we’ll make it
I’d been meaning to make it out to this park for a while. The San Andreas fault runs just past the northern side of the San Gabriels, and at the location of Devil’s Punchbowl County Park, it’s done some pretty cool things to the landscape. There is some really neat broken and crumpled landscape right here pressed between the mountains and the desert. I went out with Erin , Remco, and Jeff, and did this 7 mi RT’ hike, which had a total of about 1000′ of gain and loss.
I’d been meaning to go here for a long time and was glad to finally make it. You drive around to the north side of the San Gabriels, and go to this county park. There is a small sort of visitor’s center, with some maps, and also a couple animals. There is a really short loop there where you can look out into the bowl, and also the start of several other trails.
the owl wasn’t what I was expecting…I think he’d eat me if he could
The feature is a sort of…bowl, with this neat rock formations. The hike involves walking around the length of this bowl like object. The first side where you start is pretty directly in the sun, but as you curl around to the other side of the bowl, you are right on the face of the mountains and as such get a fair bit more shade. You then edge along, and end up going down several switchbacks, and then drop down on the trail to the Devil’s Chair specific formation. The very last bit can be seen in the first photo I posted, and is a nice narrow walk out to this rock formation.
oh man, it’s so very crumply!
I had printed out some information on some virtual geocaches in the region, which told us a fair bit about the geology we were looking it, which I personally thought was pretty cool. The fault lines comes right through and twists, and you can see it pretty clearly if you know what you are looking for. It was definitely a warm day, but it was a nice walk with some cool formations to look at (and it was very windy out on the edge of the chair!) even if there were not particularly spectacular views to see. Always interesting to
be right at that interface between mountains and forest.
