Continuing my rehab, we took four quick trips: to Giant Forest in March, to the Grant Grove area in April, to Mt. Baldy in May, and to Mt. Pinos in June.
March 12: We stayed at Potwisha Campground and "commuted" to the Wolverton area, near Giant Forest. It was foggy and cold, but we didn't care -- it was great just to be on snowshoes again.
We stopped off at the Big Trees trail to see, well, big trees:
Even though this trail is popular in the summer, we had it all to ourselves --- just add several feet of snow:
The customary wishes were made on the bark of the Sequoias:
March 14: On the way back up the hill, the clouds had lifted, giving us a view of the Great Western Divide:
Back to the Alta Trail for some more silence and solitude:
Sunset at the campground:
March 15: The winter of 2023-2024 had been wonderfully rainy. The Sierra foothills looked like Ireland, only with citrus groves:
As an added bonus, there was a rainbow waiting for us over our driveway:
Note that the sky is darker on one side of the rainbow than the other. This phenomenon is called (no kidding) Alexander's dark band. (Not ragtime.). The explanation involves a lot of physics having to do with the angles at which the light is refracted. It's above my pay grade. As they say, just GTS. ("Google that stuff.")
We had such a good time at Giant Forest in March that we decided to take a quick follow-up trip to the Grant Grove area in April. (Bear in mind that we lost all of 2023 to medical issues, so we have to make up for lost time.)
Azalea Campground is first-come, first-served during the winter. We took a chance and bingo. We snagged a great site located about a hundred yards from any other site, and the snow was not a significant obstacle:
Felice brought some roses from our garden -- why not?
April 10: We mostly tromped around the forest north and east of Grant Grove, just enjoying the freedom of movement that the snowshoes provide. (And enjoying the silence and isolation, too.)
April 11: We started out at the road closure of Generals' Highway and soon found ourselves at Montecito Sequoia Lodge, closed for the season due to the heavy snow and the road closures. Over the past 35 years, we have spent many, many days at the Lodge, both summers and winters.
April 12: Someone had thoughtfully left a sled at our campsite. You might want to crank up the volume to get the full effect for these three short videos:
Apparently, we were not the only ones enjoying Bearskin Grove. These fresh tracks were made by a bear with roughly size 14 claws:
May 15: Our next mini-trip was just a day hike in Ice House Canyon, on Mt. Baldy. The creek was loud and delightful:
Spring!
June 3: Our next mini-trip was to McGill Campground on Mt. Pinos, near Frazier Park. The campground was almost empty. Most of the campsites were very shady; ours wasn't. The campground was at around 7500 feet.
(Warning: a long and exciting story about a DIY fix-it job is approaching. Feel free to skip the next few paragraphs.)
Shortly after we arrived and leveled out the trailer, we noticed that the "check" light was on the refrigerator's display panel. Uh-oh. That would mean that the fridge burner was not getting any propane. I knew the tanks were full. What could be the matter -- was the fridge malfunctioning?
I then tried to light the stove to check the flow of propane. Nothing. With full tanks and no propane flow, the problem was not the fridge. It had to be the regulator, the device that limits the flow of propane from the tanks to the utilities. There was no way I could fix a busted regulator. We were going to have to turn around and go home.
But then I remembered that we happened to have a spare regulator. We'd had a problem about ten years ago with another regulator that made an annoying whining noise, so I got a new quiet one and saved the old noisy one, on the theory that we might need a spare someday.
Well, this was Someday! Time to open the toolboxes.
The hardest part of the fix-it job was finding wrenches to fit the gas fittings on the hoses leading to the regulator. I carry a full set of sockets and open-end wrenches, but some of the fittings were non-standard -- millimetric? Doubtful.
Crescent wrenches did not work either. Fortunately, we had a couple of needle-nose vice-grips pliers, which got the job done. I had a tough time threading the couplings, but Felice's nimble fingers took care of that problem.
We hooked it all up, opened the tank valves, turned on the stove, and lit the burners! Lessons learned: (1) It is still a lot of fun to work together and solve problems, even after 50 years of DIY. (2) Vice-grips pliers are not the first tool I'd reach for, but they are sometimes the last. (3). To the extent possible, carry spares for any mission critical hardware.
(End of DIY detour.)
June 4: We took the Condor Summit trail (which is part of the Vincent Tumamait trail), which starts at about 8800 feet at the top of Mt. Pinos:
The first two miles were in gently rolling terrain. I did some homework and came up empty -- how come the high mountains in this area have relatively flat summits? It must have something to do with the movement of the San Andreas, which runs along the foot of the mountains, but I am stumped.
Speaking of the San Andreas, Felice spotted this anomalous outcropping:
My best guess is that the granite was extruded under water as a form of pillow lava. This is a bold and uneducated guess, but I'm out of my depth. Or it could be just weathered granite, but why would it weather along the seams unless there were layers of different hardnesses? I don't know.
Note, too, that the granite strata (weird phrase!) are sharply inclined, tilted up to a nearly vertical orientation. That is not uncommon for sedimentary or metamorphic rock and is almost certainly caused by uplift due to the nearby San Andreas.
June 5: We took the South Ridge trail, which runs from McGill campground up to Mt. Pinos campground. The trail contoured slowly upward and was very well graded.
The lupine was going strong:
Scent is such a powerful trigger of ancient memories: lupine has a lovely smell, but it always reminds me of the inexpensive laundry soap that my late Aunt Mitzi used in 1955. Long time ago.
Yet another fascinating granite outcropping, with a more typically rounded shape. Note the healthy-looking forest -- have the bark beetles somehow overlooked the mountains south of the Sierra?
June 6: We were having such a pleasant time that we extended our stay for another day, unexpectedly. We hiked around the Chula Vista campground up at the summit and came across the hill where we used to go sledding, back in the early '90s:
No hike is complete without a foot soak:
June 7: We were heading down the hill toward home when Google alerted us to a bad accident on the freeway, with no way around it. What to do? Explore! So we headed out to Cerro Noroeste, a campground at about 8000 feet, just to see what we could see.
It was very pretty, but not worth the long and twisty road up the mountain from Pine Mountain Club. There are very few hiking trails, since the campground sits on a plateau at the summit.
We parked the trailer in the shade -- Felice went for a walk and I took a rest:
