Good Friday was a holiday for me, so while the kid was in daycare I took the opportunity to bag this pointy peak I'd been meaning to for quite some time. I sorta had been saving it for when my father was in town, but these days I've got a different San Gabriel mountain adventure to do with him that takes priority. This peak is a little too ambitious for Justina or a Pirate Preschooler hike, so long story short I struck out solo, which I haven't done for a little while.
There are a couple trip reports of this peak I've found in the board archives, starting with davidwiese who's mystery-hike I correctly identified the first time I ever fatefully visited this message board about a year ago
https://eispiraten.com/viewtopic.php?p= ... cle#p66293
And then Sean did it back in 2015
https://eispiraten.com/viewtopic.php?p= ... cle#p52094
I've planned this hike for so long I didn't bother with a map, and its pretty fool-proof anyways: Mendenhall Ridge Road out to Highline Saddle (which is hard to miss, and I've been there via Burma Rd before) then follow the ridgeline back to the summit.
The road is a steady rise, and I tend to push myself at a pretty good 3MPH clip for this kind of hiking, and was enough to break a sweat in the cool brisk cloud-blowing winter weather. I made Highline Saddle in under an hour, and then the far more entertaining stretch of roller-coastering in a distinctly western San Gabes sort of way back along the ridgeline began. This stretch went even quicker, reaching the summit about 45 minutes later, with final climb that was enough of a workout I counted my steps. The ridge was amazingly easy to hike along, despite there being next to no trail. The brush was only about knee-high, and the Mendenhall Gneiss had weathered to a smooth-sailing gravel. I made way better time than expected. Sean's trip report talks a lot about poison oak and other brush that must have been wiped out the following year in the Sand Fire. Now its mostly just wildflowers and low bushes with the occasional yucca. At one spot I circled around an angry Buckthorn bush, but those nasty creatures were few and far between.
My photos are (unintentionally) in almost the exactly same locations as david's, but its not surprising because they are striking views that I suspect demonstrate some of the greatest exposure you can find at these elevations in the whole San Gabriel mountain range.
The summit itself was windy and cold, a narrow exposure of rusty gneiss worthy of the peak's name. I didn't linger long before starting the only real tricky part of the hike: finding the best route to drop directly back down to the Mendenhall Ridge Rd to complete a loop. David had re-traced the ridge again back, and Sean had backtracked to a little bit of a saddle, but I wanted to try for a clean loop continuing directly down the west ridge. For this goal I exported a geo.tiff file of the amazing LA County GIS topographical map with its unmatched 10-ft contours. I had it loaded into my phone using Avenza Maps and carefully made my down the west ridge trying to stick to a narrow target of the least steep possible route where I hopefully wouldn't get cliffed-out. I'm happy to say it worked out just about perfectly, and I only had to get on my butt for the last little drop down the the side of the actual road-cut at the very end. Road-cuts are a re-occuring troublesome obstacle when scrambling off-trail in the Gabes, so I had made a mental note of spots where it could be passable to make the drop down on my hike out. Really happy with the precision the GIS map afforded me, and plan to use this technique on future scrambles where the terrain gets technical enough to warrant it. A shout-out to Dima for pointing me to that resource!
I was back to my car in about 2 hours and forty five minutes. For years this hike had been a big looming adventure in the future for me, but then this past Friday when actually executed felt almost more like an extended lunch break after some of the bigger days I've had this past year with the Ice Pirate community. Its a pretty cool thing to feel like you've never been more capable at a life-long hobby you've always been passionate about. Can't wait for more opportunities to push myself now that these once seemingly intimidating routes I can, in actuality, slay no problem
5 miles, 1754ft gain
