The ridge running east to west from Mt. Pinos to Cerro Noroeste contains the highest points in the San Emigdio mountains, within the Transverse Ranges that separate the San Joaquin Valley from Southern California. Having resolved to keep our weekly hikes in the 10-mile distance range, we looked into the classic traverse of the Mt. Pinos ridge when, hiked from east to west and back, would total 13+ miles and require significant elevation gain and loss. However, fresh from our great hike in the Pinnacles the week before, we were undeterred. So, we left the house at 6am, picking up some sandwiches for lunch and arriving at the trailhead near the top of Mt. Pinos by 7:30. There’s a dirt access road servicing the radio facilities on the summit, and it used to be open to the public (in fact, Chris had driven it in the early 90’s with our kids when they were little), but a prior visit here a couple of years ago revealed that the road is now closed. That closure adds four miles to the round-trip distance now, although the road itself is fairly moderate in its ascent, gaining about 500′ over the two miles to the summit. From there, we would follow the Vincent Tumamait trail west over Sawmill Mountain and the north shoulder of Grouse Mountain (from which we could hike south a short distance to that peak’s summit) before dropping into a low saddle and up the other side to Cerro Noroeste – after visiting each of the four summits, we would retrace our steps without the summit side trips. One additional perk would be reaching two county highpoints (Mt. Pinos in Ventura County and Sawmill Mountain in Kern County). So, we hit the trail at 7:45 and easily walked north and west up the access road, reaching the Mt. Pinos summit in about 35 minutes. We searched for a summit register but couldn’t locate one, so we took a few pictures and headed west across the open summit to the Tumamait trailhead. The trail’s name honors Vincent Tumamait, a Chumash chief and storyteller who spent much of his life teaching about and preserving the Chumash culture. The west side of Mt. Pinos is steep and barren, and we followed the switchbacks down to the saddle east of Sawmill Mountain – from here, the trail climbs steeply in spots, eventually becoming gentle as it runs due west but south of Sawmill’s summit. We left the trail at a large duck, but we were well short of the summit and returned quickly to the main trail, following it further up until its obvious high point. Hiking cross-country, we found the summit a couple of hundred yards to the north, marked by a tall cairn built Himalayan-style and adorned with prayer flags. Again, we could find neither a summit register nor a benchmark, but Jane did locate a duck downhill to the west that marked a use trail that we followed off the summit. Returning to the main trail, we continued west past a trail junction to a prominent duck signaling the use trail south to the summit of Grouse Mountain. About halfway up the use trail, we found another track heading east, and we figured we could use it to connect back to the main trail and head further west to Cerro Noroeste. After reaching Grouse Mountain’s wooded summit without much effort, we headed back north, found our alternate track…and promptly got lost. The track vanished within the first 50 yards, but no worries – we have a GPS right? Right, but where the GPS said a trail should be, no such trail existed. We wandered first north, then west, then north some more, eventually reaching a rise that our map indicated was well north of the trail. We thought it conceivable that the trail could be further downhill to the north, but we didn’t really want to risk losing several hundred feet of elevation and still not find the trail. We decided to head east cross-country toward where we had first left the trail and reconnect with what our GPS had tracked to that point. We eventually found the trail again several hundred yards eastward, indeed running to the north and downhill from the rise, but by this time we had spent enough time and additional distance that it no longer made a lot of sense to continue west to Cerro Noroeste. We turned back east up the trail, stopping in a clearing west of Sawmill Mountain to eat lunch and rest for a while. Picking up the trail again, we passed over familiar ground past Sawmill, through the Pinos-Sawmill saddle, and up the west slope of Mt. Pinos itself. (The trail is very steep at the bottom of Mt. Pinos’ west face, gaining 120′ of elevation over just 1/10 of a mile.) We took another short break at the Tumamait trailhead before returning down the access road, reaching our car by 1pm after walking nearly 10-1/2 miles that felt more like fifteen. We were both a little beat up by the time we returned, but the area was beautiful and we’ll likely be back to complete the whole circuit without the summit jaunts.