Hacking Tower Ridge Road

Date:  10 July 2010
Who hiked:  Me, Hubby, Thing2
Where:  Middle Ranch - Hacking Tower Ridge Road - Camp Cactus Road
When: 0950-1225
Distance:  4.2 miles (measured on GPS)
Weather:  sunny and clear (!)

No photos for this posting -- we forgot the camera!

We camped at Little Harbor again in our trusty tent camper, this time without Thing1 who is away at summer camp.  It has been a gloomy June and July thus far and today started out no differently.  We woke up on Saturday morning to the scoldings of a Northern shrike outside our door, ate pancakes, then piled in the truck for the trip to Middle Ranch.

We parked by the stables at Middle Ranch, saw some good birds here (black phoebe, northern raven, California quail, mourning dove, house finch, barn swallows), then walked up the road that leads to Thompson Reservoir.  We followed the path around the Reservoir, where we saw a pair of ruddy ducks and two pairs of coots.  One pair of coots also had a chick, ugly and orange-headed.  If you have never seen a coot chick, you have to click on this link.  They are remarkably unattractive.  We also saw barn swallows, acorn woodpeckers, northern ravens, European starlings, and northern mockingbirds here.

We had one pair of binoculars between the three of us and Thing2 finally figured out how to use them properly.  He was so excited about them that he carried them for extended periods of time, stopping to use them whenever he could.  We had to chuckle as he said, "Wow, that cactus looks so close!" and tried to touch it with his fingers while looking through the field glasses.

We walked about 1/3 of the way around the Reservoir to where the trail heads uphill and hit the intersection of the Bulrush Canyon Trail at about 1040.  At this point, the road that we were on was called Hacking Tower Ridge Road.  We were not making good time as we had taken a lot of time to watch coots and to investigate the spillway at the Reservoir, which looks like it might be really exciting on a skateboard or scooter.  Exciting and terrifying...  Anyway, we were really moseying along, not hiking very quickly.

About five minutes past the Bulrush Canyon Trail, we reached the crest of the hill, where we had a lovely view of the windward side of the island.  Here the trail follows the crest.  Although it was sunny where we were, it was still gray and overcast back in Little Harbor!  A red-tailed hawk was riding the thermals over the canyon and an American kestrel was hunting on an adjacent ridge.

Thing2 was entranced by the kestrel hovering and swooping down on its prey, which he watched through the binoculars.

There was a fenced area with enclosures in it on our right as we walked along the ridge and we followed an access road down to it.  There were electric wires along the top of the fence and we thought we heard electricity running through them.  This was odd as there wasn't anything inside the enclosure that needed protecting -- all the pens were empty.  Thing2 really wanted to touch the electric fence and kept asking us what it would feel like if he did.  We told him that it would hurt -- I know this from first-hand experience, having touched electric fences back when I was a curious child.  He finally screwed up his courage and touched it, only to discover that it wasn't electrified.  I think he was disappointed.  The noise that we had heard was humming flags and lines flying in the breeze.

The pens inside the fence had been used to captively breed and foster Catalina Island foxes.  The recovery plan was a rousing success and so there aren't any foxes there now, though the structures still remain.  Today they were being used by a couple of spotted towhees...

Our trail intersected Camp Cactus Road, which we took to the right to head down the ridge to Middle Ranch Road.  It wasn't long before we were back on Middle Ranch Road and walking back toward our truck.  We stopped briefly at Quail Valley, where the Catalina Conservancy has a Catalina Island fox, Tachi, in a naturalized enclosure.  We looked for Tachi -- who made only a brief appearance -- and then ate some goldfish and drank some water.  Soon we convinced Thing2 to hit the road again, and we were back at our truck 15 minutes later.

We saw two hacking stations on this hike.  These hacking stations were used in a bald eagle restoration program completed by the Institute for Wildlife Studies on Catalina.  A hacking station is used to introduce young raptors to new habitats and then to provide them with supplemental food without exposing them to humans.  This supplemental food increases their chances of survival, especially when they are young and inexperienced in hunting.  One hacking station was at the Reservoir and the remains of a second was on the Hacking Tower Ridge Road itself.

Birds seen:  Black phoebe, Northern raven, California quail, Mourning dove, House finch, Barn swallow, Acorn woodpecker, Northern mockingbird, American coot, Ruddy duck, European starling, Orange-crowned warbler, Chipping sparrow, Red-tailed hawk, American kestrel, Pacific slope flycatcher, Spotted towhee, Allen's hummingbird