Gorgeous day on Mt Baldy this morning. I was a bit concerned because of the heat this last week and of course humidity. But, it just really never showed up today on Mt Baldy. The flats were up to 109 degrees, but not even close on the mountain. We started our hike a bit late, 8:00 AM from Manker Flats, then up the fire road to the cutoff to the ski hut. Lots of hikers today. The skies were clear and a light breeze going uphill from the Ski Hut. Very, very nice. I went with my son Cy and my friend DJ and it took us about an hour to get to the Ski Hut. When we got there, we looked around a bit and decided we would try to go straight up to the Devil's Backbone Trail from the Ski Hut. It was just different and looked doable, unlike our "straight up the bowl" last year. No more than 100 feet from the hut, we ran into a Rattlesnake with about 5 rattles, the first I've ever seen on Baldy. After taking some pics of him, we went up the trail (or non trail as it may be.) Not real hard for about the first couple of hundred yards as there were enough bigger rocks and harder dirt to get a foot hold, even though it was steep. Then an area that really was a bit difficult. There was no trail at this point and it was two steps forward, one step back for probably 100 yards or more. At the end of this scree field a lot of bushes started showing up AND signs of a trail. The trail wasn't good, and was mostly dug in by people like us trying to find a way to the top. But, it was pretty good and fairly easy though really steep through the bushes. It stayed like this until we hit the Backbone. I was surprised how close we were to the summit. We checked our time at this point and it took us 1 hour and 15 minutes to get from the Ski Hut to the backbone trail. From there we pushed quickly to the summit passing everyone on the way. After the scree and steepness on the way to the hut, a real trail seemed like a road. Took us a bit under 30 minutes to the summit.
There were lots of people at the summit, including two guys who had carried completely full 5 gallon bottles of water in their packs. They said it was in preparation for Mt Shasta in a couple of weeks. On the summit, they dumped the water and had lunch.
I'll post pics as soon as my friend sends them (I forgot my camera.) I'm not going to recommend this way up, but if you want something a bit different, you may want to give it a try.
"Turtles, Frogs & other Environmental Sculpture"