Today’s hike was a “make up” hike. I’ve been fighting a cold for the past week and was supposed to go hiking with Oliver the day before. I wasn’t sure if I was going to feel up to it, but when I woke up, I was feeling OK, so I was ready to go. Oliver texted me in the morning saying his right eye was swollen shut so he couldn’t go hiking. I thought about going by myself, but decided I’d just take it easy and try and recover from my cold. When I woke up today, it was foggy – I checked the weather reports and it looked like it was going to be a nice day, which is not what I was expecting. I decided to give it a try to see how I did. Burnt Granite was the trail Oliver and I were supposed to hike so I thought I’d do it.

Since I hadn’t originally expected to hike, we got a bit of a late start. We got to the trailhead around 11:00, suited up and started up the trail. I opted to start at the original alignment where the trail crossed the 4650 road coming up from below. Someone (I’m guessing it is the mountain bikers) has done a lot of work on the south side of 4650 on the original alignment heading uphill:

And immediately after you start up the hill, it has always been very tight in here since it is packed with small trees – there has been work done to make this a bit clearer as well:

And more work a bit farther up – you can see how packed this area is with small trees:

We were enjoying the larger corridor in this lower section. It wasn’t long before we got to the “real” trail – the corridor that heads southeast in pretty much a straight line. This is a really neat segment of tread that used to go farther until they did the fuel reduction work a few years ago and destroyed some of this original tread. I was pleasantly surprised to see that someone has mostly restored the tread in this work area!




We worked our way thru this lower work area and found that the one log that was in here has been cut and the short connector trail over to where the trail comes up from the 020 spur had also had work done to it to improve the corridor. This used to be the only access when this trail was originally recovered, before the original alignment to the northwest was found. Now you can either come up the old 020 spur and join the trail, or you can hike the original alignment. On some hikes I’ve opted to come up one way and go back the other, but recently, I’ve been hiking the original alignment more since I kind of like it better.

Once thru the work area, we continued up the trail. We passed thru the work area twice more, but the tread in these areas has been restored as well, so passage is pretty clean. The work areas aren’t looking quite as “raw” as they have been due to the passage of time. I’ve always found it weird that they spent all that time and money to masticate all the brush in two thirds of the area and then came back and re-planted pine trees in those same areas. I’ve never quite understood the thought process behind that work.

We continued up the trail, hitting the first couple of switchbacks. I think it was somewhere in here – about 4000′ – where we saw our first evidence of snow – just a light dusting:

As we were heading up, I couldn’t help notice how quiet and calm it was. I wasn’t hearing anything or any wind or anything – just silence. A bit further up, the snow got a bit deeper:

And it wasn’t too long before we were on “top” (there is a section of trail that is pretty flat after having done some significant climbing – I call this the “top”), and soon got to the junction with the old trail down to Tarzan Springs, which has also been nicely cut out – and you can’t miss the junction now with that old oil can marking the junction:

After that flat spot, not too far past the junction with Tarzan Springs, the trail starts heading up again. The grade isn’t as steep as it was earlier, however. It starts out getting into larger trees (the area on top must have burned more as the trees are smaller), and soon heads into a series of rockslides. The second one has the best views I think – this is where we stopped for lunch. This was the view – not a great view today as many of the peaks were in the clouds:

Here is a peakfinder picture of the view – you can see what COULD be here on a clear day:

After lunch, we continued down the trail a bit. The last time I was up here, I did a spur of the moment decision to continue and head up to Mt Lowe, which was quite an interesting trip, but today I wasn’t looking for any additional excitement. I figured we’d go down to around where the trail meets the old spur road. We didn’t get quite that far however. Near the south end of the tread, there is a weird area that gets a LOT of blowdown (not sure why). I was curious if there were any new logs in there (there weren’t – and one that was there when we were up here early this year had been cut out). We got to the end of this “blowdown alley” and decided to make this our turnaround point:

The trip back down was uneventful – I was just enjoying the quietness of this old historic trail. When we got back down to 4650, I thought we’d go down the lower segment a bit – this area just off 4650 seems to get a good bit of blowdown too for some reason. We walked down to where the trail enters a cut area – just shy of a half mile. There were 3 new logs in this area – the good news is that they are all easy to step over.

Once back at the truck, it was time to head home. Even though I wasn’t really cold (keeping moving really helps stay warm), I was ready for a nice warm truck on the ride home.

A great day in the woods while I’m recovering from a cold.