Hiking to Wind Caves at Gaviota State Park {Santa Barbara Area}

Happy almost weekend!

What’s the weather looking like where you live this weekend? I know that some of the U.S. is seemingly getting out of its polar vortex for the season, so I hope that all you who have been cooped up inside for awhile have time to enjoy some more mild temperatures. In San Diego it’s supposed to be pretty hot and sunny – in the mid to high 80s all weekend – so I’m going to try to soak up the sunshine outside as much as I can! Speaking of being outdoors, today I’m talking about my favorite outdoor workout: hiking – more specifically, hiking to wind caves in California’s Gaviota State Park.

This outdoor workout was part of my getaway with my hubby a couple of weeks ago. First I told you guys all about the Danish town of Solvang that we stayed in, as well as our wine tasting experience in the Santa Ynez Valley (post here), so today is my last recap from our getaway. We hiked at a park near Santa Barbara on our way back home to San Diego on Sunday afternoon.

As any of you regular blog readers probably know, I hike a lot. Out of all the hiking areas I’ve journeyed to, I think that I get lost or simply can’t find the hiking trails at first at 90% of the new hiking spots I visit…. and Gaviota State Park was no different. It’s usually not even because my sense of direction is lacking, it’s more so because parks don’t often note precise addresses, and when they do have them listed online, they tend to lead you to a dead-end road with no hiking trail or parking lot in sight.

This is exactly what happened at Gaviota State Park. I had mapped out a precise route I wanted to take. I had read about natural hot springs and the park’s peak which took you around a 6-mile trail loop, and I had a nice little plan figured out. But, then my GPS took us to a locked gate, and we wound up wandering around and finding the park’s camping sites and a parking lot on the beach in a totally different area.

(…awesome, now I know exactly how to get there. Thanks for having such a helpful website! Not.)

This type of thing always winds up being kind of aggravating, but I suppose I blame it on a lack of funds for state parks leaving not much personnel to manage decent websites with any sort of information that’s helpful. I wish that wasn’t the case, but there’s not much I can do about it besides get lost and figure out a plan B, right?

After chatting with a park employee, we decided to instead do the hike he suggested, which led hikers up to wind caves. Since I’m a nature junky that likes anything interesting out in the environment, wind caves sounded like a fun idea to me!

The Gaviota State Park wind caves are a sandstone formation found close to the Pacific Ocean, and can be seen if you’re driving past on Highway 101. At first the trail was paved and was more of a walk, but then we got to a part of the hike that had me working up a sweat with a nice steady incline.

After we made it to the peak, the trail led us back downhill, and then got a little funky. All of a sudden we were on this narrow path scratching our legs on tree branches and fields of yellow flowers – though itchy, it was obviously an optimal background for a bit of posing:

After that the trail wasn’t all that clear, but we wound around and started rock climbing our way up to the sandstone caves. It was a little adventure getting up there – a bit of an adrenaline rush finding my footing as we were climbing, but a fun workout!

Once we got up there, we spent some time exploring around the wind-carved caves. It was fun crawling into different crevices of the caves – or in my hubby’s case, climbing on top of them too!

Since I was participating in a yoga challenge on my Instagram, I struck a tree pose in one of the caves. It was the best pose I could manage in a sloped wind cave!

And I even managed to set my camera in a cove of one of the caves, and got a decent shot of the two of us:

What was neat about this hike was that getting to the caves didn’t take long – even though I’m pretty sure that we took the long route. Our hike in total was just a couple of hours roundtrip, and it was nice to get some time outside and a good workout in before sitting in the car for 4 hours driving home. I was a bit bummed a few days before our trip when I looked at the weather forecast because rain was predicted for our scheduled hiking day, but it wound up being perfect hiking weather, which was a great surprise!

Tell me… What was the coolest thing you’ve witnessed in nature? Do you ever get lost while visiting new hiking spots?

I would have to say journeying around in the world’s largest ice cave in Austria was the coolest natural treasure that I’ve seen!