After leaving my car at Switzers, we shuttled over to Red Box and geared up, hitting the trail by 7am. We hopped aboard the Bill Riley Trail and caught a beautiful view of the powdered high country.
We heard a chainsaw crew hard at work. Early Sunday morning is apparently a good time for trimming everything within fifty feet of the trail.
Within an hour or so we hit the San Gabriel Peak/Mt. Disappointment saddle and started down the trail to Markham Saddle, gaining our first view of both Bear Canyon and Brown Mountain.
At Markham Saddle we bumped into members of two different Meetup groups, one doing the several peaks around the head of Bear Canyon, and another also en route to Brown Mountain.
Henry and I spent a couple minutes trying to convince a somewhat confused Meetupper that we weren't actually the droids he was looking for.
During our short break at the saddle, I suddenly had the urge to do some blunging, but then I noticed a sign on the water tank.
Markham Saddle has been designated a "blung free" zone. So I decided to save my blunging for Brown Mountain.
From Markham Saddle the Mt. Lowe Road took us along the south ridge of Bear Canyon to the Tom Sloane Saddle Trail.
The TSS Trail hasn't received much love lately, but it's still easy to avoid the poodle dog and poison oak.
I can't say we had a quiet, peaceful descent to the saddle, as twenty-plus Meetuppers marched past us, many of whom kept asking, "Are you U.S. Hiking?" I felt like politely answering, "No, they went ahead of us." But instead I replied, "Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!!!"
That was a joke.
But there was one particularly loud talker who let everyone in the canyon know exactly what she was thinking at every moment, and I did finally say "shut up", but probably not loud enough for her to hear me. Mostly I muttered it to myself, to help alleviate the sudden and powerful urge to kill.
And now for something positive: we were getting closer to Brown Mountain.
From TSS we marched up the steep ridge route and over the first false summit with the large cairn. Cecelia found some Chapstick up there.
Brown was getting even closer now.
It really is true what they say: the closer you get to Brown, the more brown it gets. By the time we reached the summit, Brown was so brown that Rico was able to pick it up and pour brown down his throat.
With all the Meetuppers at the summit, I temporarily thought we were at Inspiration Point. But then they all departed, and I recognized Brown Mountain once again.
I tried to blung Cecelia, but she didn't want any part of that.
With the Meetuppers gone, our return to TSS did not produce any urges to kill, at least not on my part.
Teke was feeling triumphant, having conquered another Lower Peak.
Next on the agenda was Bear Canyon. The drop from TSS was very easy with a nice trail through the trees.
At the streambed, there were ruins of some sort of building. It seemed too small to be a cabin, but perhaps it once provided shelter for a family of gnomes. Who knows?
From this point, the streamside trip down Bear Canyon required hunting for signs of sawed branches, and trying to follow colored flags which marked the route.
We made slow but steady progress, periodically having to step through poison oak and poodle dog patches, hurdle downed branches, and boulder-hop along the stream in narrow sections of the canyon.
I was having so much fun that I decided to slip on a slick boulder and stumble face first into the stream. The water was so refreshing as it filled up my pants and boots.
We encountered a young foursome in shorts and t-shirts scrambling upstream. I initially thought they were hardcore, but later changed my mind when they didn't know about poodle dog. We showed them what poodle dog looked like, which was very easy to do since the plant was practically everywhere. Apparently one member of their party had been touching it. The next time we saw that guy he was frantically washing himself off in the stream. And the third time we saw him he had smeared his body with mud.
Anyway, we eventually reached Bear Canyon campground.
Then the Bear Canyon trail sign.
After exiting Bear Canyon, we headed up the Arroyo Seco
to Switzers.
We contemplated finishing the loop to Red Box by continuing up the Gabrieleno Trail. But it was getting late, and another couple hours of the Arroyo Seco wasn't exactly a thrilling idea. So we called it a 14.5 mile day around 3:30pm.
