May 27, 2019 — Our route follows the Cathedral Peak Trail, passing Arlington Peak, Cathedral Peak, and La Cumbre Peak. We then did White Mountain and Mission Ridge, and followed the Tunnel Trail back. Our plans kept changing throughout the day as we added more peaks and changed our route choices.
There is no parking lot at the trailhead for this route, but there are lots of parking spaces on the side of the residential road. Austin and I headed up the Tunnel Trail, which starts off as a paved road until just after crossing Mission Creek. From here, we passed the start of the popular Seven Falls Trail and headed up the Cathedral Peak Trail, where we took a few wrong turns because of numerous social trails, so my recommendation would be that if the trail doesn't continue to ascend the ridge or gets too brushy, you're on the wrong one. Once on it, we were happily surprised to find that the trail was easy to follow and had some great, fun scrambling for its duration. Without researching, I honestly thought it was going to be just a walk up a ridge. Class 2+ was everywhere, with maybe a few very, very easy Class 3 moves here and there. The views got progressively more wonderful, looking out toward the Channel Islands and the basin beneath La Cumbre Peak. After a lot of fun and sweat, we made it to Arlington Peak's small summit block, and then continued to Cathedral Peak.
From the base of Cathedral Peak's short summit scramble, the social trail to head to La Cumbre Peak started north, avoiding cliffs. Social trails lead off to the right prematurely, so if you're doing anything harder than Class 2, you chose the wrong social trail. The trail leads steeply down to the saddle between Cathedral and La Cumbre, before heading back up steeply with some more fun scrambling to the summit of La Cumbre. We didn't know you could drive to the top, so were surprised when we saw cars. The views are really nice looking toward the Pacific Ocean.
After enjoying La Cumbre for a bit, we headed east along the ridge and joined the road for a couple of miles. Along the way, we passed the start of the Tunnel Trail, which would have cut quite some time off our day, but we wanted to get some more vertical gain in. We continued along the road to White Mountain's north slope, where a really nice social trail led to the summit. We first thought to go back to the Tunnel Trail's head that we passed earlier (visible as the Google Map dotted line on attached map), but instead decided to try finding the social trail leading south from White Mountain. Someone had mentioned its existence earlier in the day, and it was early enough to give it a go. The social trail was hard to follow in spots for sure, but it exists. We had to turn around a few times, but in general I recommend sticking as close to the ridge crest as possible. There was one particularly cryptic section about halfway down where the trail just seemed to end completely, but instead passes under a boulder and continues seamlessly along the ridge. I altered my attached map to be as claer as I could be. Eventually, the social trail joins with the Tunnel Trail, and we took a quick detour up to Mission Ridge before following the trail back to complete the loop.
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