~ 22 miles, 8000 ft gain

damn 4 minutes

Photos are geo-tagged
Click for more stats & gps files

In the book The San Gabriels: The Mountain Country from Soledad Canyon to Lytle Creek, John Robinson mentions offhand about some football player being able to summit Mt Baldy via the Old Baldy trail in under 2 hrs. Sounds like a great challenge? I agree.

With 9 days till the Baldy Run to the Top Race, I thought it would be a great time to give it a go. The weather had thankfully cooled down, and I was at the Baldy Visitor Center in tank top and shorts at 7 am ready to go.

Instead of the normal 60Csx GPS I usually bring, I brought my Forerunner 305 with heartrate monitor that I have had for maybe 4 months but haven’t used much “in the field”. Based on many bouts of training with heartrate monitors, I had a good feel for what heartrate I could sustain for a 2 hr hike. I wanted to use the Forerunner for 3 purposes, 1) make sure I don’t go out too quickly 2) check my pace and 3) make sure I’m getting up to the the right heartrate at the right time. I expected I could stay between 165 bpm and 170 bpm for the duration. Seem like a bit too much? Yes, yes it is

Things were going good up to Bear Flat, with a mixture of hiking and a bit of “running” if you could call it that. The switchbacks out of Bear Canyon seem to be the steepest part of the hike, and my quads and especially my calves were really burning. I hadn’t hiked up anything steep at a fast pace in a while and I think that bit me in the ass a little bit. I felt okay at the top of the switchbacks and thought I was on pace for my goal although I didn’t really know. I was about just under 1 hr in and my heartrate was at 165 so it seemed all good.

I kept chugging up along the ridge. The weather was really good for this, nice and cool with some breeze. Higher up, the wind got fierce and become more of a nuisance. My heartrate was starting to drop into the low 160′s – I wanted to it to start getting up near 170 so that wasn’t good. “Just go faster!” you all say. Well if it were that easy! My legs didn’t want me to go faster.

Eventually I got up to the part where the ridge flattens out a bit and you can see West Baldy and Baldy ahead. Only 20 min left and they seemed so far away. The grade lessened enough for me to get caught in the Walk/Run Vortex – you know that area where it seems just a little too much energy to run, but too little energy to walk? That’s where I was. The running was too much so I walked as fast as possible but I wish it was a little steeper. Finally, it flattened out enough to run for a good 1/4 mile and I was at the base of West Baldy with maybe 10 min left. Can I make it? 3 min left and I am ascending toward Baldy-West Baldy saddle. Not looking good. I try to run but its just too much. I finally make it up in 2:04, 4 minutes too late. Damnit!

Well it still was a good try but I felt the effort was lacking. I don’t know if it was the lack of training on steep slopes, the fact that I ate too much late in the day on Friday, altitude, or a combination…but I knew via heartrate that I wasn’t at the right intensity I know I could do. The funny thing is that if I didn’t have the heartrate monitor, I would have felt like it was a better try!

Anyways, it was freaking windy on top. 50, 60 mph? I had the summit to myself (9am) and ducked behind one of the rock-stacked walls. I didn’t stay for very long as it was kinda cold with the wind, so I headed down Devil’s Backbone.

Refilling at Baldy Notch, I decided I needed to put in some more effort, so I went ahead and did the 3T’s trail. From before Thunder to just before Icehouse Saddle I had the trail to myself. I forgot how nice that area is.

I got down to Icehouse parking lot 6 hrs after starting, not too shabby in halving my days compared to the last 2 weeks. I was going to hitch a ride (turned off GPS), but didn’t see anyone leaving, so I jogged / walked the 1.5 miles back to my car.

I don’t know what goal to set for the Baldy race. 1:25 seems too low, I don’t think I can do that at 192 lbs. I’m shooting for 1:28.

Check out the rest of his gallery here, http://keeganuhlphotography.com/wilderness/icehouse2010/index.html

Thanks for sharing!

Final Stats:

14.8 miles, 5600 ft

GPS track here

KML Google Earth file

Cucamonga, Etiwanda, & Bighorn Peaks at EveryTrail

At a relatively last minute, I decided to join up with a hike scheduled in KathyW’s hiking group that was headed up Cucamonga, Bighorn, and Ontario Peaks. I wanted to hike to Etiwanda as well since I hadn’t done it before. Eric (edenoch) was game.

