I was at 
Vincent Gap
high on the Angeles Crest Highway just before 4a. The road,
an engineering marvel of its day when it was completed in 1956, runs for
66 miles atop the San Gabriel Mountains, on or near the crest dividing the
Los Angeles Basin to the south from the Mojave Desert to the north. It's still
a very cool road today. The section
between Vincent Gap and Islip Saddle, five miles to the west, has been closed
for four years now due to extensive slides that washed out sections of the road.
I had been to nearby Wrightwood a few times over the years, but never up as
high as Vincent Gap. I drove up this way to climb the HPS peaks around the
Baden-Powell area, finding it a very enjoyable outing.
I got the early 4a start so that I could be atop Baden-Powell for sunrise,
slated for around 5:30a. So near to the summer solstice, it did not take long
for the 
eastern sky
to begin to grow light, and before 5a I was able to turn off
my headlamp. Just before the summit I came across the
Waldron Tree, a venerable
1,500yr-old limber pine growing on rocky soil along the trail. It was named for
an honored local leader of the Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area.
The four mile, 2,800-foot ascent took me almost exactly an hour and a half,
getting me to the summit right at 
sunrise.
It was a very nice morning, cool but not cold, and the sun came up quickly to
start brightening the mountaintops. I was surprised to see Baden-Powell's
shadow
extend west towards the Valley over the haze, much like Shasta or
Rainier in the early morning. I wandered around the Baden-Powell
memorial at the top, reading the 
inscriptions
and pondering their meaning like the good
Eagle Scout I am. If it brought tears to my eyes, I'm not telling.
Being the highest peak in the area, one might think that Baden-Powell is
also the hardest peak to reach in the vicinity, but not so. That honor goes to
Ross Mtn, barely a bump off the long 
South Ridge
of Baden-Powell. It has maybe
100ft of prominence, but is some 2,000ft down the ridge. So the trick is the
long climb back up to Baden-Powell after the descent to Ross. The good news is
that the ridge makes for a delightful climb, with swell views off both sides to
many of the 
other peaks
in the area and to the Los Angeles Basin below. It took
about an hour to make the descent down the ridge, a use trail helpful in places
to get through a few brushy sections. The 
red HPS can
was there atop a small
pile of rocks, with signatures going back to 
1995
when the register was placed
by HPS veteran Carleton Shay (his 8th time to Ross!). I spent probably 20
minutes around the summit area, taking 
pictures and a break as well.
The ascent 
back up to Baden-Powell took another hour and a half,
and just after 8:30a I was back 
on top. Just before reaching the
summit for the second time, I came across another 
solo hiker
heading down to Ross. We were both surprised to find
someone else heading to Ross on the same day. We chatted briefly before parting
ways in opposite directions.
From 
the summit of Baden-Powell, most of the remaining part of the
hike was downhill. I followed the PCT west along the crest, tagging first
Mt. Burnham (a 
summit cairn, but no register), then the
higher 
Throop Peak. A 
plaque
honoring the founder of Caltech (originally called Throop University) was placed
at the summit in 1992. I could have continued along the crest
to Hawkins about
another mile away and to several other HPS peaks in that direction, but I
decided to leave those for another day when I'll
drive up to Islip Saddle from the
other direction. I headed down the northwest ridge of Throop, eventually
stumbling upon a no longer maintained trail that drops all the way to Dawson
Saddle. A 
teetering sign
at the TH describes how the Dawson Saddle Trail was
built by the Boy Scouts some 26 years earlier but it has been neglected now for
some time.
It was just before 10:30a when I got to the 
maintenance shed
at 
the saddle, the
highpoint of the Angeles Crest Highway at 7,901ft. From the saddle I made the
quick ascent up a use trail on the north side of the road to the sumit of
Mt. Lewis,
taking only about 30 minutes. Mt Lewis isn't particularly high and the
views are muted by the trees all about the broad summit. I found a fairly
new register among some rocks, placed within the last year.
