This morning, I made an attempt to hike Devil’s Canyon, deep in the Angeles National Forest. I figured since it was a north-south canyon, it would have a healthy amount of sunshine and less snow than the surrounding peaks.
Turned out I was wrong. About an eighth of a mile into the route, I ran into a snow-covered mess — complete with a steep drop off. If the snow were more powdery, I could have continued, but this was the stuff that’s been melted during the day and frozen over again at night — tough, slippery, and unsafe to hike on.
I ended up getting back in the car and heading into a lower canyon instead — but be aware that there’s still snow up on the mountains, even though we haven’t had precipitation in a little while.
On the other hand, if you want to take a trip to play in some plowed snowbanks, head toward the Angeles Crest Highway ASAP.
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We were surprised to see how much snow was still up there this weekend (and how many people were driving on the 2 because of it) but we hiked to the summit of Buckhorn/Akawie (http://angeles.sierraclub.org/hps/guides/13b.htm) anyway. Most of the trail is a notoriously hard to find use trail and most write ups just say ‘walk up’. In this way, the snow was great because we could follow our footsteps back down instead of getting lost which evidently is a frequent occurrence.
There was another set of footprints, so someone else was obviously up there before us.
Occasionally we’d fall through the snow to our knees, but in general it was a great snow hike.
Sounds like a lot of fun!
The mountains are really beautiful when they’ve got some snow on ‘em. Hopefully they’ll get a nice fresh coat from this week’s cloud and drizzle mix.