Hitting the wall

[GoalHiking]

20260606_151541_small.jpg

On Sat 6/6 I attempted to hike the Sylmar waterfall above Veteran's Memorial Park. I thought it'd be fairly easy, but it wasn't. Esp when I ran into this, which I take to be at least 5.10. I couldn't find good foot or hand holds and, given I'd gone to the gym the day before, I had an extra gallon of water in my pack (for a ruck lite), and I had something else to do I didn't want to spend a lot of time trying to get up the rope so I turned tail and ran away. I also didn't entirely trust the rope.

On the 13th I'll be in Santa Clara for Qatar v Switzerland, then the next day I'll be doing the Alameda County highpoint if anyone's interested.

Pray for Shaqiri to change his mind at the last moment.

[Nate U]

I've done routes right near it but didn't know about this waterfall! But yeah it's on Alltrails I see. Sounds like the trail is pretty rough and informal. Just when you think you've done everything around the SFV, you are reminded there's always another canyon...

[dima]

Can you climb the tree? Or the rope?

[Sean]

Yeah, that's a wall alright. Thanks for the report. I'll make sure to avoid that place.

[David R]

There are so many rescues up this canyon, it may be our new Eaton Canyon.

[Nate U]

This is when Alltrails can really backfire from a safety perspective - anonymously-posted trails that aren't actually trails in high-traffic areas luring the naive and unprepared into things like sketchy waterfall climbs up informally-attached ropes, etc. I'm not sure what sort of reliable, knowledgable authorities monitor what gets posted on Alltrails? If that even happens at all?

[GoalHiking]

I did try to reverse rappel up the rope and it wasn't working out for the reasons stated. I assume if you were even more foolhardy you could try to shimmy up the branch, but down could come baby and all... I believe the AllTrails route has you coming down the wall, which might be easier even if it's a good bit more dangerous.

I saw a guy with a dog going down canyon, and I hope he did it as an out-and-back to the wall.

[RH]

This is when Alltrails can really backfire from a safety perspective - anonymously-posted trails that aren't actually trails in high-traffic areas luring the naive and unprepared into things like sketchy waterfall climbs up informally-attached ropes, etc. I'm not sure what sort of reliable, knowledgable authorities monitor what gets posted on Alltrails? If that even happens at all?

I've removed a few trails from AllTrails and often change their designation to Private or similar if I've been there and found them not to be public or no semblance of a trail. It takes several weeks for the updates to show up on AllTrails.

I try to research other maps/satellite images/apps before going to a new area but I almost go royally screwed a couple years ago in Frazier Park by following a series of trails on AllTrails. But once I reached the edge of the National forest boundary, it was all No Trespassing signs, fences, and people's yards. I was already about 9 miles into my loop and limited daylight left so didn't want to backtrack 9 miles. Instead I scanned for people, saw none, hopped a fence and moved swiftly through private property to another fence, hopped it to another private yard, then finally made it to a public dirt road to finish my loop. But on AllTrails, every one of those areas was listed as public (black dashed lines). I've fixed it on AllTrails so others will know in the future.

[dima]

Are alltrails paying you? Why are you working for them for free? OSM is the public map dataset you can contribute to, if you want to improve the public map. Alltrails displays this also, and also doesn't contribute in any way. They're leeches, and yall should just let them suck.