EISPIRATEN

Returned to Chilao to complete the route from weeks back. Going south on the Silver Mocassin trail and then down the firebreak ridge.
I got into a minor flow of East Fork of Alder Creek , just in time to get a taste of the slog section in between. Gone was the Little Sierra…replaced by the upper Big Tujunga in yellow Fall color.Speed slowed considerably and I was happy this wasn’t going to last long. As if to welcome me to the Tujunga, a mile long out of operation black hose appeared.I had thought there was an obstacle here requiring a rope, but it was nothing. I continued downstream hitting Alder Creek in no time.The East Fork doesn’t join Alder Creek right away and the black hose trail stays with the East Fork. Meanwhile, dry Alder Creek is a bushwack.The mini narrows start at a meadow and it was clear sailing until I hit a Lobo canyon deja-vu: a short drop into a keeper pothole followed by an exit drop.I went around to check out the pothole. A short climb on the side got me onto the lip where I lowered myself in to check water depth. Alas it was a true keeper and I felt kind of stupid on the way I approached the whole thing.Not stupid enough to let go and get into the pothole though A sketchy climb got me back above the pothole and I returned back up the firebreak ridge. On the way back I checked out some of the rock formations on the ridge that are not obvious from the top of the ridge. A lot of rock exploring around these parts available. Total time: 7 hours.

Sunrise in the Big Tujunga


Ridge travel


Rocks along Alder Creek


The meadow


Keeper...zoomed in. There is a short rappel before the picture.


Plenty of nifty clouds this pre-storm day


More rocks


Some hard to get a good picture of close up. End up on super steep crumbly slopes.


View from the top of some rocks

Rad pothole.

Have you hiked all of Alder Creek, below Loomis? I've always been curious about it.

I saw the largest lion track I've ever seen, near the ranch about two years ago. 60mm palm pad! I can only assume the fittest animals made their way to this patch of unburned area and made it their refuge.

Cool pics and TR.

cougarmagic wrote: ↑Have you hiked all of Alder Creek, below Loomis? I've always been curious about it.

Nope, but I got a good look at it. Downstream of the pothole is a closed area for the frogs, but between there and up to Loomis, Alder Creek is pretty much hellish. I think the animals stick to the surrounding hillsides and strategically invade the creek. Then again, maybe there is a black-hose trail there too

Damn, we need to get AW's photos restored. Do you still have the ones for this TR? Can you reupload them?

AW: if you

• Still have the photos for all your old reports on a disk drive somewhere
• And have some automateable way to convert your trip-report image filenames (like "tr6.jpg") to the images you have on your computer

Then we can do an automated mass-reimport to get everything back. The second point above might be hard. Do you have any idea which image is "tr6.jpg" without the human you manually looking through your images?

Did AW put a date in all of his TR titles? Could you match date then filename?

I suspect he might have lots of photos for each trip, but only a select few were included in the trip report. And that there's no automateable way to match them up. But he can hopefully tell us that I'm wrong.

No it was the same filenames for every trip. This one is confounding because I had switched cameras and computers..
I have a few pictures from that trip uploaded 12/2/13.


But yeah, I was worried the way there might brush up...was hoping that canyoneers would keep it up.