Baden-Powell to Isoceles 2006

This hike came to fruition because a friend of mine, Jesper, guides people all over California on monthly hike excursions throughout the year.  So this 12th day of September was blocked off in my iphone calendar as a dot, which ruins your entire weekend, as you really can’t drink or party too much the night before and you are too tired to party the night after.  Well sort of…  

Due to circumstances, Jesper had to cancel this hike.  Damn, should have bought those B52’s and Psychedelic Furs tickets to the Hollywood Bowl, hindsight is blah blah.  But Jesper said to go anyway, he gave us a couple of ideas and I decided this was the hike we will attempt.

Attempt.  Yeah, only 4 miles up and 4 miles down, but a 2,660 elevation change, according to the PCT.org.  I found a more impressive elevation change of 2,806. but I will err on the low side, so I am not cheating anyone.  Sounded like a doozy to me, but low and behold I got two of my friends, Shana and Susan, to join me.

Okay, so sunrise is not one of my vocabulary words, but it became one today as I left the house at 6:30 am to pick up my friends for our 1 1/2 hour drive to Vincent Gap in the San Gabriel Mountains. We arrived around 8:15 am to fairly light clouds and a great temperature of about 75.  Considering that LA/Orange County is having a brutal heat wave, the temperature was the first plus of our day.  Shana scratched off the dates for the Adventure Pass, that I bought at REI on Thursday along with my new Keen hiking shoes and guaranteed no blister socks, hung it in the window and we were off.

Stopping at the fairly clean facilities that our $5 pass helps pay for and passing the PCT Hiker box, we headed up the trail at about 8:45 am.  At about switchback 4 (out of 39 or 41 conflicting info on the www, and I wasn’t going to count), Susan and I were on the same page, whose idea was this?  Shana on the other hand was at about switchback 6, and decided to head back down to find us, she continued this pattern for a while. 

Gazelle became her nickname, free dictionary definition: Any of various small, swift antelopes…characteristically having a slender neck and ringed horns.  I think the Urban Dictionary  has a better definition, (the gazelle XXX – click at your own peril).  By the way, if she did have horns, they would be ringing, when I was done with her.  Continuing on to switchback 154 out of 5354, we passed the bench that was built at about .9 miles up the trail. 

 

 

The bench switchback presented us with a lovely view of the road we arrived on and the parking lot, AND of how far up we have hiked. Impressive for the moment.

 

 

 

 Continuing UP, we arrived at the junction of Lamel Springs, which in my studies of the hike, was about .3 miles off of the trail.  Perfect!  I told Shana to go check it out and Susan and I would continue our ascent up this second highest mountain in San Gabriel. Now the cautious me started screaming in my head, don’t let her go off by herself!  But she has her big girl panties on and I knew she couldn’t get far and we would find her, eventually. 

Plus somewhere on this trail was a pack of boy scouts that could help if we needed it.  So as predicted, Gazelle caught back up to us in about 15 minutes, minus a trail sandal, half of a trekking pole and some skin missing.  Seriously WTF?  Apparently, at about .2 miles into the excursion, the slope became rocky and slippery and she wanted her trekking poles.  So while removing the poles from her pack, one of her sandal shoes flung down the mountainside, picture the movie Wild, she lost her footing and slid about 50 yards down the mountain on her backside.  Damn, I wish I had pictures!  So after she caught back up to us, we decided to stop for a munch break and whipped out the first aid kit!  

The good part out of all this, is we determined the first aid kit needed a better supply of bandaids. Unfortunately, Shana’s favorite shorts now show a little too much ass.

 

 

 

 

 

According to my walkmeter, we had about 1.7 miles left to go. My whining diminished when the views at the switchbacks came in sight.  Gorgeous!!  Breathtaking!!  Okay we can do this! 

The trail switched from a dirt trail to a rocky trail and became harder to step up.  So we elected to use the trekking poles.  Hello?  These poles rock!  No pun intended!  Somewhere after this revelation, Susan got her mountain butt in gear and left Shana and me in the dust.  Actually I think Shana was being nice hanging back, because I was lagging and back to whining.  I blame the air, it is definitely not because I don’t work out.  Nope that can’t be it…one foot in front of the other…. Are we there yet?  People passing us going down kept saying, you are almost there.  Shut up, I am dying here!

So we get to the top, well not really the top, the fake top is what I call it.  It is like someone giving you a muffin, but they ate the muffin top off first, so you have the top of the muffin, just not the top you wanted.  So we got to the fake top where the views rocked! 

After a couple of pictures, we passed the Waldon Tree (more on that later), walking along the steep-off-of-both-sides fake top to get to the final ascent of about 15,342 more switchbacks, sucking the no air up here, we finally arrived to the real top at 9,245 feet (again according to PCT.org).  Wikipedia gives us a credit of 9,407 feet.  This is where we found Susan waiting for us.  Sigh, at this point my two friends became my trail bitches. TB for short.  A girl that passed us running up, yes I said running up, the trail, offered to take our obligatory  photo with the beautiful American flag.  WE MADE IT!!

 After about 45 minutes at the top, enjoying our lunch, the 360 degree views, the cool weather (remember it is Africa hot at home at sea level), we see some storm clouds forming and decided to make our way down.  In a way it was disappointing to have to leave, it is an incredible feeling being up above all the chaos in LA.  Peaceful!  So we took a couple more pictures, note the dramatic setting on my Olympus Tough 4G camera made the clouds seem more threatening than they were.  On the way down, we took pictures of the “Wally” the Waldron Tree a 1500+ year old Limber Pine tree.  It marks almost the spot where the PCT junctions off of the Baden-Powell trail to continue North.

So we started the 4 mile trek down, clouds brought a nice cool to the trail and a lot of the people that hiked up earlier were gone. So it was a bit deserted when we descended.  Now, I hate down!  I didn’t used to, and my lungs don’t.  But when I got to mile 7.5 of 9 miles down on the South Kaibab trail in the Grand Canyon, I learned to hate down.  I learned to hate trail protecting stairs built by the lovelies that maintain all our wonderful hikes, hats off to you folks.  It hurts my calf muscles in places I didn’t know existed.   So I was worried about the steep descent, but thankfully there were no trail saving stairs.  But I took it in stride and left my trail bitches behind in my dust, well I did wait at a switchback every once in a while for them, because I sure as heck didn’t want to get to the bottom and wonder what happened to them.  That would require me hiking back up to find out. So all was going well, until, well  we came upon this:

It wasn’t there when we hiked up and I didn’t hear it fall.  I made Shana go over it first.  I figured she was already hurt, so if the tree started sliding when she went over it, we would still only come away with one injured person for the day.  What a trouper!!  Over she went, then she guided myself and Susan over carefully making sure we avoided the twig that poked her in her butt  Her ass is going to sore tonight. 

 

 

After we safely tackled that obstacle, it began to sprinkle lightly.  Felt great!  Made it to the parking lot by 3 pm, and the rain started.  Perfect timing!  After putting on comfy shoes and drinking a frosty lemonade, which I had waiting in the car, we headed home.  Waze put us at Susan’s house at 4:50 pm and home by 5:10 pm.  Time for shower and then the reward we were hiking for:

Stats:

Combined total of 71,029 steps, 1,518 flights of stairs, 2.25 liters of water for me, 0 blisters, 1 injured, 3 bottles of wine – one hell of a great day!