I looked around for an
older one at all the obvious places I could think of, but was unable to
discover another one.
Back down at Dawson Saddle, I settled in for the two hour hike back down the
road to Vincent Gap. With the highway closed and no motor vehicles whizzing by,
it was a fairly pleasant walk cruising down the center of the road. A handful
of 
cyclists plied their way up the grade as I was hiking down,
with some enterprising young men using 
motor scooters to
ferry supplies for a late-season 
snowboard park
they were grooming in a side canyon a few miles up from Vincent
Gap. For the most part, the road was in terrific shape, looking to have been
recently repaved and swept regularly of debris and rockfall by Caltrans.
Logs that had fallen on the road were 
cut and piled in several places
along the road, 
large boulders
pushed or dragged off the roadbed. There was one spot where half the
road was still covered by what looked like a more 
recent rockfall,
and nearer to Vincent Gap could be found the more 
serious slide
that had taken much of the road with it. Caltrans was in the process of
stabilizing 
this section, boring 
deep holes for a
foundation and pouring concrete to shore up the hillside.
It was 12:45p when I got back to the the van at Vincent Gap. The
parking lot,
completely empty when I had arrived in the night, was now almost full with
visitors. I drove back down the highway, turning left on Big Pines Highway
before reaching Wrightwood. I had one more HPS summit in the area to tag before
calling it a day - Pinyon Ridge. The description seemed easy enough, and I
figured I could knock it off in less than an hour. I parked along side the road
at a turnout near the
YMCA camp (called All Nations Camp on the 7.5' topo). I
hiked up through 
the camp
until I found a weak trail along the creek at the
camp boundary. The trail crossed the dry creek several times and has been washed
out in several places, but I could still follow it for more than half a mile. It
eventually petered out where it crossed a dirt road traversing the north-sloping
hillside. Huh? This wasn't in the description. I had no map with me for what
should have been a trivial peak, not unlike Mt. Lewis, and for this I suffered.
Thinking the summit must be above me (that's where they're usually found), I
continued up the slope on the other side of the road, scrambling
cross-country up the steep, loose dirt of the forest understory. The ascent
seemed to go on and on, all the while the top of the ridge not looking any
closer. I then stumbled across a trail, well-maintained, traversing the slope.
Another question mark. By now I was sure I was not heading up towards Pinyon
Ridge and needed a new strategy. I turned west and followed the trail to see if
I could get a view through the trees to orient myself.
In less than a quarter mile I came
to a ridge where I could see down to Pinyon Ridge, well to the north and
300 feet below me. I had overshot the summit by more than half a mile. Rats. I
was lucky to find a decent use trail descending the ridgeline to the saddle
just south of Pinyon Ridge where I picked up the dirt road heading to the
summit (I could have saved a lot of trouble had I followed the first dirt road
I came upon to the west, where it traversed to the same saddle).
There is no obvious summit highpoint on Pinyon Ridge as I came to find. I
stomped around through the grass and trees looking for a cairn with a register,
but found none. I did come across a 
lone duck
alongside the road, but it didn't
have any companions and seemed to indicate nothing. Oh well. The views were
non-existent as well, heavy brush and trees blocking most directions (a nice
view of 
Baden-Powell
was to be had looking south, however). Getting back down
was another story, but easier. I had expected to find a use trail to the summit
as the HPS guide seemed to indicate, but after looking around back at the
saddle for evidence of one, I had to eventually give up. I could have taken
the road east to the point where I had crossed it on the way up, but decided it
would be easier to follow the dry canyon down directly from the saddle. Though
there was some brush to get around, for the most part it provided a fairly
quick way back to 
the camp,
down hundreds of feet of steep, gravely slopes.
What I thought might take 45 minutes ended up taking twice that, but
such are the uncertainties of peakbagging sometimes. At least I had eventually
found the summit and didn't have to give up in complete failure, as I had
thought might happen for a while there...
Continued...