Continued...
Fernando 2 BM / May BM
My daughter's team finished up early on the last day of a three day VB
tournament in downtown Los Angeles. Afterwards, my wife and daughter would
board a flight home to San Jose while I spent the week driving to the
next VB tournament in Reno, NV the following weekend. This would give me the
opportunity to drive up the Eastern Sierra along US395 and do some peakbagging
along the way. Tonight I'd made plans to have dinner with my sister and nephew
who live in Santa Clarita, so I found a few easy peaks to tackle on my there
and work up an appetite. May BM, located at the west end of the San Gabriel
Mtns, just north of San Fernando, had been added to the LPC list several years
ago. I was busy elsewhere when Tom Becht was finishing the list earlier this
year, so it seemed as good a time as any to nab it now. I got off the 210
freeway at Osborne St and drove the windy Little Tujunga Rd all the way to Bear
Divide on the crest of the range. From here I drove west a few more miles to
the County of Los Angeles Fire Dept's .
It's a popular destination for
road cyclists riding up Tujunga Canyon and Sand Canyon Rd, as well as mtn bikers
coming up the Santa Clara Truck Trail from the west and Wilson & May Canyon
Truck Trails from the south. At nearly 4,000ft, it makes for quite a ride up
from the valleys below. The hike to May BM is rather tame, and that includes a
visit to
which is only a few hundred feet from the parking lot
at the west end of Camp 9, a roundtrip effort of little over 2mi. One can make
this significantly harder (by hiking from the base of the mountain on the
north or south sides) or somewhat easier by driving a portion of the Santa
Clara Truck Trail to the base of the mountain.
Fernando 2 BM, a P1K that I had visited four years earlier, has been bulldozed
over a large area leaving a communications installation found at
.
I didn't find a benchmark labeled "Fernando 2" on that first visit nor on the
current one, but there is a from 1983.
encloses the
installation and a large part of the bulldozed summit, but a use trail takes
you across the top outside the fence and west down the .
The descent
trail is somewhat steep and loose, not great footing, but better than dealing
with brush. It connects with the truck trail at
with May BM before zigzagging its way up the
of the second summit. It took about 25min to reach of May BM
where a register can be found amongst a collection of rocks next to
. I signed onto of signatures with Tom's
LPC list finish as a way to join him after the fact, if not actually in spirit.
Though not an impressive summit, the view overlooking the San Fernando Valley
is nice. I spent the first 24yrs of my life growing up here and my visits often
brings back fond memories. The one thing missing from the view from
when I was a kid was the thick, brownish-black smog that would have made such
a view exceedingly rare (a few times a year I could see the surrounding
mountains following a rainstorm). Thank you unleaded gas.
I wandered northwest off the summit, the shorter route to the truck trail, even
though slightly longer overall back to where I'd started. I walked the badly
worn pavement of
back to the saddle before climbing back up to the
top of Fernando 2 BM via the use trail. Back by noon, the outing had taken
barely an hour. These were the only two summits found on LoJ, but as is often
the case, PB (peakbagger.com) often has other semi-random points that users have
submitted as "summits", some more deserving than others. I pulled out my phone
and fired up the PB app and lo and behold there were three other such summits
listed nearby. Karl Fieberling had recently logged ascents to all of them, so
they couldn't be all bad, right?
Hero Peak / Tribute Peak
Hero Peak is found immediately east of the fire station, a small knoll that
hosts the large servicing the station. I parked at
of a use trail running up the west side and took all of four
minutes to climb to the top. This is the shortest route to the summit. A
somewhat longer use trail runs up from the southeast and a third option starts
from near Bear Divide to the east, making for a longer, mile-long hike to the
top. One is treated to a nice view of Magic Mtn and other summits of the San
Gabriels to . The summit also provides a good vantage from
which to take in Fernando 2 BM to .
But as summits go, it's pretty lame. So much so that when I got back to the van
I decided to keep hiking the 3/4 mile northwest along the
to Tribute Peak which is a mere
1/3mi north of San Fernando 2 BM. Had I known about it earlier, I could have
tagged it while walking back along the truck trail. One could easily drive to
the base too, making for a "summit" that takes but a minute to tag. The saving
grace of the hike was the I found along the way - cute
little devils, not often seen in the state. The summit provides a nice view of
and the Placerita Canyon State Park areas. Both of these
summits could easily have been combined with the first two summits by simply
parking in the main parking area of the fire station.
Mesa BM
I drove a mile back along the main road towards Bear Divide, stopping at a bend
where the road turns sharply to the north. A short hike of a quarter mile takes
one south to the end of a subsidiary ridgeline where two small
can be found. The lower one is
of Mesa BM, also called Contact Point on the topo map. I found no benchmark,
but did note an interesting use trail continuing steeply down to the south. To
the southeast is a view of , a tall concrete barrier
holding back the Pacoima Reservoir (low water level today).
It was just after 1p when I finished back at the van, barely two hours for the
day, which was just as well - more time for visiting with my sister and
nephew...
Continued...