Moments in Dirt and Ink

Open air sketches for the month. The city poking out of the haze while hiking up the old toll road . Antennas on the mountain top . Top: south view.  Bottom: northwest view.  From near the top . Some of the turtles on campus.

from Lake Poway, nearish La Jolla Locate the trailhead. I only drove to La Jolla, so can't say how to get there, but Lake Poway is on the map. It's a short trail, but can get hot so we meant to head off quite early. We did manage to get around to going downhill before it started to feel particularly hot. They've certainly put together a lot of trails for a place that hadn't had a trail until 1980, but there's usually trail signs, too. Not quite the first view of ocean along the trail. I'm told this wasn't particularly visible until fire came through a few years ago. There were a few funky shaped bits of pink granite around. It seemed to be turning into shells, in a way, in places. Besides this one, the top features a wave of stone everyone but me was taking photos of. The local pink granite, a rock that isn't as much harder than the local sandstone as expected.

Angeles National Forest Locate the trailhead. The old way to Henninger Flats is to start at the bottom of the Mt. Wilson Toll Road and walk up. The road has a gate on it that is only open sunrise to sunset but now hasn't been open for years because a large section of the road, visible from the gate, has been removed by a landslide. With the traffic of people who go up the mountain from around here, it might be expected to have a good trail bed again, but it does not. Since the gate never opens, one must start in at some other location or trespass. If the sunrise to sunset time limit is no problem, then the Eaton Canyon lot is a good starting spot. If not, between the two is a small dirt lot along Altadena Dr. Either way, the reason there hasn't been a good trail bed made by the passage of people is because there's another way up using the Eaton Canyon trail directly across the riverbed. From the lot on Altadena, one may have to go east a little to get to it. ...