For the holidays (pick your favorite, but it was probably Hannukkah for my family), I got a new GPS toy! (the garmin etrex venture Cx, very shiny). So I had to go out and play with it. I’d gone geocaching once with a couple of friends, which it looks like I never wrote up, but I thought it would be fun to go play. Admittedly, I mostly wanted to use the GPS for mapping, but it seemed a reasonable thing to go do.
As it was two days before Christmas, everyone and their mother was gone, so I decided to play it fairly safe and do a really short, really close little hike. After looking through my Trails of the Angeles (now getting well worn!), I decided that Grizzly Flat would be ideal. It’s more or less the first trailhead up Route 2, so only about 8 miles from the freeway, and is less than 5 miles total, and checking at geocaching.com informed me that there were 3 caches on the route, so off I went. So, I walked ~5 mi total (both parts) and a few hundred feet of gain and loss, but nothing crazy.
pack it out, indeed.
I parked in the little lot, after managing to miss it the first time (somehow) and then began my trip up the slope. This was my first time ever hiking alone, so I was a little nervous, although this particular trip didn’t post any particular dangers. I even brought my iPod, though I only used it on the way back. Anyway. The trail starts up dirt single track, reasonably steep, under cover of woods, and then pretty quickly comes out of the shade and is just a trail hacked out of the manzanita. The first geocache was in this area, and was trivial to find. So much so, as a matter of fact, that I hid it a little more when I was done – they shouldn’t really be in plain view of everything. After a bit of walking in this, I found myself under cover again, and then suddenly approaching this little meadow, on the side of a real pine type forest, the kind you don’t really see in the San Gabriels. Apparently the USFS has a pine plantation up there, which is really kind of neat.
Odd little meadowy area I cut through.
After this point, you join up with a fire road, and turn to the right, skirting the pines. The road keeps going, and the directions get a little confusing, because there are several intersections with other fireroads, not all of which are clearly discussed. But you slope up a bit, under some shade, then turn another right, then finally get to a big fireroad crossing. Where the guide says “cross the other road and turn right”. Of course, I turned right too soon. and eventually my GPS was letting me know I was nowhere near where I needed to be, so I backtracked a bit and found the appropriate bit of fire road. This angled down and around, a nice broad sandy road, which eventually lead to grizzly flat, which is actually a campground. It has a horse tie up pole, and a rope swing, and some campsitey areas, and also a big concrete thing letting you know where you are.
Just in case you couldn’t figure it out
I hung out here for a bit, finding the third geocache (I hadn’t been able to locate the second on the way in, though I found it on the way out). It was a nice little area, and I didn’t see anyone, though I did find a fair bit of trash, mostly alcohol related. For instance, the enormous empty budweiser can. (I went back on this hike a couple of months later, which I won’t think I will recount, but we found a lot more of the same trash at the time, though on neither trip did we see any other people).
Because you need to walk several miles off the road to drink your tequila
Anyway, after relaxing there for a bit, I headed back the way I had come, and it was mostly uneventful. As I said, I did manage to find the third of the geocaches, so that was nice. After I made it back to my car, I tried to go and find this fourth “bonus” geocache that had been mentioned on the website, for which I had to drive about a half mile further down the road. There’s a fun little burn scar on the way. Must have been pretty fresh, when I saw it again six months later, it already had a new growing coat of green.
Fire clears things out good
I never did find the last geocache, though I blundered around on this hill for quite some time. The one nifty thing here you find just a bit beyond where the cache is supposed to be. You park at a fire gate, and walk up the road a bit, and see a tree on a slope, and mess around there for a while. But a bit further off are a bunch of boxes that looks like newspaper distribution boxes, kind of , or garbage boxes, or some sort of crates, or something. So I go closer to try and figure out what these crazy boxes out on this random road are, and as I get closer and closer I, I can hear this buzzing, and when I can finally read the sign it tells me it is an apiary! Totally random. Of course, stinging insects creep me way out, so I hightailed it out of there. I shortly thereafter gave up on the cache as well, and headed home after a nice late December day.
mmm, bees are gonna get you!
