Happy almost New Year! It’s that time of the year, where I like to think about winter sports. Unfortunately, the snow has come…and gone again, and not really bothered to come again yet. We’ll see. Anyway, a couple of years ago we went up to the San Gabriels to play around with some snowshoes. It was pretty. It was also the day after I had just gone up Baldy, so it was pretty lowkey.
start your engines….
Nathan had purchased me a pair of snowshoes for the holidays, so we went out to play with them. However, they were perchance a bit too large for me, so we also rented a mid-sized pair, and then went up into the mountains to check everything out! As the main route up towards Mt. Waterman was still closed, we had to go the long way around through Sunland, up through Big Tujunga Canyon, to the Angeles Forest Highway, to Upper Tujunga, before actually making it to the ACH. But that was fine, both because I’d never gone that route before, and also because we got a great view of all the different areas. We saw some untouched zones, and some burnt zones that were recovering, and some burnt zones that were…not. Especially up by Chilao it looked pretty bad, and it made me somewhat sad. But it was quite the enlightening drive.
Pretty day out there
We finally got up towards Mt. Waterman, and started walking up one of the fire roads around there, I think the same one that eventually turns into the trail up the mountain. We didn’t really go all that far, just playing around a bit. As it turned out, the snowshoes that Nathan had gotten for me were too big for me, or at least felt a bit too large and ungainly, so we switched out, and the bigger ones worked out well for him. He enjoyed playing around with the ability to walk straight uphill 🙂
uphill and downhill! Magic.
But we walked up and around for a bit, and played around, and at one point found a bit of trail that actually went off of the main fire road, and followed it for a bit, as we could hear some water. We ended up at a small creek flowing downhill, and played around on the banks of that for a while, and just sat and enjoyed it looking pretty. This was the one bit of the walk that was more like “trail” or “just going through the woods” than it was “playing around on a fireroad”, so that was a nice opportunity to have. From there, we did go a bit further up the fire road, and eventually found a nice rock to sit on for a few minutes before just heading back to the car. On the way out, we saw a few people going in (and we had seen a couple of people earlier), but for the most part, we had been alone, which was pleasant.
Crossing carefully…
Looking up creek
