The Snowy, High San Gabriels

I woke up at Mt. Islip parking area, and found that the other two tents were still set up and the cowboy camper was still there.  These were ominous signs.  If 20-somethings were so beat that they were already asleep when I arrived in the evening and still asleep when I woke in the morning, then the hike through all the snow must be strenuous indeed.

I took down my tent, ate breakfast, and started hiking up the trail.  I looked back at the parking area and took this picture.  The two tents and the cowboy camper are at the far left of the parking area, roughly at the center of the picture.

As I hiked upward and onward, I soon came upon a big snowbank stretching over the trail that looked virginal – no one had stepped through it at all.  That didn’t make sense.  With all these northbound hikers, the snow should have an uncountable number of foot holes through it.  I stood and reflected for a moment – then I noticed a hiker just walking along a bit up the hill from me.  He said that hikers were just walking along the dirt road that adjoins the trail.  There is still snow, but it is a lot easier than the actual trail.  As a southbound hiker, I followed the actual trail before reaching the snow, whereas the northbound hikers followed the dirt road because that is where the herd path through the snow went.

Soon I reached the Little Jimmy Trail Camp.  Even though there was still snow on the ground and there was only one guy sitting at the picnic table at the time I passed through, the camp looked heavily used, much like a camp on the Appalachian Trail.  The whole area was mushed down to the dirt from lots of tents being pitched and slept in every night over many years.  There was even a bear box, visible in the picture.

It was difficult to find the trail out of camp since so many people had walked everywhere, but I soon found success.  However, this trail too ran into virginal snow.  Once again, I reflected for a moment until I heard voices to my left.  Aha! The hikers were at the Little Jimmy Spring where the herd path through the snow evidently went.  I retraced my path and headed for the spring, where I decided to cook up some ramen noodles.  My philosophy in southern California is, “Whenever I find water, it’s time to eat.”

I also could talk with some 20-somethings who had been through the mountain snow, but nothing memorable was said.  What was strange was that the spring was set up like a living room fireplace, where the water pipe came out where the fire would be.  The herd path through the snow required me to step on a log and over the top of the “fireplace,” walk through a bunch of bushes, then finally get to the mountain snow.

The mountain snow was deep and pliable enough to leave foot holes that are often called post holes.  Following the herd path meant that I had to lift my leg and step forward either into an existing foot hole or a groove of powder created by many people walking through.  I stayed away from rocks or logs because my foot could break through the icy veneer, plunging my whole leg downward suddenly.  That could cause injury.

Once I hiked up to the ridge, the first thing that I noticed is that that the north side of the mountain has the snow, whereas the south side is more or less snow-free, and the boundary is very distinct.  I tried to walk on the snow-free south side as much as possible, because it was faster and required less effort than picking my whole leg up every step to put into the next posthole.  I found that there are actual “avoid the snow” paths to follow from many others having the same idea.  Trouble is that there are so many rocks and bushes that the “avoid the snow” paths are eventually forced back onto the snow, so I ended up going onto and off of the snow repeatedly.

The herd path through the snow went up again and to the left, this time missing Mount Hawkins off to the right and heading toward Throop Peak.  About Mount Hawkins, the claim is that Nellie Hawkins was a “waitress” at a mountain establishment named the Squirrel Inn then Cold Brook Camp from about 1900 to after 1920, and the guys liked her so much they managed to get two mountains named after her, Hawkins and South Hawkins.

My quotation marks around “waitress” imply that my guess is that these establishments may have been bawdy houses that Nellie owned or operated, much like the mother who left her family in Steinbeck’s East of Eden.  California and the whole American West were filled with bawdy houses during this time period that featured drinkin’, gamblin’, and prostitution and were heavily taxed by the federal government – comprising a significant portion of the federal revenue prior to the 16th Amendment, ratified in 1913, giving Congress the power to levy income taxes.

The next mountain was named after Amos G. Throop (pronounced Troop, as in German), who was a Chicago businessman and politician of the Temperance Party.  He later moved to sunny southern California and became mayor of Pasadena.  He is best known as the founder of Throop University in 1891, which was renamed the California Institute of Technology in 1920.  There is supposedly a plaque at the top, which was likely covered in snow, but I followed the herd trail, which at this point closely followed the actual PCT that does not reach the peak of any of these mountains.

