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Scorpion beach santa cruz island11/9/2023 ![]() Island Packers has a bunch of regulations for how much cargo you can bring onboard, but as backpackers, you probably won’t be travelling with a lot anyways. Boat reservations are a bit less difficult to get compared to campsite reservation. This is why you have to make camping reservation before you go – no spur of the moment stuff here. If you’re staying overnight, the Island Packers reservation system will ask you for the confirmation number of your campsite reservation. Tickets are $79 per person and kayaks are an additional $15. The only commercial boat company that goes to the Channel Islands is called Island Packers. Most people take a boat, but if you happen to be super rich, you can take the scenic route in a helicopter. The next step in this logistics saga is to arrange your transportation to the island. For reference, I made the campground reservation a little more than 5 months in advance and from what I remember, we got one of the last spots. Reservations can be made up to 6 months in advance. If you can reserve a hotel room, you can follow the reservation process on this website – pick your dates and the number of people, pick your campground, and cross your fingers that there’s availability on your selected dates. If you don’t plan on doing ocean activities, the Del Notre campground looks like a great place to spend a couple days.īoth campsites on Santa Cruz fill up very quickly, so the best way to get a spot is to make a reservation super early at. Since kayaking was non-negotiable, we settled on the Scorpion Ranch Campground, which has a nearby cove that is perfect for launching our kayak. Ordinarily we would choose the Del Notre backcountry site for its remoteness (the hike in is 7 miles), but it turns out that it’s really hard to launch a kayak from that area. Most islands only have one campsite to choose from, but Santa Cruz has two – there’s the Scorpion Ranch Campground (31 sites) and the Del Notre backcountry campground (4 sites). Once you decide which island to go to, you have to choose and reserve your campsite. ![]() ![]() For more information on the other islands, visit this page on the park’s website. One drawback of Santa Cruz Island is that half of it belongs to the Nature Conservancy which doesn’t allow recreation within its borders or coastal areas however, the island is so big that we didn’t have any problems avoiding their land. It’s also the biggest island of the five, so we knew we wouldn’t run out of hiking trails. We picked Santa Cruz because it’s the easiest island to get to, has calm ocean conditions for sea kayaking, and we’d have the best chances of seeing the island foxes here (have I mentioned I wanted to see the foxes yet – because I really wanted to see the foxes). There are five islands to pick from – Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, San Miguel, and Santa Rosa. The first step to planning a trip to Channel Islands is deciding which island to go to. There are a ton of moving parts to the trip, so this section’s going to be a long one – grab a cup of coffee and settle in (please). It was like being in a zoo, but without any of the glass and the cages – and any of the other famously dangerous carnivorous zoo animals. We saw A LOT of island foxes super up close, a majestic 1000+ pod of surfing dolphins, and enormous pelicans that could probably eat me in one bite. One of the best things about the islands is how easy it is to see wildlife. We chose to focus on sea kayaking, which was totally new and horrifying to me, but we also went on a long day-hike across the island and snorkeled in one of the coves (also new, also horrifying). There’s even a couple backpacking opportunities if you want to be on-brand and stick to the backpacking. We chose to go to Santa Cruz Island for the kayaking and unique island foxes, but there’s plenty to do on all the islands and they’re all beautiful. There’s a whole lot of stuff to do on these islands. ![]() That’s why I’ve made this guide almost insufferably detailed – I expect people to skip giant chunks of it, but when you want to start planning a trip here, you know where to find all the information. It also didn’t help that we wanted to go ocean kayaking independently, without a group tour, which was actually pretty hard to figure out because there wasn’t a lot of information about how to do it. Every time I would start planning a trip here, I would back out because of the price (it’s a tad high) or the time commitment (you’ll need more than two days). We knew we wanted to go to all eight National Parks in the state, but I just couldn’t get my act together for this park. Channel Islands National Park is a place that always intimidated me when we lived in California.
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