This is Santa Rosa Island, one of the islands in channel islands national park
off the coast of Ventura, California. The park is made up of five islands that all
offer camping with santa cruz and santa rosa being the
biggest and the only two that offer backcountry
camping as well. We got to the islands by boat with a
company called Island Packers. This is definitely what I'd recommend
doing because flights to these islands are not cheap. They'll set you back
over a thousand dollars whereas the boat ticket's only about 80 bucks.
The campsite is called Water Canyon campground and it's only about a mile
walk from where the boat drops you off. If you wanted to test out your
backpacking gear before going on a more serious expedition
this would be the place to do it because the hike in is really easy.
The campsites offer a picnic table and a wind shelter since the wind can get very
extreme here, especially at night. There are two bathrooms at the
campground with running water and flushing toilets,
but no showers. The campground also has water spigots
with water for drinking and cooking which is done on propane stoves
since there are no campfires here. The main attraction to the channel islands
are the scenic peaceful beaches but some other activities you can do while you're
here are surfing, kayaking, diving,
backcountry camping, hiking and watching wildlife. For this section of
the video I'm going to put in some of the scenic shots I got while hiking.
Something else that draws ocean kayakers to the channel islands are the beautiful
sea caves. One of these caves was even large enough
that the island packers boat fit inside it.
These caves surround the island and most of them are big enough to be explored by
kayak.
The next thing we'll talk about is the wildlife on the channel islands the most
famous of which is the island fox. These little guys are native to the
channel islands and can't be found anywhere else.
They used to be endangered in the early 2000s due to diseases from the mainland
and predation by eagles but now their populations have come back
as a result of vaccinations and tracking programs.
Now they're all over the islands and they're most active at dawn and dusk if
you want to go look for one.
Most of the other wildlife we saw on this trip was in the ocean.
This right here is a mako shark we saw on our boat ride to the island.
We also saw a whale and a pack of dolphins on our boat ride.
That's going to wrap up this video, if you want more information about what you
can do here and how to get here i'm going to link to the island packers
website and national parks website in the description below.
Other than that I would encourage you to please subscribe if you found this video
useful and I'll see you in a later video.