While hiking through the snow around Throop Peak, I took this picture of Mt. Burnham at the left foreground and the double-peaked Mt. Baden-Powell covering the center-right background.  These two men were most responsible for the world-wide boy scouting movement, with American Frederick Burnham called the Father of Scouting and English Lieutenant-General Robert Baden-Powell called the Founder of Scouting.

After following the herd trail through the snow around Throop Peak, I reached this sign.  The PCT arrow points to where I came from, and I was heading in the opposite direction as the picture.  Sheep Mountain Wilderness Area is the largest of three wilderness areas in the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument.  A federally designated wilderness area is closed to all mechanization, including bicycles and chain saws.  Already existent trails may be maintained using hand tools, but no new trails are allowed to be built.  Often, important watershed regions are designated as wilderness areas, and the LA area gets something like 30% of its water from the San Gabriels.  The San Gabriel Mountains National Monument was designated in 2014 and expanded to the southwest during my hike on May 2, 2024.

Here is the view atop Mount Burnham, looking east at the double-peaked Mt. Baden-Powell.  Whereas most PCT hikers pronounce Powell like “owl” the hooting bird, Baden-Powell wanted his name pronounced more like POE-wul, as in Edgar Allen Poe.  He even wrote a poem about his name.  “Man, matron, maiden, Please call it Baden.  Further for Powell.  Rhyme it with Noel.”

I met north-bounders between Mounts Burnham and Baden-Powell.  One guy had his tent pitched at the bottom of the saddle in a spot where there was no snow.  The other was a couple who were pitching two tents by digging out snow near a big tree close to the top of Mt. Baden-Powell.  I was determined to get out of the snow and camp at the Vincent Gap parking area.

But first I found the monument dedicated to Baden-Powell in 1931 along with this mountain  bearing his name.  Both were dedicated in a speech by Fredrick Russell Burnham, who was Baden-Powell’s great friend and teacher of military scouting during the British conflicts in Rhodesia.  Baden-Powell realized that to fight an unknown enemy in an unknown land, there must be the sort of scouting that Burnham had learned as a youth from the Sioux Indians of Minnesota.  Burnham had moved his family to Africa because he was always looking for adventure, and Cecil John Rhodes’s idea of a British railroad from the Cape to Cairo appealed to him.

Baden-Powell was probably more of a writer than a military man.  He managed to get himself and his troops into situations where they were surrounded and forced to eat their horses in more than one occasion.  Meanwhile, his 1899 book on scouting, while meant for military recruits, was being read widely by boys.

Eventually Baden-Powell wrote his seminal work Scouting for Boys in 1908.  It’s hard to believe, but Scouting for Boys in all its editions was one of the five top selling books by number of volumes in the 20th century, only outsold by The Bible, Mao’s Red Book, and The Quran.

Baden-Powell never set foot on this mountain, but his four directions of every boy scout’s duty are all that were visible in the deep snow:  God, Country, Others, and Self.  These are central in the Scout Oath, “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my Country.” “To help Other people and all times.””To keep mySelf physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”

It was time to head down the mountain because it was getting late.  The forest is wonderful and  healthy on Mt. Baden-Powell, and the snow was deep.  I followed the footsteps down the mountain, but as the footpaths diverged, eventually I found that I was following one guy who was a bit of a daredevil.  He did keep his direction at the center of the switchbacks, so soon I was at Lamel Spring.  I needed water, but there was so much snow and it was getting dark.  I opted to continue downward where the steepness and the thinning snow made it more and more slippery.  After a couple of big slides, I finally arrived at the trail uncovered by snow.  It was a simple walk to the Vincent Gap Parking Area.

This time it was too late and too dark to seek out snow to melt.  I was forced to set up camp and to go to sleep with no water and no food.  Strangely, their were no other campers here, so I was all alone – that is except for the loud vehicles with drivers seeing if the Angeles Crest Highway was open.  It was still closed just beyond Vincent Gap, so they turned around in the parking lot and headed back to where they came from.

Eventually the loud cars quit coming, and I was able to get to sleep.