Fun Sunday

The kids and I had a fun afternoon on Sunday. The kids wanted to go to the Apple store in Northridge. Alex needed a replacement battery for his iPod Mini, Catie wanted to by a new PS2 game (Kingdom Hearts) and Nik just wanted to play with all the new Mac stuff and dream about the day he buys his iBook laptop. Then, after all our shoping commitments were done, we got to the fun part (for me anyway) a Geocache in a really cool location.

I have been wanting to do the Stoney Point cache in Chatsworth for quite some time. It's on the northern edge of the San Fernando valley, just east of Santa Susanna Pass which leads to Simi Valley. This area is infamous as the location of the ranch owned by Charles Manson and is cult of murderers. In a twist that only shows who is really in charge of this world, the exact location of the Manson ranch is now owned by Rocky Peak Christian Church. Is the Lord awesome or what!

Anyhow, back to my story. I knew from reading the logs on the cache page I knew the cache was near the summit. I thought since I had all three of the kids along I should find the easiest trail possible to the top. So, the most worn trail must but it right? Well we hiked almost the entire parimeter of the peak and didn't find an easy trail. OK guys, looks like we need to do a bit of rock hoping and scrambling. Still trying to find the path of least resistance. Well, we ended up doing quite a bit of climbing. I was very proud of all the kids, they did a great job. Even Nik, who is pretty cautious when it comes to all things gravity hung in there and made it to the summit. After snapping a few photos I checked my GPS to see how close we were to the cache. 15o feet and all I see is Down! After a lot more scrambling I finally made it to the cache, located not more that 18 inches away from a 50 foot cliff. Not as dangerous as it sounds, but still pretty exciting.

As with most climbs I've done, coming down is always harder than going up. Nik and I share the same challenge in this regard. Cautiously we worked our way down. The scenery was really nice. Had to keep reminding myself this was in the of a heavily populated part of SoCal. Our serenity would be shattered from time to time as we would run across graffiti on the rocks or patches of broken glass from beer bottles. Yep we are in So Cal afterall! Ultimately we made it down safe and sound. Thanks guys for sharing this adventure with Dad. For more pictures of our adventure, please visit our Family Web site.