Santa Margarita River Solo Hike 12/2/10

I,ve been eyeballing the beginnings of this river gorge from the freeway for many years and I have wanted to explore it. Seeing this cut in the earth from afar just intrigued my interest too much too leave it alone any longer. There are no trail descriptions on the web or in any books that I could find. Finding my way to the beginning of the gorge was not too hard. I found a decent creek crossing on a tributary creek that flows into the river. Then I found a small dirt road that leads to the river. There was much evidence of human trampling at the first couple of swimming holes, some grafiti and trash, but the further down the river I traveled, the cleaner and more pristine it got. This is a really beautiful river gorge and the river drops into many huge pools and cascades over some really neat granite formations. The slopes and walls on both sides of the river rise up i'm guessing 2 to 3 hundred feet on either side. I found a nice spot on a granite formation in the middle of the river and rested and meditated and ate a nice snack and drank water and just enjoyed the river as it cascaded by. Nice day.