During a work trip in April 2006 to Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station, California, I headed down the 101 and explored one of the canyon roads (Kanan-Dume Road) between the 101 and the Pacific Coast Highway. That ended up being a neat way to cross the Santa Monica Mountains, although I'll admit that as expected I was a little white-knuckled in spots because of the nice, expansive views and very windy conditions. By the way, just east of this canyon road lies Malibu Creek State Park, where much of the M∗A∗S∗H TV series was filmed. I didn't get a chance to explore the park, but apparently some parts of the set remain on the premises. Looking at the surrounding mountains, I could definitely see the resemblance to scenery from the show.

The canyon road ended on the coast at Malibu, and from there I explored the Pacific Coast Highway heading back north, stopping at some beaches and overlooks along the way. In particular, I was trying to scope out a good spot for some sunset photos, which was a little tough considering that the coast travels almost east-west along that stretch. Still, I found a pretty good spot at Point Mugu itself, which presented a nice backdrop to a pretty decent, albeit somewhat overly cloudy, sunset. I will state now that I froze my ass off taking dozens of pictures, as it was extremely windy, dropping a good ten degrees while I waited there patiently... ;-p

I returned to Point Mugu, CA in May 2006 for some more aircraft work. This time around I had some more time to explore the area. My workmate and I explored the Pacific Coast Highway from as far north as Santa Barbara all the way down to LAX Airport.

We explored two other Canyon roads between The 101 and the PCH and also drove out to Chino, CA to visit The Planes Of Fame Museum (see the separate gallery under Aviation Photography).

I posted these pictures to my flickr account as well, where there's a neat feature that allows you to see all of these pictures in a map view to get an idea of where they were taken.