Dante was passing through and we set off to hike Saturday morning and did the Lunada Canyon trail then walked to a second trail, going to the Shipwreck down on the beach.

A view from the top of Lunada canyon shows how foggy it was below,  the remains of the shipwreck.  

Dante took a picture of me taking a picture 

To me, this looks like it would be on a treacherous coastline, but in fact there's several multimillion dollar homes just above where I was standing. 

The first hike was about 75 degrees and sunny through tall bushes and grass, a few steep parts were a good workout. Then we went down to the shipwreck trail and were surrounded in refreshing fog. From our vantage point on the canyon trail we could see it wasn't just a fog bank, it was thick clouds that had to chance to burn off. In fact the weather at the coast all weekend was 20 degrees colder than a mile inland, overcast and foggy. It was actually welcomed by me because I just wanted to get some chores done without being tempted to enjoy a summer-like day.

So the shipwreck was pretty cool to see. A 400ft ship ran aground in the 60s and they spent a couple days trying to rescue it off the rocks but failed. Then there was an auction for all kinds of elements of the ship that was being bashed and demolished on the beach. Now all that remains are long scraps of metal, mostly graffitied, and what looks to be the bow and some shell of the hull as well as this tractor/tank/crane machinery. Whenever I sail past PV point I would look for the wreckage on shore but this was my first time seeing it on land and up close. There isn't a trail going to the wreck, people have to hop along rocks which form a beach until they get here.

Other than that I installed some solar powered lights in the shell of the truck to help when finding something at night or when we go camping and need light back there. The solar rope-light was about $30 and designed for peoples gardens and backyards so it's waterproof. I just used zip ties to fasten the rope to the punched-angle metal on the ceiling.

Camper shell lights