Brush Peak 2005

Los Padres NF

One weekend one of my friends called me up and invited me to tag along on a hiking trip on a trail by the Cold Spring Tavern behind Santa Barbara. I had gotten some different film and wanted to give one of my camera bodies a dry run before an upcoming trip so I figured sure, I'll bite. What lay ahead was not a trail at all. We started off from the motorcycle parking lot behind Cold Spring Tavern and just started walking up the creek. Shortly, the creek would go dry and we were left with a rock scramble funhouse. We kept going up and up. Soon we couldn't hear the band playing in the bar any longer, but that didn't stop us. We got higher then the arch bridge of the 154 towards the top of the mountain. Later on I would do some research and find that this place was named Brush Peak. Another person found that there was an indian cave nearby, but we never got to it as we had no maps or the like. There were a bunch of old roads that ran up there judging from the relatively cleared level patches. None of them seemed to connect anywhere, however, so we just went back on down the way we came. Perhaps someday I'll take the time to go look up some older maps in the library and see just what was up there many years ago.

And perhaps next time I'll bring a machete. The peak definitely earns its name.

The Photographs

These photographs were taken with my Minolta system with the SRT Super body. I needed to exercise it a bit before I use it more. I like many things about it, particularly the double exposure capability and the viewfinder apeture display, but I loathe the fact my particular body does not work with manual metering. Next time I purchase a body I'll have to be more careful, but the SRTs are creepy since the same body number had multiple iterations, not all with the same features.

This was also my first time trying out the Kodak Ektachrome 100VS film. I had wanted Kodachrome PKR, but all the stores in town were sold out. Given my kodachrome fetish, I hope it's not the beginning of a trend. The 100VS was a fun film. Almost reminiscent of Velvia, but not quite as saturated. Since most of this hike was rock scrambling, I wound up doing a lot of macro work. Click "Next" in the upper right to begin.