Surprise Hike at Cleveland National Forest May 01 2014

Yesterday the sky in L.A. was filled with smoke.  Everyday this week has been dry, high winds and reached 97F!  It's a magnet for fire.  Surely there was 3 fires in and around LA.  We decided to do a staycation for some fresh air.  This was a completely spontaneous, unplanned trip we made.  Just packed our backpacks with loads of water and power bars and headed 2.5 hours south.  

The mountains you see in the photo was in East San Diego County.  I was surprised to see so much green in this hot weather.  Usually in So Cal, greenery only last until early spring.  The mountains were so beautiful, much like a landscape painting showing great depth.  We hiked and sometimes had to climb over large rocks to get to where we wanted.  It was about a total of 4-6 miles we hiked.  

The goal of this trip was to find the waterfall, but Cleveland National Forest did not provide much signs at all.  We ended up going off trail and climbed some rocks then it led us to the cliff with no waterfall.  That's ok, we figured we'll just take out our lunch and enjoy the view.  

On our way back we finally saw the waterfall we were looking for; thus, decided to go see it.  We jogged as fast as we could, trying to beat the sunset getting to the waterfall.  Finally, we made it close enough to see it and stopped there to enjoy for a bit.  It was about 7:30 pm now, and it gets dark quicker in the mountains so we headed back to the car.  

By 11 pm we made it home.  This all happened like a dream to me.  In the morning I was home responding to emails then by 5 pm we were sitting on a cliff overlooking the mountain range having lunch.  Just a few hours after that we were home with Lotus (my dog).