another adventure: mt. san antonio

Recently I accomplished a life goal: I hiked Mt. Baldy. As part of the Six Pack of Peaks, it doesn't really seem like that huge of a deal, especially with how many people we saw on the trail. But for me it was. I went to high school right at the base of this mountain. I have endless memories of going into this mountain with friends in high school and taking long drives up the windy road when we all came home in the summers during college. 

The day we hiked we started at San Antonio Falls and took the fire road up to the Notch, from there we hiked Devil's Backbone and it was just as terrifying as I thought it would be because of the views it offers on either side. You can cut out some mileage and elevation by taking the ski lifts but we opted not to. Getting to the summit seemed like an endless climb, at one point the trail seems to just go straight up. 

(This is my "what-have-I gotten-myself-into" face.)

We decided to make a giant loop out of our hike and take the Baldy Bowl trail back down to the Ski Hut and on to San Antonio Falls. We didn't take a lot of pictures this trip. It was a nice change to not constantly take out my phone and go "this would be GREAT for the blog." Instead we just hiked and talked and hiked and talked. We only took our phones out at the summit for a few photos to remember it by. We may have been the only ones up there that did not bother to take pictures of all of SoCal (which you seriously can do from the top, you see everything.) Instead, I took this one picture of the San Gabriel Mountains continuing on to the West. It's not the best picture I have ever taken but it is the memory I will never forget. 

xoxo,
kat