We started out with the rest of the group at 7:30 from Icehouse Canyon trailhead. The lot was already full, leaving people to park elsewhere. Then comes Taco walking up the road with his climbing gear. We start hiking up the trail and meet another SGMDF guy (sorry I can’t remember your sn!). Eventually Taco veers off to go do some climbing. After hitting Icehouse saddle, Eric and I go ahead as we wanted to add Etiwanda and hopefully then catch up with the group on the way down Cucamonga.

We made good time and reached Cucamonga first, then descended down the east side following a use trail that links up with a maintained trail a few hundred feet below. We followed this for a mile at most, and then veered off to the right for a 300 ft climb to the summit of Etiwanda.

The views inland were hazed over (and I took crappy photos in general). We noticed the extensive burn on the southern slopes, I wonder when that fire occured. But in general, Etiwanda does have some worthy views.

We headed back, but I decided to go back up Cucamonga to see if the group was there (and add elevation gain), but they had already left. We continued down the trail to the Cucamonga-Bighorn saddle, where we saw the group starting the ascent up the ridge to Bighorn.

The SE ridge up to Bighorn Peak is a very nice, steep climb. At somepoint I must have put my hand on a sharp rock, b/c a few minutes later I noticed that my hand is covered in blood and I had a nice laceration across the palm. Weird. It wasn’t bad at all really at least.

We were fine with being done after Bighorn, and descended cross-country to the Ontario Peak trail, then back to Icehouse Saddle. From there, it was a nice 3.5 mile hike back to the cars.

Eric seeing that cutting swithbacks is bad!

Trip details are given here.

Meetup Link here

My photos here

Well, this was quite a trip! We met up at the Icehouse Canyon trailhead at 8 am with about 18 people, 8 of which were planning to ascend to Ontario via the regular trail, 7 of which who I had ‘allowed’ to go up via Falling Rock Canyon, and 3 of which wanted to go up FRC but even though we had already closed the group a week prior. I decided they could go, even though it probably is too many people for such a canyon especially on the scree slopes in the upper portion.

Since there were forecasts for precipitation and high winds, I was ready to cancel the FRC hike and go up IHC trail, but wanted to see what the gametime conditions were like. Luckily, there was practically no wind nor any signs of rain / snow, so we were still good to go.

Given previous route descriptions, FRC was not difficult to find as we veered right off the Icehouse Canyon trail at the first blantant switchback, then headed up east a bit before turning south into the canyon. The lower canyon was a lot of fun to do some bouldering. I was not sure exactly what the trouble was with avoiding the first waterfall, as it was dry and we passed it up by staying on the left side of the canyon. Heading up, it seemed that the sides of the canyon would alternate with one having scree and the other have solid rocks to boulder, so we went back and forth avoiding the scree sections as much as possible.

At about 6100 ft, we could see a pretty obvious branch go off on the right side of the canyon, which matched again with descriptions noting this to be a key turn not to miss!

As seen in the photo above, now the area of movement has narrowed with people following in a single line. There was an option to follow up a more rocky terrain to the right or take the scree slope to the left, and most of us decided to take the rocky terrain with a few going up the scree.

The more rocky terrain was fine in the lower portion, but became more difficult as we got higher and the rock became more crumbly. Meanwhile, the few people who were on the scree basically gave up and headed over to the rocky terrain thinking it would be easier.

The main keys to heading up this portion with this size group were splitting off, patience, and communication! Luckily we did pretty well with that. We split off into smaller groups on different portions of rock, with each group making progress up while watching out that any falling rocks were not in the pathways of others.

After a long bout we finally ascended the ridge and were able to head over to Pão de Açucar.

Then we headed over and up the ridge toward Ontario, which I also thought was pretty fun with some more options of rock bouldering.

And, you will probably assume the following photo was due to rocks in FRC:

But in reality, Guido had a tough battle with a tree branch!

And my damn cover didn’t open all the way on a few photos:

So then we headed up to Ontario for the 2nd out of 3 peaks. Now, I remember seeing a cool photo of something standing on this thing, but once I started climbing it, I was like, ‘oh hell no I’m not trying to balance on top of that! So I just gave it a hug.

We continued on to Bighorn Peak. On planning the hike I initially put in the chance of heading to Cucamonga after, but I think we felt the 3 peaks were sufficient for the day. So we headed down the north slopes of Bighorn and intersected the Ontario Peak trail about 50 m from Icehouse Saddle. From there, it was all trail downhill.

Overall, a great adventure, and it seemed it was definitely what people were looking for. I would like to explore more off the beaten path areas in the future.

And afterward, we hit up La Tolteca in Azusa for some good Mexican grub.

KML Google Earth file

Icehouse Canyon to the Three T’s (Timber, Telegraph, & Thunder) at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail:GPS Geotagging