Angeles National Forest
Locate the trail head.
I decided to head out to the current end of Templin Highway again to check out a little more of the extreme western section of Angleles. The excuse for this one is to search out five Public Land Survey System markers, all witness corners, that rest in the bottom of Cienaga Canyon, mostly along Castaic Creek. They were placed before 1958 (
Liebre Mountain 7.5') as they can be found on the quad from then. Otherwise, I know nothing about them. I loaded up some guessed locations into the GPS and made a plan of attack. I would follow the canyon up, pausing from time to time to stomp through the undergrowth on the side looking for a monument, then follow the old road back down. This road was reduced to a trail in more recent maps and has been mostly removed from the
1995 quad. Still, the route up the ridge and back down can be seen from satellite, so I'm pretty confident I can follow it. The canyon bottom seems to have a bit of trail as well, although that can be an illusion.
There's plenty of traffic for the lake, but no one is parked at the end of the highway. I get packed up, a task involving far too many bits of backtracking to grab a thing I'd forgotten but finally managing to be prepared, and head down the last of the pavement to the bridge across Castaic Creek. On the far side of the bridge, a road wanders past the stream gauge and starts up the canyon. I head down it for some easy initial travel. There are many footprints already on it, some of them quite crisp. Someone has camped under the trees just past the gauge, but not recently. It's a good start to what might prove to be a long hike, but just past the stub of a gate that probably marks the end of the county's inholding around the lake, I find the first washout.
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Still nothing for the county's stream gauge to measure. That tamarisk can't help. |
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The base of a gate at the edge of a big washout along this old road. |
The washout isn't too hard to cross and at the end there is more road and more easy travel. There is another washout before the first ford. The ford is delicately eroded over the top and terribly undermined at the bottom, but still has a depth gauge so you can see how crazy it might be to try to cross the stream in a flood. The high tension wires crackle above and an old car frame rusts, bringing together a collection of the ways civilization affects the remote outposts it passes through. Eventually, the road is washed out again and stays that way for a while before a second ford just below an old stream gauge. Past this, there is not a lot of road in the canyon.
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The old ford still looks usable. I don't think I would want to if the water was high enough to register on the depth gauge on the right. |