Moments in Dirt and Ink

Sketches done in open spaces during the month. A meander around the zoo must include the elephants. Another evening stroll in the Henninger Flat direction . Concessions at the free concerts in Memorial Park. Not a good day for walking as the Station Fire (behind the Pasadena Library) makes everything sting.

Altadena front country Haven't been hiking in, um, a while. It must be a month. I could check that here, but that would surely be cheating. Since the moon is fullish and the moonrise calculator said the moon would be up not too late and I know it's an easy trail to take in the dark, I headed up the way to Henninger Flat around 9PM. Mother Nature seems to have taken into account the actual landscape of the area in calculating when the moon will really rise, so it wasn't actually up until after I'd got to where I was going and had sat for a while.  I had some possible companions, but they decided not to. For one, this was probably for the best since her knee isn't good and the trail at the bottom is steep enough to cause problems with that. I made rather good time, for me, going up. I parked along Altadena Dr. and got up the trail to the toll road plus a little to where there is a park bench for folks, which is something like a mile up, by 20 to 10...

We went off to the zoo. I didn't have my camera, but mom brought hers and I got to take some photos of the kitties. There's always something interesting to be found in the Tropical Aviary.

Altadena front country We hiked up to Echo Mountain to watch the fireworks.  In this case, "we" is a group of 12 people I mostly don't know who are mostly in Abbie's boyfriend's lab.  We met around 4:30PM to head up the trail, probably getting started around 5PM.  Today has been hot and humid and we were quite hot going up.  Eventually we were stopping for every bit of shade we could find.  We ended up one of the first groups up of those aiming to see fireworks.  Most people came as it was getting dark, but we all got to watch the sunset and look around the place in the light. As the day was humid, visibility wasn't great.  This manifested itself mostly in a layer of dingy air over the cities, but it didn't go up very high.  The valleys were quite invisible, but mountains sticking up out of it from time to time seemed perfectly clear.  As the sun faded and the lights went on the distant lights became just a uniform smearing ...

Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area Locate the trailhead. Abbie plus her boy plus a new member of his lab plus her visiting parents and I all went off on a hike down by Malibu. It should be a nice little loop , except for this creep . How he gets away with it so close to Malibu, I have no idea. The trail had been going there long before he bought the property. And he promptly sued his neighbors to force them to give him the same sort of easement the trail has. A clear case of good fences making bad neighbors. The hike starts at the end of Corral Canyon Road, which heads into the young mountains with many curves and steep drops from highway 1 just "north" of Malibu. The road turns to dirt and gravel and widens into a parking lot just before a gate. The fire road beyond may be used by bicyclists and the various single track trails from the spot may not. Castro Motorway continues on from the end of Corral Canyon. We didn't get to see th...

Angeles National Forest Locate the trailhead. Alder Creek is apparently a "trail that was" in the guidebooks even though I found it on the current (Ha! It's getting rather old and out of date. They need to do a new one.) forest map. There seems to be very little to be found about it online. There's a little on it by one Caltech alum who is so often a great source on the local trails. There's also an errata site for Trails of the Angeles that notes you can hike this trail now, but then says it's not particularly interesting. In the 10 years since folks have known it was open, there doesn't seem to have been a lot of interest. The trail heads both ways from where Upper Big Tujunga Road (Between Angeles Crest and Angeles Forest highways) crosses Alder Creek. There used to be a small lot a hundred feet off, but now it has been blocked by a load of dirt as has all the roadside parking for a quarter mile. One presumes this is to discourage use o...

Angeles National Forest Locate the trailhead. Icehouse Canyon is on a right hand straight (the road turns sharply left) just after Baldy Village. To enter the Wilderness some two miles up, you need to get a permit. We also needed a hang tag to hold the Golden Eagle so we were good and let them count us. That didn't make parking any easier on a Sunday morning. Backpackers and early(er) risers had gotten all the real spaces in the large lot, and quite a few of the imaginary ones. I was able to imagine one more spot on the second time around so we weren't so good on the parking but we weren't blocking anything either. The trail itself goes up at a steady, determined pace. It is about 3.6 miles of constant up. It does not go flat, it does not go down, it just climbs and climbs until it gets to the saddle. There is one junction along the way which is actually just another way up to the saddle but takes about two miles longer to get there. We took this going dow...

Angeles National Forest Locate the trailhead. The "Bridge to Nowhere" isn't really such. Hike information can be found here . The instructions for getting there could be improved quite a bit, though. After getting off on Arcadia in Arcadia, turn north and follow the road out of the city and along the reservoir. Turn right on East Fork Road to cross a large bridge over the river and wiggle around a little more. That road does dead end at the ranger station if you go around the hairpin turn it talks about, but if you catch the road into the Sheep Mountain Wilderness to the left on that hairpin turn you pass a few trailheads on the way to the end of the road. Park in the large lot by the gate on the road and continue down it passing yet another trailhead to some other destination. The trail follows the old road route up to the bridge built for the road. At least half of it is actually on the old road bed, but there are places where the roadbed are long gone and ...