Success ! - Summiting Old Baldy

 

OK, last chance this trip to summit Old Baldy.

 Still not stellar weather and  pristine visibility, but pretty much the best I’ve had this week!

 It’s a little over a mile and a half from camp to the joint trailheads for White Rock Cave and Old Baldy.

As you might remember, I’ve already done the White Rock Cave and terrifying mildly scary Bird Trails and am not ready to repeat that experience just yet. Not when I have other things to do, like Baldy.

Not that the initial climb up towards Old Baldy

is all that much easier, or less terrifying, (Yep, it’s still wet and slick out here and to reduce the risk of becoming a statistic, or a line-item in some park report, I’m wearing my spikes.)

 

but it is new territory, and that’s always good – well, sometimes good – once in a while – maybe.

Are we there yet?

Must be getting close – right?

Ah yes. There it is. Somewhere under there anyway.

Seems like, for some narcissistic reason, generations of people have been willing to cart rocks around up here, intent on making Old Baldy even taller than it really is.

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OK, I took a lot of photos from up there, after all it took me long enough to get here! But I don't want to spoil things for the rest of you so I'm only posting three of them here.

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This looks like a good spot to sit, dangle feet, and have a snack.

And it was, especially when

the light did something special  for a few brief moments

 

and temporarily set the Cottonwoods downstream ablaze.

 Where that horizontal line hits the river is Mager’s Crossing. It’s a low-water crossing of, perhaps the appropriately named, Old Leaky Rd. It’s very difficult to see the road right where it crosses the river because it’s covered in a few inches of water.

OK, been there, done that, took the photos, had a snack, and the day is getting on, so now that I’ve made the steep assent to the summit of Old Baldy it's time to head back down.

 

I’ll spend the rest of the day traipsing across an assortment of ridges and come back down to river level via the Old Horse Trail.

Because of the spotty trail markings I missed the lower end of the Old Horse Trail when I came up the Old Entrance road a few days ago, but I was able to find the upper end of the trail and today I followed it back down - well - at least partway down before it ended, in lieu of the old road.

OK, I don’t know what’s gotten into me but I’ve either got to move over to YouTube or quit with these videos which are more annoying than informative in Blogger

 Anyway, while higher up the slope and mostly out of sight, the Old Horse Trail parallels the Old Entrance Road and not long before they merge together I stopped to take off the spikes I’d been wearing since the Old Baldy trailhead as a defense against steep and water-slicked rock.

When I looked up these two were casually standing there just across the road below me. After a bit they moved farther on down the road then turned up-slope and quickly faded into the terrain.

A nice way to end my hike, and my first trip here to Garner State Park.