Santa Catalina Island, along  with the other channel islands, is located approximately twenty miles off the coast from Los Angeles. There are two basic ways to get there: take a boat or fly. The most popular way (and the method we used) is to take one of the two commercial boats.   Catalina Express costs about $35 round trip and will get you there in about an hour. Catalina Cruises is slower, taking about two hours to make the trip, but costs less ($25). If you're lucky enough to have your own plane or helicopter, you can fly to Airport-in-the-Sky.   Most of the hotels and both boat lines offer several packages to fit a variety of needs and budgets. Take one or more of the tours if you've never been to Catalina before. It really is the best way to see the island. Hotels range from very expensive to modest.   My advice is to stay in the cheapest place you can. All of them are nice, and given the fact that the city of Avalon (which is the only city on the island) is only 1 square mile or so, just about all of them are near the boardwalk. Why pay $100 or more for a room that you're only going to spend a few hours sleeping in?

The best way to see Catalina is to hike it. I've been to the island twice before - both times with the CSULA geology department to the Boy Scout camp at Sandy Beach in Emerald bay which is located on the northwest end of the island and therefore nowhere near Avalon. Still, I had a great time.   One evening my buddy Paul and I got this great idea to hike up to the top of this peak just above our camp. It didn't look too bad from our view point. We headed up the closest ridge and headed up and over to the peak, carefully avoiding the wildflower and admiring the geology. It turned out our "little" hike took us to the top of Silver Peak (elev. 1804') and the route we took was a 1800 foot elevation gain over about a mile. This is what you get when you decided to do something for the hell of it! The view, however, was fantastic. Definitely  worth the pain and suffering!

On this trip I finally got to see Avalon. Didn't do any hiking, which was supposed to be the whole goal of this trip, but I finally got to Avalon.   Robert and I arrived on the island too late Friday night to really do anything more than eat dinner and sleep. Saturday morning arrived to find us raring to go. Part of our package deal included the Undersea Tour. If you've ever been on the submarine ride at Disneyland you have a pretty good idea of what this tour is like.   The big difference is that everything you see on this ride is real.   If you are like me and can't scuba dive (Hiking accident in the northern Sierras where I fractured my cheekbone. Not fun.), this is an excellent way to see one of Catalina's greatest assets - her marine life. The scuba diving and snorkeling are exceptional off of the entire island due to this fact. We then headed for a tour bus for a Skyline Drive Tour, which takes you along the coast up to the Airport-in-the-Sky.

I should probably mention here that approximately 86% of the island is owned by the Catalina Conservancy, a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation and preservation of the island. This is the reason why the island has only one city (Avalon), two (three, depending on your point of view) main road that link the east end of the island to the west, and is a wonderful example of what Southern California looked like before we Europeans came and messed everything up. Catalina is best described as a mountain plunked into the ocean. There are very few places on the island that can even remotely be considered flat - one of which is Avalon, the other is the southwest side of the island. The remainder of the island is rugged peaks and valleys with few trails.

But I digress. If you want to see Catalina without a moderate to strenuous hike, take one of the inland tours. Most people who hike or camp on the island will often take one of the Safari buses or jeeps up to Blackjack Camp and then head out from there. We took the shorter of the two tours. On it we were treated to a corny but informative narrative of the sites by our tour guide, Jenny, who was an absolute stitch.   Bison were brought to the island (supposedly) for the filming of Zane Grey's The Vanishing American by movie maker William Farnum back in 1924. The studio had every intention of returning the large animals back to the Midwest, but the bison had other ideas and hid from their pursuers. Eventually the humans gave up and the buffalo have been there ever since. The bison, however, never made it onto the final cut of the film. Today the conservancy practices rotating some of the animals out to other ranches to reduce inbreeding.

Upon our return to Avalon we decided to hike up to the Wrigley Memorial and Botanical Gardens via Avalon Canyon Road. This really wasn't a hike since we never left the paved road. It was a nice stretch for the legs, though, especially since it's a slow but noticeable grade up to the Gardens.   We didn't quite time our day right because we got there two minutes after closing time. We ended our trip with a sunset dinner overlooking the coast. Which we soon regretted as our trip back to L. A. was not as smooth as the first trip!

Plans have been made to go back for a real hiking trip on the island before the summer is over. And this time I WILL go hiking!