the18 mile hike

This Spring Break, a few of my friends and I decided to get off our asses and do something productive. We decided to hike to the punchbowl in Santa Paula. Aly, Oj, Josh, Dan, Jt, Mistine, Lisa, Kevin, and I woke up early in the morning yesterday and left Aly's house at 9am. We got to the trail and followed the directions from online. The directions were confusing because it didn't seem like we were going the right way, but we kept on hiking up the mountain anyways. Wepassed by avocado farms and ran into horses and snakes. We ended up on a paved road high up in the mountains and ran into a truck passing by. The driver asks us where we were heading to and we were told that we were on the wrong trail the whole time. I guess we were supposed to turn left instead of right in the beginning of the trail OMFG! 3 hours of hiking and were tired and exhausted, GREAT! So we decided to go back down where we started, and along the way, we saw 2 guys that were trying to get to the same destination. They were on the wrong trail too. We decided to take a shortcut which only took us less than an hour to go back to where we came from. I wish we took that shortcut in the first place -_- Everyone was nagging and whining and complaining how their feet hurt and it was hot and we were never goin to find it, but a few were still motivated to find it. They had the right to complain because we hiked for 6miles. We saw a photographer and asked for directions. Luckily, he had been there before and we basically followed the tagging on the rocks to get to the punchbowl. It took us 3 hours to get there, adding another 6 miles that we've hiked. It was 4pm, and we finally made it to the punchbowl! YAY!! but i honestly, thought it wasn't worth 12 miles of hiking, getting lost, runnin into snakes, horses, looking out for bears, cuts, scrapes, and rolled ankles. The water was freezing cold, there was tagging everywhere, and alot of trash. The hike back only took an hour and 30 minutes because we took shortcuts along the way.

imagine how much calories we burned! O_O

Photo credits to Daniel Jordan Carrasquillo