As a final tune-up before our backpack trip in the High Sierra near Mammoth next weekend, Pedro organized a hike to Mt. Pinos and Sawmill Mountain with some friends from work, Shane and Michelle, and we tagged along since we’re all about the fun – the reader may remember that Mt. Pinos is the high point of Ventura County, just as Sawmill Mountain is the high point of Kern County. We left early from Pedro’s house, reaching the trailhead at the end of the Mt. Pinos road by 7:30am. We’ve done this hike three times before, twice westbound like today and once eastbound from the other end of the trail at Cerro Noroeste, but all those visits took place in 2013, so it’s been a while since we’d made the trip. From the trailhead at 8,300′, we walked up the wide Mt. Pinos access road, moderately gaining elevation over the first mile until reaching the broad summit plateau where the gradient eases through open sagebrush meadows as it passes over the rolling terrain. We took the side road up a few hundred yards to the proper summit, where we found an unmounted sign noting the elevation as 8,848′, a few feet higher than we recall from our previous visits – some trail runners passing through took our group photo. The views here were very pretty in the morning sun – it was clear enough that we could spy Mts. Baden-Powell and Baldy some 100 miles away to the southeast. However, the normally clear views northward were blocked by valley haze, and we could see virtually nothing of the Sierras. After a bit, we headed west off the summit and over to the Vincent Tumamait trailhead – from here, the trail descends gently down the west slopes of Mt. Pinos for half a mile until dropping steeply into the level saddle 400′ deep between Pinos and Sawmill. We made our way into and across the saddle before ascending up the other side, regaining the same 400′ to the similarly broad and level Sawmill Mtn. summit, elev. 8,806′. As expected, we found the Chumash spirit tower where we last left it, but gone were the Himalayan-style prayer flags and the summit register can – we looked around for the latter but could not locate it anywhere, and we spent about 30 minutes here eating an early lunch before turning back. We had seen a handful of folks on our way west, but now we met more than 30 people on our way east – day hikers, backpackers, runners, mountain bikers, definitely a popular Sunday spot in the late summer. The GPS logged 7.36 round-trip miles with over 2,600′ of combined elevation change, all over 8,000′, so it’s a good workout when conditioning for higher mountain activities.