We went out to California for about four days. Flew into Oakland, drove down the coast, spent a beautiful weekend in the redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains seeing many friends and sharing in Dave and Iris getting married. We then headed back north, took a nice walk in the hills, got a ride in a Model S from Dan and Marina, went back to Oakland, spent the evening with yet more friends, had pizza and watched youtube videos, and then finally, the next morning, took in some quality Ikea time, followed by an In’N’Out visited before flying back home. Whew! Quite the weekend, and maybe in another three years I’ll write it up with photos 😉 For now…home again, home again, putting the house in order, and beginning the real clock to our own wedding. So…let’s talk about a little day trip to Lake Arrowhead we took a few years ago 🙂 We just needed / wanted to get away a little bit, so we drove up and up the hill to Lake Arrowhead, and found what we could find…
like these!
We drove up to Lake Arrowhead with no real plan in mind. We stopped in at the ranger station on Rim of the World highway, where they gave us some area maps and some hiking ideas. So we drove down into town itself, and then a bit around the lake, and then headed up towards the North Shore campground. Even once we made it up there, we had to cast around a bit to actually find the trailhead. However, we finally made it there, and then we headed along.
The trail headed downhill for a bit, through a wooded area, then up and across another hill. The sun started peeking out, and it was getting pretty warm until we went over the hill into another valley. As we headed along, we went through a previously burned area, with tree statues bright up against the sky, and low new green growth blanketing the hillsides. Around another hillside, we turned and started heading along a marshy stream area. There were some more burnt out crazy stumps. As I stopped and looked for some geocaches, we also discovered that I was grabbing *all* of the caterpillars onto me.
All the trees after the fire
Singular tree, against green and blue
Inside a tree trunk is the place to be!
All the area had new growth, but was still very warm due to the general lack of tree cover. We ran into some other people, who said if we went just a bit farther we would come to a stream crossing, and then would be able to see the ruins of a cabin, however, so we soldiered on a bit farther. We did come to the stream crossing, which had a fair amount of water in it, and made it to the other side, where we met up with a fireroad. We had apparently made it into a reasonably popular 4×4 area, as I guess a lot of truck trails criss-cross the region. So we headed a bit further, traipsed through the water running over the top of a dam, and then headed to where we could see a chimney in the distance.
stupid caterpillars
trucks! passing, on truck trail
first view of the cabin site
We walked over to the small ruins site, and scrambled around on them a bit. This was clearly a place where someone would have put another geocache, though of course the location wasn’t quite where you would expect! But I did eventually find it, which was fun time of running around the house. After we did that, we basically retraced our steps back to the trailhead. It was a bit quicker going back, since we weren’t trying as much to stop at everything, of course, though the last uphill bit before the car was still kind of a pain!
Remnant chimney
Evidentiary sign
After that, we drove back into the small town area and walked around a bit. We got a couple of drinks, and did some shopping at the bass outlet store of all places (hooray for sales, I guess). There was also a wooden boat festival going on, and while we didn’t want to go pay to see the boats particularly, we could see a bunch of them just at the dock. They really were quite beautiful, and it was a good reason for lots of people walking around. We then got some ice cream and walked around the other side of the set of stores, until we got back to the parking lot and headed home. My notes tell me the hike was about 4 miles total, leading to a hiking lifetime of 712.4 miles for me, and ~34 for my newer hiking shoes.
Shiny car at the lakeside
