95: Stockton Flat to Baldy Notch
97: Icehouse Canyon to Icehouse Saddle, Cucamonga Wilderness
98: Icehouse Canyon to Icehouse Saddle, Cucamonga Wilderness, Kelly’s Camp, Ontario Peak
99: Icehouse Canyon to Icehouse Saddle, Cucamonga Wilderness, Cucamonga Peak
100: Middle Fork of Lytle Creek to Cucamonga Wilderness, Icehouse Saddle
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As avid travelers ourselves, we realize that the true usefulness of that map may be limited by the device you are reading on. So we are offering you the printed map at a deep discount.
Simply go to the map’s product page at WildernessPress.com (ISBN 9780899973821) and enter the code
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then complete your purchase. This code will allow you to buy the map for $5 + s/h.
We thank you for buying this eBook product and hope it helps you along your journey.
Preface to the Eighth Edition
In 1970 I wrote to Tom Winnett, founder of Wilderness Press. Tom had just published Sierra North and Sierra South, hiking guides to California’s mighty Sierra Nevada. I asked Tom if Wilderness Press might be interested in a guidebook to the trails of the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California. Tom enthusiastically approved of my project, and a year later, the first edition of Trails of the Angeles appeared.
Over the next three decades, Trails of the Angeles continued to be a favorite of Southern California hikers, much to my gratification. These were years of strenuous work to keep the guidebook up-to-date. Unlike a novel or most works of nonfiction, a guidebook is never completed. Change is constantly taking place, caused by a number of factors: fire, flood, abandoning of old trails and campgrounds, building of new ones, objections from private property owners whose land a road or trail may cross, and new US Forest Service regulations. Underlying many of these issues is the fact that the San Gabriels rise next door to one of the major population centers on the continent, which results in swarms of people using—and often overusing—these mountains.
Still, it was a labor of love on my part. Countless weekends were spent doing what I enjoy the most: tramping over old trails, checking out realigned or new ones, and meeting new friends.
Now, mainly because of advancing age, the time has come to relinquish work on Trails of the Angeles. My successor is a young, energetic hiker I met on the Mount Wilson Trail several years ago, Doug Christiansen of Sierra Madre. Doug is an airline pilot by profession who spends many of his free days rambling over the mountains that rise abruptly above his home. I’ve hiked with Doug many times in the past year and am convinced that he is the right man for the job.
I offer a fond farewell to my many mountain hiking friends of years gone by. May you continue to enjoy walking the footpaths of the splendid mountain country of the San Gabriels.
John W. Robinson
Fullerton, California
January 2005
Preface to the Ninth Edition
“Keeping a guidebook up-to-date is a never-ending job.”
So wrote John W. Robinson many years ago in the preface to an early edition of Trails of the Angeles, and he has repeated the phrase often since. This has never been truer than in the seven years since the last edition was published. A series of natural and man-made disasters, culminating in the devastating 2009 Station Fire, have conspired to confound and frustrate hikers, nature lovers, and all who love the San Gabriel Mountains.
As a result, there have been many changes to the book. Several hikes—so noted in the text—are still off-limits due to the fire; others have only recently been reopened, and the repairing and reworking of trails is ongoing. These trail trips have been retained in the hope and expectation that nature—aided by the efforts of the US Forest Service and dedicated groups of volunteers—will slowly but surely restore what man has come so close to destroying. I have reluctantly removed and replaced four hikes in the book. Gone is the short stroll up Vetter Mountain and its historic lookout; the lookout burned to the ground in the Station Fire. The Bichota Canyon and Allison Gold Mine trails became so overgrown and eroded that these unsafe hikes have been replaced. Lastly, fire damage and persistent access problems at San Sevaine Flats led to the removal of that trail trip from the book.
In their place, I have chosen four excellent new hikes: two in the front range above Duarte and La Verne, a very scenic trail trip on the north side of the range from South Fork Campground to Vincent Gap, and a spectacular and challenging portion of the old North Backbone Trail on the back side of Mount Baldy, recently reintroduced after a multiyear absence from this guide.
Happily, there have been some positive developments in the past few years. Access roads to upper San Gabriel Canyon and Chantry Flat have finally been repaired. And two new wilderness areas were designated in the San Gabriels in 2009, protecting and preserving thousands of acres of vital habitat and watershed.
There is still much to see and explore, and much to enjoy and celebrate, in this fascinating mountain country.
Doug Christiansen
Pasadena, California
May 2013
Marshall Canyon (Hike 91)
Introduction
“There is no exercise so beneficial, physically, mentally, or morally, nothing which gives so much of living for so little cost, as hiking our mountain and hill trails and sleeping under the stars.”
So wrote the late Will Thrall—explorer,
