It was getting hot in the lowlands and my son wanted to go for a hike so I took him on a jaunt through the San Gorgonio Wilderness. We started at South Fork on Friday with a smattering of day hikers just ahead of us. We passed them up as we made our way towards Poopout Hill. The weather was quite nice but would get hotter later in the day. The devastation of the fire still gets to me as the section after Poopout used to be such a beautiful section of trail and now its pretty ugly looking. We reached the junction with Dollar Lake and headed across the creeks that had significant water. The switchbacks were alive with flowers which were much more impressive on the way down when they were opened.
We reached Dry Lake, it was pretty nicely full and may keep its water through the summer the way it looks now. We skirted the lake to the left and passed a camper as we got to the far side of the lake. We surprised him by heading up the now very grassy slope towards Grinnell. The slope had knee high brush which was relatively easy to navigate through except for the burned out manzanita that was hidden underneath. As the incline flattened the area became more forested. There were two steps as we headed to the east and the amorphous summit. We found the summit with a circular cairn on top with no sign in canister.
Coming up from Fish Creek saddle allows you to know where the obscure east ridge is but from our direction it is quite hard to suss out. I had my son use his compass as the last time I did this route I ended up going down the SE ridge. Conversation went something like this :
"We're heading SE Dad"
"I know but the slope southward is steep"
"How are we looking now?"
"Still SE"
"Aw F*** we're on the SE ridge"
"I told you we were going SE"
"Don't talk to me"
I was able to contour down the remainder of the slope in a southerly direction and got us somewhere between the two ridges and we only had a slight detour to the Fish Creek saddle as the trail from Fish Creek climbs this slope. There was one person camping here as we headed up to 10K ridge. We didn't have the time to actually hit 10K ridge high point so we went over to Lake which has a nice little scramble to the top. This ridge gives you the best feeling of utter devastation from the fire as everything is toast along it with nothing really growing even now. Other then the downed trees this made movement quite quick. The view from Lake is excellent and you can see in all directions other then to the west where you get an interesting vantage point of San G. From here we continued along a rocky ridge back to connect with the trail. A quick hop around Zahniser got us to Mineshaft Saddle. We met a group of backpackers who we had seen earlier, they thought we had already summitted San G and were on the way down and were befuddled when we told them we hit some other peaks to the east. From there we met a ranger on our return to Dry Lake and chatted with him for a bit. Lots of backpackers were heading up as we went down for the three day weekend. The tread and incline of the trail is excellent and you can get some good movement on the way down even if you're getting old like me. We did about 16 miles with 3,800 elevation feet in 6:45. On the way down we saw the beginning of the Running Springs fire which fortunately looks like is under control.
