Nicholas Flat Trail

Leo Carrillo State Beach has always been a popular surfing spot. Surfers tackle the well-shaped south swell, while battling the submerged rocks and kelp beds. In recent years, the state added a large chunk of Santa Monica Mountains parkland, prompting a name change to Leo Carrillo State Park.

The park's Nicholas Flat area is one of the best spots in the Santa Monica Mountains for spring wildflowers because it's a meeting place for four different plant communities. Chaparral, grassland, coastal scrub and oak woodland all converge near the flat. Another reason for the remarkable plant diversity is Leo Carrillo's elevation, which varies from sea level to nearly 2,000 feet.

Along park trails, look for shooting star, hedge nettle, sugar bush, hollyleaf redberry, purple sage, chamise, blue dick, deer weed, burr clover, bush lupine, golden yarrow, fuschia-flowered gooseberry, and many more flowering plants. Around Nicholas Pond, keep an eye out for wishbone bush, encelia, chia, Parry's phacelia, ground-pink, California poppy, scarlet bugler and goldfields.

Mishe Mokwa Trail

Sandstone Peak, highest peak in the Santa Monica Mountains, is one of the highlights of a visit to Circle X Ranch, 1,655 acres of National Park Service land on the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. The park boasts more than 15 miles of trail plus a much-needed public campground.

Half a century ago the land belonged to a number of gentlemen ranchers, including movie actor Donald Crisp, who starred in How Green was My Valley. Members of the Exchange Club purchased the nucleus of the park in 1949 for $25,000 and gave it to the Boy Scouts. The emblem for the Exchange Club was a circled X--hence the name of the ranch.

Abalone Cove Trail

Abalone Cove offers the hiker a fine sampling of the pleasures of the PV shoreline: tidepools, sandy beaches and dramatic 180-foot high bluffs laced with trails. The excellent vistas from the top of the bluffs include Sacred (Smugglers) Cove and Inspiration Point, Catalina Island and the wide blue Pacific, and inland to the Portuguese Bend landslide zone.

Mile-long Abalone Cove Shoreline Park boasts two beaches—East Beach, a sandy beach at the east end of the cove and Upper Beach, an artificially raised rocky and sandy beach created in the 1930s for a resort hotel, whose former clubhouse now serves as a lifeguard facility. An ecological reserve protects the rich tidepools and offshore kelp beds.