I had spent the night camped in the Lake Hughes area. I had arrived there after
dark and went about searching for the start of the Lake Hughes Truck Trail, a
dirt road climbing up into the Liebre Range. The correct start is east of the
lake, off a road signed as Private and confusingly so. Seems I didn't drive far
enough up the road to find the truck trail and went about looking for another
way. I found it at the end of E Lake Shore Dr on the south side of the lake.
The pavement ends at a gate and it was here that I spent the night, expecting
to walk the road in the morning. I was happy to find that 
the gate was
unlocked and I was able to drive through the gate and meet up with the truck
trail I had hoped to use the previous evening. I was able to drive almost 3mi up
the road to get within a quarter mile of Peak 4,234ft. I 
parked at a
saddle 
NNW of the summit and followed an old
firebreak/motorcycle track up to the summit. 
Views were limited
due to lingering clouds from the previous afternoon's modest storm system. I
found 
a cairn and a 
small memorial someone had left for their
family. The whole hike took only 10min, whereas the driving was 20min each way.
Back out through 
the same gate,
I spent the next 30min driving down Elizabeth
Lake Canyon on Lake Hughes Rd, stopping at the closed Warm Springs Camp. I was
here to hike the Warm Springs Fish Canyon Truck Trail to a trio of unnamed
peaks. The truck trail is gated 
from the start and no longer open to
vehicle traffic. I 
parked
on the right side before the gate, one of the few places I
didn't see No Trespassing or No Parking signs. The hike was long, about seven
miles each way, including the small diversions from the truck trail to climb
the various summits. I had the place to myself, not another soul the for the
5hr+ that I was there. Most of the gradient is pretty tame, no steep sections
at all on the truck trail.
Less than 10min from the gate, one finds out why the road has been
closed to vehicles - a bad washout has completely destroyed it. It looks like
the drains where 
Warm Springs Creek goes under the road
got clogged, allowing the creek to run over the road and eventually
modified its course to include 
part of the road. It would appear the
Forest Service has no plans to ever reopen this to vehicles. Easy enough to
manage on foot, however.
Past the washout, the road begins to 
climb out of the creek drainage
on the north side,
eventually reaching a divide between Warm Springs Canyon to the east and Fish
Canyon to the west. Turning northeast, the road becomes 
more of a trail
as it has been some years since vehicles have been allowed on it. In one
location where a washout occurred, a drainage culvert has been repurposed as
a bridge,
quite cleverly. The first summit is about a mile up from the divide, Peak
3,780ft. An old firebreak allows access 
from the northwest, a steep
but short climb up 
chaparral-covered slopes. In similar fashion, I
returned to the truck trail, continued northeast and climbed the next two
summits. About a dozen ticks found their way 
onto my clothing while
hiking through the brush growing along the truck trail between the first and
second summit. I flicked most of them off
before they could cause trouble, but one got pulled from my arm a few minutes
after it had begun the process of burrowing in. Oddly, no ticks were found on
the brushier firebreaks leading up to the summits. I left 
a register
on the last summit, 
Peak 4,119ft,
which was furthest from my starting point. If
one were to continue on the truck trail (which ends not far north of Peak
4,119ft) and the firebreak climbing steeply up from there, one would reach
Sawtooth Mtn,
an HPS summit a little over a mile north of Peak 4,119ft. Feeling
no need to tag that one a second time, I headed back down the way I'd come. I
finished back at the jeep around 1:15p and decided to call it a day. I was to
meet Laura M. in Burbank that evening and would have do some driving through
traffic to get there. I showered somewhere off Lake Hughes Rd before finishing
the drive down to Castaic Lake. Then it was onto Interstate 5 for the
drive into the Los Angeles Basin, the least-fun part of the day...
Continued...