Moments in Dirt and Ink

The trails of the front country can be veritable highways where you seem to pass another person every 10 or 15 minutes, at least for the first couple miles.  Even as the people thin further away from the trailhead, the trail itself is often a wide track with a deep groove from the heavy traffic.  Heading into the backcountry, the trails are still well established though generally narrow tracks.  The bushes are kept at bay and the track is fixed if there is a slide.  But keep going, to the trails that spend some time behind seasonally locked gates and plunge into the deep backcountry (and often have attractions like hot springs near the start to draw off some of the crowd) and the trails start getting hard to follow.  They're easy enough for the first mile or two, but keep going and there's parts that vanish.  A few tree falls and the trail might be lost altogether.  It becomes a challenge to follow these trails. It looks like Indian Creek is a good i...

Angeles National Forest Fish Creek Canyon has a quarry at the mouth, making access difficult.  The quarry has a few access days somewhat less than every other Saturday during which they provide parking and shuttles to go up the canyon.  This makes the hike up to the falls about 2 miles.  The shuttles used to allow people up until noon and continued running them back down to 3 PM, but recently this time has been shortened.  There is also a route made to bypass the quarry to get into the canyon from just after the gate to the quarry which adds about 3 miles to the trek up to the falls and which no one seems to have anything good to say about.  Previous years when I have gone, the part of the bypass trail coming down to the canyon looked wide and used.  The first mile of the other side, which I have been on, looked used, but was overgrown once it got to the other side of the canyon wall.  When I went this year (28 May 2011), the access trail down in th...

Angeles National Forest There are all sorts of known gold mines, and likely as many unknown ones, around the local counties.  This is gold country, after all.  Iron Mountain must have been a very attractive place to mine because it is riddled with the things even though it is (and was) a remote and difficult area.  One still finds prospectors when going up the East Fork of the San Gabriel River at the bottom of the mountain.  A lot can be found out about these mines from the local enthusiasts .  Many of the mines around Iron Mountain are included in the "mines we will never see" section .  There is also a section of lost mines of Iron Mountain . Some of the mines in the area are: Allison Mine, which may have two almost usable routes to it, one up the gulch  from the "bridge to nowhere" trail and one along the hillside from the maintained part of the trail out of Heaton Flat Baldora Mine, sometimes claimed to be another name for Widco, but a...

Angeles National Forest This is a hike that looks like it would be a nice add-on to a Henninger Flats excursion.  It should be mostly easy, as it's along an old road, with plenty of views to the south.  It has been used by Christopher Brennen for one of his adventure canyoneering hikes to then proceed down the glen .  That has some 9-12 rappels of up to 80 feet, so the whole loop isn't a good choice for a hike.  However, he says the road only has a couple of bad spots and a lot of brush (as of 1999). The road starts above Henninger Flats, just above some water tanks.  The purple line here starts at the main campground and museum, where most people taking exercise on the road seem to turn around.  It's a little further up, past the other two camping areas, to get to the old fire road marked on the USGS maps. Brennen provides a good description for finding the road as well as other useful bits of information, like a use trail down into a lower part of ...