I would like to note that this hike marks the 4th anniversary of my hikes.txt hiking log. The log doesn’t note *all* the hikes I’ve ever been on, but it’s most of them. (I started it with my first pair of real hiking boots. However, my first real hike as an adult was Mt Monadnock, when I was 21 or 22 or so. Thanks Jake!). Anyway, this hike put me at about the 325 recorded miles hiked mark. “It’s a start!” Here’s to well more miles than that in the future…
Anyway, hiking! This was a surprise 8 mile hike up Mt Josephine (5558′, 1900′ of gain), via the Mt Josephine Fire Road. (A surprise because the guidebook listed it as 6 miles, trip #35 in Trails of the Angeles). I went with Erin, Ben, and his friend Matt. There had been rain in Pasadena the prior day, which meant we had fresh snow nearer the top of this hike!
know your safety stats!
thanks google
it’s almost like winter. but not quite.
This hike was more fun than I thought it would be. It’s fire road the whole way, which usually isn’t what I’m so psyched for, but in this case it meant that the grading was nice, it was easy to get through snowy areas, and generally just let us walk and look at views. Anyway, you start with a long push over in one direction, and then make a sharp left in towards the mountain itself. You curve around the front of the mountain, over a ridge, and then keep curling up around the back of it (well, “back” in terms of where we started from). As we got behind the mountain (the north side) we started seeing more and more of the snow from the precipitation of the prior day, but it was at most a few inches, so it was fun to walk through and play with, rather than being a hassle.
As we got closer to the top, it started getting foggier and a lot cooler. Right before you achieve the summit, the fire road itself ends at an open area, and the last hundred feet or so are on Real Trail (that is, a foot path) to another small little open area next to a weather station right at the top.
We sat her and had lunch and chatted and took a couple of group photos, but really it was just kind of foggy and cold up there. We couldn’t see a thing, so we decided not to linger. Of course, on the way down, the sun started breaking through the clouds, and we had some really gorgeous views that we weren’t able to see on the way up (mostly of Strawberry Peak to the east), and we could easily see almost all of the trail we had taken on the way in. Admittedly, most of the views of the trail could probably have been seen on the way up, but who was turning around to look at that stuff? Not so much us 🙂
not what I usually expect
