Since Sara was in Europe for 3.5 months since my last blog post, I had to keep myself busy. So I've had a few pretty fun adventures.
On August 20th, Harlan and I did a 16 mile day hike up to San Bernardino Peak. Now originally, I was planning on doing an overnight trip, so I had packed my backpack full with enough gear for the weekend. The hike was HOT, I believe temps were around the 90's when we passed through some exposed sections of the hike. Harlan was not liking it very much and I was saving most of my water for him because he needed it. Around 6 miles into the climb there was a stream where I was able to refill our water and Harlan laid right in the middle of the stream to cool off. Once we got to the summit of San Bernardino Peak, I had changed my mind about staying overnight. I'm not sure why, but I just wasn't feeling it, so the plan was to hike the 8 miles back to the car and make it a nice training hike with my full pack.
The area of this hike had full cell reception, so I was able to chat on my phone with Sara who was in Europe. I even set up online video streaming on my phone so Sara was able to watch Harlan hike and play in the creek for a little bit. Pretty funny.
The next weekend, I did an overnight backpacking trip with Colin and Tristen. Tony was going out of town and needed someone to watch his dog Kai, so Kai and Harlan joined us on the hike. This was Colin and Tristen's first backpacking trip so I decided a trip of the Fish Creek trail of the San Gorgonio wilderness would be the easiest and most scenic for them.
This was my first time on the Fish Creek trail and I enjoyed it very much. A couple miles in we came upon a pretty big meadow and had lunch. It was very hot down in the city so this caused a bit of thunderstorms to develop above the mountains we were in. We heard a bit of thunder as we hiked up to camp. When we reached Fish Creek saddle, we met a group of hikers from San Diego and we decided to stay and camp there even though our permit was for the next camp a couple miles down the trail. Our new friends loved the dogs and were all taking pictures with them.
The next morning we got an early start to hike to the summit. Colin and Tristen hiked well and we got to the summit with an almost clear sky except for a single cloud forming above the mountain.
As we were hiking back down the camp, the clouds continued to form. We were about a mile from camp when it started drizzling, then raining, then hailing, and finally a full on thunderstrom. We hurried back to camp and bunkered down in Colin's Tent for a while to wait it out. We saw some major flashes with almost immediate thunder so it was all very close.
Once the rain died down we were able to get outside to pack our stuff. The dogs were not very happy about the rain at this point.
It was a fun trip. A great first backpack for Colin and Tristen. I'm sure we will do another soon.
In September I flew to Europe to go see Sara in Geneva, Switzerland where she was having her internship. I rented a road bike and it made it much easier to explore Geneva and enjoy the nice European roads. I headed to Grenoble, France where I rode up to Alp d'Huez. The climb was brutal, but it was one of those things that I can now check off the list. The scenery while riding through the roads in the Alps were insane. The mountains towered around you in every direction, no wonder it is such a famous place to ride.
Sara and I did a little traveling and went to Zermatt, Switzerland where the Matterhorn is located. It was amazing, a little different than the Matterhorn I've seen a million times at Disneyland all these years.
Sara and I took the ski lift up to the highest point and did a little walking around. There is a ski area up there on the glacier that is open year round. There was a halfway point of the ski lift where we got off and hiked the rest of the way back down to the town.
After Zermatt we headed to Munich, Germany for Oktoberfest. All I can say is that I HAVE to go back to Oktoberfest again. It was a great time and we had a blast.
I had one last big adventure, Tony, Trevor, Kai, Harlan and I did an 8 peak traverse of the San Gorgonio ridge. This was an overnight, 28 miles, about 10,000ft of elevation gain weekend. We started at the Vivian Creek trailhead, hit San Gorgonio peak, Jepson peak, Little Charlton Peak, Alto Diablo peak, Shields peak, Anderson peak, San Beranardino East peak, and San Bernardino peak. All of which are over 10,000ft. It has snowed/iced a few days before which made it a little interesting in places.
The dogs tired each other out the entire time. They probably ended up hiking about 5-10 more miles than us humans did with all of the running around they did.
Nothing too exciting happened during this hike, it was just a lot of hiking. We hiked about 8-9 hours on Saturday and hit half of the peaks with most of the elevation gain for the weekend. Sunday was a bit easier since we camped around 10,000ft so we just had to stay on the ridge and hit the remaining 5 peaks. We had shuttled a car to the San Bernardino trailhead where the hike ended, so it was an awesome point to point trail.
That is it for my adventures for the last 3 months. Now that Sara's back I hope to get a lot of good winter adventures in here pretty soon.
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