Wed, Mar 8, 2017
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| With: | Patrick O'Neill |
I was in the Santa Clarita area of Southern California for a couple of days of peakbagging before joining the family in Irvine for a volleyball tournament. Patrick was driving up from Dana Point to join me, but traffic would conspire to push his arrival past our 8a meeting plan. Luckily he was able to text me well ahead and I had time to tag an extra summit while he sat in traffic. Poor Patrick. Our outing in the Magic Mountain Wilderness would start from Soledad Canyon, with plans to tag both the Wilderness Highpoint and Prominence Point. The highpoint is reached fairly easily, but the prominence point has recorded only a single party visiting it, reported to be a tough bushwhack. I had come prepared with clippers to groom a trail from one peak to the other, but luck was on our side today. The Sand Fire from July 2016 had swept across almost the entire wilderness which is located on the northwest side of the San Gabriel Mountains. The fire had been unusually thorough, leaving very little standing in its wake. Consequently, the clippers would go unused and cross-country travel on almost all the slopes, ridges and ravines was completely brush-free. This allowed us to reach another minor summit in the area that was last reached 13yrs earlier (undoubtedly after the previous fire cycle). All in all, a great day that we both enjoyed a good deal.
Golden Valley OSP
off Placerita Canyon
Rd. Horse BM is the highpoint of the OSP, a collection of low hills situated
between the Santa Clara River to the north and Placerita Canyon to the south. A
series of old ranch roads serving as 
trails lead to the summit in a
mile and a half. The area had 
burned over in the same fire the previous
summer, but here 
the recovery is well under way. Most of the brush had
been burned off, leaving the slopes covered in 
a verdant blanket of
new grass that looked more like something in Marin County than LA County.
Starting just before sunrise, I spent and hour covering the eastern half of
the OSP in a circular route going over 
Horse BM along the way.
It was from Horse BM 
looking south that I first suspected our outing
to the Magic Mountain Wilderness would be much easier than expected. The slopes
there looked exceedingly bare, but I wondered if the dead brush branches would
create their own set of problems.
Leaving the van here where it would be easy to spot by Patrick if he
drove by before my return, I started cross-country up 
steep slopes to
Agua Dulce BM, 2/3mi distance, climbing 900ft in the process. Here, too,
one ridge on the southeast side and
descending another to 
the north and 
east. The
two mile effort took just under an hour.
Soledad Canyon Rd. We did not plan to use the usual route up the PCT
or Indian Canyon Motorway, but instead take advantage of a more direct
ridgeline to the west that showed a use trail on the satellite view.
There is a juvenile 
detention center just east of this ridge and it
appears that the detainees have created a network of trails in the area,
including along the ridge we ascended heading south. Trail or no trail, the
ridge proved brush-free and very little burned branches to dodge. There are a
few 
trail signs that can be found in the first mile along with a
memorial cross for someone who had passed in 2008. We
went over a pointed listed on PB as "The Moon", appropriately so for the
post-fire scene, though the name pre-dated the most recent fire. Just before the
two mile mark, we made 
a detour and left the ridgeline to visit
another PB summit in Pt. 3,130ft a short distance to the east at Patrick's
behest. From there we continued southwest to 
Pt. 3,665ft, another PB
summit and the junction point between the Wilderness HP (above us to
the southeast) and the PP (down to a saddle and then up to
the northwest).
It was just before noon when we reached 
the Wilderness HP, having
taken 2.5hrs. There was a small, single-page 
register
left by Keith Christensen in 2013. There
were other entries by Craig Barlow, Paul Garry and Bob Sumner, all among the
usual suspects. Our highpoint at 4,700ft was less than half a mile off the
crest of the San Gabriel Mtns to the south. 
Magic Mtn
rose a few hundred feet
higher about 2.5mi WSW, with the much higher MT. Gleason about 7mi ESE.
Following a stop of sufficient length to allow Patrick to top off his fuel
tank, we turned back, heading to Pt. 3,665ft and on to
the Wilderness PP. We
covered the 1.7mi wth a 750-foot drop through a saddle in about an hour,
arriving
not long after 1p. There was no register here, though this didn't
really come as a surprise. I've not found anyone outside myself yet interested
in Wilderness Prominence Points, so to most this was just unnamed Peak
4,054ft, normally a brushy undertaking. We were doing so well on time that it
was easy to convince Patrick to 
continue northwest
to unnamed Peak 3,897ft,
another mile further. The saddle between the two was easier than the last,
but still more than 450ft. We were surprised to see 
a cairn
here, and more
surprised yet to find 
a register
in a nested set of cans. No one had yet
recorded an ascent on PB or LoJ, so we wondered who might have left it back in
2003. His name is Bill Johnson, a fairly common name but not one we'd heard of
in peakbagging circles. A few other parties visited the summit in 2004, then
silence. We suspect that the register had been placed after a previous fire,
with the brush then growing back and making a visit almost impossible. We headed
northeast off the summit, following a ridgeline down to a small
creek channel, the last half mile 
back to Soledad Canyon
following this creek. With something over a mile to walk back
along Soledad Canyon Rd, we stopped at the rustic 
Rio Market
for some soda before 
returning to where we'd started around 3:45p.
Peak 2,844ft
on the opposite side of the
canyon from Agua Dulce BM. Lower and easier than Agua Dulce BM, we spent an
hour on a cross-country route 
up one ridgeline
and down another, once again
on the green grassy slopes that make for a more scenic hike. The summit
has a good vantage from which to view 
Three Sisters Rock
which we planned to
visit the next day. It's a striking sandstone/conglomerate feature that I'd
first seen a year earlier when I was in the area. It looked quite difficult
from our viewspot, but we hoped a close-up view would tell a better story.
It was 5p when we 
returned
to our vehicles. We showered and drove back into
town for dinner (mexican at Casa Vieja, corner of Soledad Canyon Rd and Sierra
Hwy) and margaritas. Mmmmm. Later we drove back out to more rural areas, finding
a quiet place off Davenport Rd to spend the night. More fun on tap for the next
day...
Continued...
This page last updated: Sat Mar 11 19:33:27 2017
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