One of the best things about living in SoCal is the weather. Two days after Thanksgiving the weather was so beautiful that we decided to head to the beach. Since we were heading that way I wanted to check out Malibu Creek State Park since the climbing there looks cool and we had never been. We headed to Point Dume beach and had a great time there playing in the water and sand (it seriously felt much nicer than many days in the middle of the summer). Point Dume has some climbing right on the beach but the rock was really wet so I just bouldered around a bit but we didn't break out the gear.
After a few hours at the beach we decided to check out Malibu Creek State Park. We drove the 20 minutes from the beach to the park and then started hiking in. We reached the first climbing area called Planet of the Apes wall after a couple miles of hiking, but I didn't really want to climb there since it is toprope only. We continued hiking down the trail, but quickly reached a dead end. In order to continue to the other climbing areas requires that you traverse across a fourth class slab above a big pool of water. The traverse was packed with people and no one was moving in either direction and it didn't look like it would clear up anytime soon. On top of that, I don't think Danny would have been able to manage the traverse on his own so we were stuck.
We decided to just do a quick route on Planet of the Apes wall just so that we could check out the rock and then come back at another time without the kids to do some of the better climbs. I hiked around the top and set up a TR on a 5.10a called "Christmas Pump", Amy and I each TR'd the route, then we hiked back to the car.
Even though we only got to do one TR it was nice to be able to check out a new area that we had never been to before.