One San Gabriels destination that’s been on our list for a while is Winston Peak, elev. 7,470′, located at the head of Cooper Canyon on the north side of Cloudburst Summit. A couple of years ago, we had hiked down the PCT from here to Cooper Canyon Falls, but going up and over Winston Peak was going to add a little too much effort to that hike and we bypassed the mountain for the time being. After Chris’ poor performance the previous weekend, we decided something a little more stout under a full load was in order, so we made the 45-minute drive from Wrightwood on Saturday afternoon, reaching the trailhead about 2:00pm. The plan was to hike first up a use trail 6/10ths of a mile to Winston Peak’s summit, gaining about 450′ of elevation in the process, before continuing cross-country down the steep north side of the mountain to reach the PCT – once on the trail, we’d continue eastward to Cooper Canyon Trail Camp where we’d hike back up the camp’s access road to the trailhead, basically repeating the last half of our hike here in 2016. All told, we expected a roundtrip distance of about 4-ish miles with around 2,400′ of elevation change. The Winston Peak trail started northward along an overgrown jeep road for the first couple of hundred yards before diverging on a single-track that continued more or less up the fall line of the slope. As expected, Chris got pretty winded here, averaging just a mile an hour, but we took frequent breaks and pushed through, arriving at the rocky-but-wooded summit in about 45 minutes. The trees blocked most of the views, but we could glimpse a very clear desert floor to the northwest and pretty terrain in Cooper Canyon to the east. After only 10 minutes or so on the summit, we headed north over a small knob before beginning the steep drop down to the PCT, a stretch where we lost 800′ in only half a mile, following a well-defined use trail. By 3:30pm, we were walking down the PCT on much easier ground – this area was covered in lupines on our previous visit, but all those flowers were gone this late in the season, much to our disappointment. We reached the trail camp in time to see a large group of Boy Scouts cross into the camp with armloads of gathered firewood, but we couldn’t see any tents or other signs of habitation – there must be a camping area out of view from the trail. We took a short break at the camp before turning west up the access road, following it upward to the west and south for about a mile to its junction with the PCT, where we turned left and followed the trail along a pleasant, level segment – the flat ended way too soon, as we quickly found ourselves gaining 400′ over the last half mile up the canyon’s headwall back to the road, and Chris took another 45 minutes to get up this section. In the end, this was a pretty good workout to a new summit, even though the hike was a bit less scenic than expected – we drove back to the cabin for a quiet evening, making plans for more hiking the following morning…