Summary | |
Owner | MITOC Gallery Administrator |
Creation Date | 2007-07-03 00:36:51 UTC-0400 |
Description | June 30th
Eric Gilbertson Distance: 112 miles Cumulative Elevation Gain: 12,000ft Bike repair issues: 0 Woody was going night skydiving this weekend so I decided I should also do something crazy. From my trip in the san gabriels in early June I remembered spotting a patch of snow in the distance on a mountain called mount baldy, which happened to be above 10,000ft. Can you imagine how awesome it would be to bring snow to pasadena? The one catch about mount baldy was that it was about 50 miles away, and I would be starting basically at sea level. That sounded like a fun trip to me, so I headed out just before dawn at 5:30am on Saturday morning. The first 15 miles were easy and flat as I rode southeast to the town of Azusa. From there it was basically all up hill. I headed north into the Angeles national forest, past the san gabriel reservoir and up into the canyons. By about 9am I reached a ridge at about 4500ft and for the next 20 miles it was all rolling hills - which meant no smooth cruising on the way back. I got to the 4000 ft ski village of Mount Baldy at 10am, and then it really got steep. The base of the trail up to the summit was just a few miles up the road at 6000ft, and from there it was a dirt fire road to the top of the ski lifts at 8000ft. I made it there for lunch, passing tons of people who were astounded someone would bike up that (they thought I should just take the ski lift). I knew that the farther up I biked, the easier the descent would be, so I managed to power my way up another thousand vertical feet until the trail got too sketchy to be safe. I stopped just before a rocky knife edge with multi-thousand foot scree dropoffs on each side (commonly referred to as "the catwalk"). From there the summit was only 2 miles, so I thought I could jog the rest of it. So I locked my bike to a tree and took off. Unfortunately I didn't beat the crowds like I had on half dome the previous week - it was 2:15 by the time I reached the summit and I was greeted with a crowd of 20 people. I searched around for snow on the north slope, but unfortunately it was completely dry. I was probably a week late. I talked to one lady who couldn't believe that I had biked from pasadena that morning. When she learned I was from MIT she said something like "oh, well you're smart though", which seemed to mean she thought what I was doing was stupid, but since I was from MIT I would somehow make it work out. I jogged back down the trail at 2:45, realizing that it was late in the day, but that biking down 10,000ft would be a lot faster now then biking up it. In fact, I burned the 5000ft from my bike to the ski village in about 30 minutes. From then on it was some rolling hills but mostly down hill. I eventually made it back to Pasadena at about 8:30, just in time to not need my lights. I had originally thought the trip would be almost exactly 100 miles, but with the help of google maps found it to be 112 miles. Coincidentally if I could have just swam a few miles and run a marathon I would have done exactly an ironman (though I don't think the biking portion of those climb as much as I did). Aside from not finding any snow, I deemed it a successful trip. I even had enough energy on sunday to bike another 60 miles to the beach. |