Caliente Mountain is a big, broad, lonely mountain/range located in the deserts and wastelands of eastern San Luis Obispo County, southern California. For a peak so close to the ocean, it is surprisingly dry and desert-like; you would never guess the ocean is just 30 air-miles to the west, or that lush, grassy hills, forests, ranches and farms are even closer. This is classic rain-shadow desert and steppe, in which the storms coming in off the ocean drop all their rain on the coastal ranges and have nothing left over once they get inland. East of the range is a big basin called the Carrizo Plain. This is a true sink, not a valley. A brackish salt-pan sits at the lowest elevation of this plain, much like one would find in Nevada. East of that is the Temblor Range and the mighty San Andreas Fault, then east of that would be the broad San Joaquin Valley. I had been to the Carrizo Plain once before, with a college pal coming back from a camp/hunt trip in the Los Padres National Forest in 1990. Man, it is vacant out this way, suprisingly so.

Caliente was part of a two-day, two-peak adventure, with Big Pine Peak in Santa Barbara County also on the agenda. Together, both peaks would entail about 48 miles of travel, but we would mitigate as much of this with mountain bikes. Both peaks have good roads close to their respective summits and there would be no reason to walk the entire lengths. It was a good opportunity to incorporate a bike into the adventure. Not wanting to do this alone, I was joined by Adam Helman from the County Highpointers club. This was our first meeting and our first climbs together.

I left Arizona not long after the Fall term had ended, making the 510-mile drive all in one day to the little oil-town of Maricopa, about 50 miles southwest of Bakersfield. I broke up the drive spending a couple hours in Cucamonga with my brother's family and their 7-month old baby, Emma, who smiled at me a few times (I think she likes me). I arrived in Maricopa well after dark and stayed at a "Motel 9", obviously a low-rent version of the 6 and 8 versions. The whole region is devoted to oil and gas. The scent of sulphur is everywhere, and it looks a lot like the Midland-Odessa region of Texas, minus the hills. Adam and I met the next morning, he parking his car at the motel and piling his bike in with mine in my truck. The plan was to do Calient today, then car-camp and do Big Pine tomorrow. Caliente was shorter: 16 miles round trip - a little "warm-up" for the 32-miler we'd have on Big Pine the next day.

From Maricopa we went west along route CA-166 to Soda Lake Road, then northwest on that for about 29 miles to the turnoff to Caliente Peak. This is the Carrizo Plain, in all its vacant gloriousness. The day had started out foggy but it had lifted once we hit the turn-off road. After some minor dead-ends, I was able to drive my truck up a steepish road to top out on the main ridge of Caliente. The road was pretty good, but in wet conditions it gets very slick, and I would want no part of that. From here it is about 8 miles to the summit, southwest along the range crest. We started in at 9 a.m., pushing our bikes along with us. A service road leads most of the way to the summit.

The road undulates along the ridge, gaining and losing elevation along the way. We biked much of the level and downhill portions and walked our bikes up the steeper parts. The first 2.5 miles of the road looks to be in good shape and appears to be maintained for some vehicular use. Eventually the road crests a small rise and we actually encountered a group of workers building some sort of tower at this bump; their work vehicles were in the area. They were surprised to see us. Beyond this rise the road continues to undulate and meander, coming to an abandoned and wrecked trailer set in a small meadow at about the half-way point. It appears the trailer housed local ranch hands, as the area had some old fencing and water troughs, but I'd say that no one has actively ranched the land in 20+ years. Adam and I made a rest-stop for a few minutes at this site.

Beyond the trailer the road continues with variable quality. It makes a drop to what looked like a heli-pad, then up a progressively rockier and sandier track to a stand of pinion, about 2 miles away from the summit. We decided to cache our bikes here and walk the rest. The road, such as it was, gained a small peak from which the true summit was finally visible. The track then dropped and regained the main ridge, leading to the summit, which we made around 12:15 in the afternoon. The summit has a decaying shack at the top, used as a lookout years ago during World War II, keeping an eye out for incoming Japanese planes coming in from the ocean. Today, it's very nearly falling over. The weather was terrific and we relaxed for almost an hour eating lunch and looking out over the valleys. To our south and west was the Cuyama River Valley, much greener, and to our east was the salty and antiseptic Carrizo Plain. Numerous mountain ranges were visible in all directions, including the faint band of white way off in the east denoting the Tehachapis and the grand Sierra Nevadas. In all, the one-way elevation gain from the truck to the summit was about 1,300 feet net, a little more gross including the ups and downs.

At about 1 p.m., we started back. We picked up our bikes and rode/hiked much of the way. Going out was easier as we had far more downhill bits than up, so we made the 8 miles out in just over 2 hours, arriving at the truck at 3 pm. We relaxed and slowly reloaded everything. We were both a bit beat but feeling pretty good. We left the area and backtracked to CA-166, then down CA-33 to our next objective, Big Pine Mountain. This would be a real monster: 32 miles of hiking and biking, so we made sure to get an early night. Adam cooked up some fabulous concoctions in camp (he is a chef by hobby), and we both slept out under the stars, picking out constellations, planets and in some cases, satellites.