EISPIRATEN

I've been researching how to hike Magic Mountain as a loop and am looking at a route from the north beginning in Lang: I have not found names for these trails. Google calls the 10 mi road on the west side of Pole Canyon "Magic Mountain Truck Trail", and the bottom of the trail on east side has a POI for "Bear Canyon Mine".

The strava heat map shows folks using Magic Mountain Truck Trail, but very little traffic on steeper 5mi trail on the east side: The east trail looks pretty accessible from Street View, but the west road says Keep Out. Topos indicate this is a miliary reservation and don't want to get in trouble, especially if I'm on my way down and they tell me to turn around.

Are other folks familiar with these trails? That trail to the east looks like a real butt-kicker, with the last mile of it at 30% grade. There's a number of curious spurs half-way up I see even in the earliest aerial imagery from the 50's.

More importantly, will I be able to descend on Magic Mountain Truck Trail? The bottom of it looks industrially developed, but don't see gates and fences impeding travel. If this signage is absent from Magic Mountain on descent, a hiker might plead ignorance when they arrive at the bottom 10 miles later that they didn't realize there'd be any trouble. I'm mostly encouraged by the amount of traffic I see on Strava, though more of it originates from Oak Springs Canyon Road following around Sand Canyon Country Club to the west.

Your thought process is sound!

Haven't done these routes yet. But my experience has been this area is relatively forgiving brush-wise, and these routes have what look to be decent roads upon cursory examination of satellite imagery. At least on foot you should be fine. On bike you probably are too.

My general strategy when it comes to access over private property is I come at my most uncertain interface via the wild land side (AKA at the end of your trip) so if you *do* get busted you just graciously allow yourself ushered the way you were going anyways, pleading ignorance, and your trip isn't ruined I also check nearest google street view ahead of time for no trespassing signage, gates, etc.

If you are on foot to you can always circumvent as needed!

Thanks! I've had one bad experience where I wanted to make a loop through Oat Mountain and got stopped four miles away from the car, and instead had to turn around and backtrack eight miles. I've encountered some aggressive signage and fences around Newhall and Santa Clarita, and given the distance I'm planning, really want to avoid backtracking.

It perhaps would be safer to expect come down through Oak Springs Canyon, but that doubles the distance between endpoints, making it a 24 mi loop. That might be expedited on bike, though I don't think I could get it up the Eastern trail which I'm guessing is an old fire break.

Some old ride logs on TrailForks showed someone exiting through/past the golf course after descending something like the western route you show. These ride logs have been removed, or I'd link one, sorry. Looks, on the map, like you'd go southwest instead where you'd turn northeast to Lang.

sugar wrote: Sun Jan 12, 2025 10:40 pm Thanks! I've had one bad experience where I wanted to make a loop through Oat Mountain and got stopped four miles away from the car, and instead had to turn around and backtrack eight miles. I've encountered some aggressive signage and fences around Newhall and Santa Clarita, and given the distance I'm planning, really want to avoid backtracking.

You might want to scope out the problem area from the road ahead of time, poke around a little bit to get a better idea what your best route should be. Have a checklist of a few spots to check. I do that sometimes if there is a lot of uncertainty.

On the Oat Mtn loop did you get stopped by the natural gas drilling? I've run into that giant gate at Jones Junction before!! That is a pretty serious obstruction. Luckily I didn't have to backtrack so much.