santa monica recreational... something something.

the highlight of christmas day, besides receiving some awesome jammie pants from mom and eating crepes was going on this hike with sarah. this is a hiking spot i kept saying, oh we should go there one day, i haven't been in 10+ years. which is ridiculous but true. all i remembered was that you could hike up the ravine via the stream. and that my friend and i didn't make it very far and that we got very very wet. but i think it was raining and sometime in april and we were late for theatre rehearsal. so today, by a turn of stay in the sun as long as we can or avoid it, we chose avoid it and into the cold shadows we went, treading over heaps of acorns and their thorny oak leaves, and splashes of golden california sycamore to break up the brown and green palette. we actually had to climb up rocks, narrow ledges, slippery bits were the water was running. i am notorious for accidents when i think i can leap like a gazelle. i am not a gazelle. i am not lithe or graceful. so it is not surprising that once when i thought that i stood up to a foot in muddy peatbog moss, and that another time i stood up to my chest in a siltridden river... this time i flew into a heap of leaves, luckily. and as we progressed it was a mostly fun challenge to figure out where we were going to put our feet. and then we came to the WALL and we saw a rope. sarah tugged at it. i tugged at it. figured it looked new, felt secure... sarah went up first and she made it. then i did. easy peasy. we hiked further in and saw that we'd need more time, supplies and maybe a machete to keep going. but then there was that whole turning back part. she wasn't thrilled at the prospect of going back down the drops. since as we discovered she likes facing challenges head on and going back down vertical rock walls that way proves challenging and garners quite a few butt slides. i myself approach them like ladders, one foot and grip at a time. but down we had to go as we didn't know where the trail intersected us or if it did at all. so in a matter of minutes we were back at the wall and as you know i'm not the spirit of the air but of the earth and instead of trusting the rope and repelling down properly, i went in stages, which might've worked if i had not slipped down on a tricky part and hit my right breast on a jutting rock. as usual i started laughing and shimmied the rest of the way down. it's hard to replay things when you just know if you'd trusted the rope FULLY, hopped down 2ft you would've cleared the rock and saved your breast but you didnt bcs you chose to be a pansy about it and you paid the consequences. so that everytime i put on or adjust my bra, i'm like fuck, why does my breast hurt. the whole adventure is rife with spiritual analogies. but anyway we made it out, went a bit further up on the winding path that was in the sun and then wended our merry way home. fan-tastic.