Running and climbing at Tahquitz

bcrowell · Post by **bcrowell** » Wed May 06, 2020 5:22 pm

I went up to Idyllwild Friday to attempt jogging up to San J and back from the South Ridge trailhead. I had fun, but didn't actually get that far because of snow, despite bringing microspikes. The trail north of the lookout tower was covered with snow, and I didn't feel safe going that way, so I scrambled along the crest of the ridge, which was actually kind of fun. But there was a lot of snow in the deep gullies between the PCT junction and saddle junction, so I gave up there and turned around. I've been thinking for a while that it would be a fun and challenging project to do this all the way to the summit and back as a run/jog/walk. It seems like it might work, but there could be a narrow time window in the spring. It seems like I'd need to do it when there wouldn't be too much snow, but the water sources such as Wellman Cienaga would still be running. I didn't see another human until the final mile on the way back. Practiced social distancing along that part of the trail.

Sunday I went back to the same area to go rock climbing with my daughter at Tahquitz Rock. Quite a few people were out on the rock. It was necessary to be a little more self-contained than usual on the way in and out. We didn't stop in town at all. I assumed the restrooms at Humber Park would be locked up -- we didn't check -- so we used our awesome wilderness pooping skills.

I might try the run again in another week or two if the satellite photos look like the snow has melted off enough.

Post by **dima** » Wed May 06, 2020 11:10 pm

Nice trips! Where do you get recent aerial imagery?

bcrowell · Post by **bcrowell** » Thu May 07, 2020 8:42 am

dima wrote: ↑Nice trips! Where do you get recent aerial imagery?

Caltopo has it available as an overlay. Here's one that shows the area around Tahquitz:
https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=33.7507 ... tinel_tc-0

They have some kind of rationing or throttling system in place, so if you try to access the satellite images intensively, it will stop working. But it doesn't seem to care if you access a particular image such as this one a few times in a week. I think the satellite acquires new imagery of a given area about once a week. Sometimes it's kind of slow to load the image, so you have to wait a couple of minutes for all the squares to show up.

bcrowell · Post by **bcrowell** » Fri May 15, 2020 6:06 pm

I went back again for another attempt at the run, 2 weeks after the earlier TR. Much more successful this time with less snow. Wellman Cienaga was running. It took me just under 4 hours to get to the point where I turned around, at the north end of the giant switchback east of San J. Could have probably gone to the summit, but I didn't want to spend that much more time. There were some fairly big snowfields in the grotto to the northeast of Jean Peak, but there were good boot tracks through them, and the snow was fairly firm in the morning.

A lot more people were out on the trails this time. The Lumber Mill is open for takeout, so I got a veggie burger there, which made me very happy.

I don't know if there are any climbers active on this site, but I got a good look at the north side of Tahquitz (Lily) Rock. There is snow piled up near the bases of East Lark and The Error, but otherwise the north side looks climbable.