Even though its nearing Halloween, today it is almost eighty degrees in this mountain town. I’m in the mood to make some sausage and kale soup or maybe some roasted Autumn squash, but its a little to hot to turn on the oven today. So instead I’ll take my inflatable raft up to Big Bear for one more cruise around the lake before its just to cold to go in the water again. Its so crazy, that now in late October its still warm enough to get a little more vitamin D before the weather turns chilly and I don’t see the sun again until March.
Three days ago it felt like fall up here at over 6,000 feet. I woke up at six a.m. to a crisp 45 degree fall morning. My driveway was covered in pine needles from the past days Santa Ana Winds howling through the pines. We decide to head up past Big Bear City for a fall morning hike. When we stopped to buy water in the little Big Bear City market, we got lots of looks from the flannel clad hippies; starring at our shorts, and my ever present short leggings.
I hardly ever make it to the opposite end of our mountains, where highway 38 crosses the 18 just after Big Bear City. For me, from my home in Deer Lick, it takes me about an hour to reach Big Bear City. I think driving this direction, around the South shore of the lake is annoying because there are so many stop lights in Big Bear Lake, and the speed limit is around thirty to forty all the way around the south side of the lake. When I go to Big Bear, its usually to the Fawn Skin side, much closer to me, and no posted speed limit, yea. The other day, when I went hiking near Onyx Summit, I thought to myself,
“Wow” I forgot how pretty it really is up there. Onxy Summit is the highest drivable mountain pass in Southern California, at 8,443 feet. Its about twenty minutes out of trashy meth encrusted Big Bear City. Once you drive past the trailer trash and broken down cars of Big Bear City, the road opens up, and there are dense strands of tall Pinyon Pines on both sides of the road. Highway 38 is such a gorgeous drive down to Redlands in the valley below. A very long drive. Leaving from my house to do that drive takes you about two and a half hours. In 2007 I had to commute that for two weeks, after the 2007 fire left us with most of our mountain highways burnt and scarred. Even the homes in the mountains didn’t have electricity for two weeks when we came back to the mountains. The only electricity came from generators. It was a gorgeous drive in the autumn those two weeks, but I didn’t miss a five hour round trip commute to work each day.
Rumor had it that the Pacific Crest Trail started by the Onxy Summit sign, so we parked there along with some other cars and tried to find the the trail head. No luck. We did find fire road 1N- something. So we just started hiking up the road past gorgeous Sierra Juniper’s twisting their crooked way up into the sky. The ground was absolutely covered with juniper berries, every where. It was such a beautiful, and yes cold, fall day with wispy white clouds in the sky.
Yeah, we were a little cold in our shorts. The beginning of the trail was mostly in the shade. The view was worth it, as we climbed upward, and we saw this awesome view of San Gorgonio, decked out in snow. 
Really? Isn’t that a crazy amount of snow for early October? I mean, we did have a storm roll through last week, and those peaks are well above 10,000 feet, but still its crazy to see that much snow so early in the season.
The good news is, that as we followed the fire road up, we came to a trail head for the Pacific Crest Trail! Well, you hike pretty much any where in these mountains and your bound to find a trail head for the P.C.T. some where. So we took the P.C.T. past Juniper’s Beavertail Cactus and even a little Manzanita (At this altitude?) Our hike was only about six miles, as alas, I was starving at that point of course.
