We had planned to hike today to The Pinnacles north of Lake Arrowhead, but halfway there decided we may not have time to do all we had hoped for – we chose instead to explore the West Fork of the Mojave River drainage west of Silverwood Lake, about a half hour east of Wrightwood off…
After four months to the day since our last hike, we finally found ourselves a day with nothing else in it. We hadn’t been to Big Bear since passing through last July on our way to Joshua Tree, so we decided to pay the area a visit and hike the 7 roundtrip miles to…
Saddleback Butte is a prominent landmark in the desert east of Lancaster, its twin summits and namesake saddle recognizable from viewpoints throughout the Antelope Valley. We had first talked about hiking to the 3,651′ summit last spring when the area’s wildflowers were on full display, but other things took precedence and, before we knew…
We had yet to explore the area of the Angeles crest between Throop Peak on the east and Mt. Islip on the west, the interval being a south-and-west-trending ridge that includes Mt. Hawkins, elev. 8,850′. Really just a bump along the ridgeline, the peak’s position at the juncture of the ridge’s change of direction…
We’ve driven on Hwy 2 many times past the turnoff to the Grassy Hollow visitor center, but we’ve always had other places to get to and have never stopped in to check it out. With the grandbabies with us in Wrightwood for the second weekend in a row, we decided to pay Grassy Hollow…
We had intended to hike Mt. Williamson as the second of a two-day exploration of the area around Islip Saddle, but our dog, Frances, got sick the night of our Mt. Islip walk and we had to postpone the next day’s trip as a result. The intervening weekends have been full of events and…
Chelsea, Pedro, and the boys came up to Wrightwood on Friday night, planning to go to Joshua Tree NP the following day to do Chelsea’s pregnancy photo shoot with our favorite photographer, Holly Carlyle (we got to know Holly five years ago when she shot Chelsea and Pedro’s wedding, and she’s been a veritable…
In Wrightwood again for the weekend, we decided to try and do two hikes on opposite sides of Islip Saddle, a point 30 minutes west of Wrightwood at which Hwy 2 crosses the Angeles Crest and the PCT west of the Mt. Baden-Powell area. East of the saddle lies its namesake, Mt. Islip, elev….
Having spent a rather lazy Saturday at the cabin, we decided to drive across the mountains on Hwy 2 and eat Father’s Day dinner with Dani at Carter’s restaurant in Pasadena, doing a hike somewhere along the way. Of the literally dozens of options open to us, one that had caught our eye on…
For a couple of weeks now, we had been talking about repeating our hike up Mt. Baden-Powell (9,399′), but adding a trip down the peak’s western ridgeline as well. We had also kicked around the idea of doing the hike in the reverse direction, from west to east. In either case, we’d need to…