Category: Day hiking

Ventana Wilderness backpacking and hiking map

It’s the cool season and it’s time to focus on lower elevation areas.

I haven’t been to Los Padres National Forest or Ventana Wilderness in nearly fifteen years. I think I’ve walked there three times. The longest trip was five days as a boy scout. We went up the Double Cones. I remember a camp where I pulled no less than 14 ticks off my shirt.

Some of the trails in Ventana continue to be in terrible shape. Do your research before you head out! The popular corridor trails (Sykes, Pine Valley) are generally fine. It’s the other trails that can verge on non-existent. This is not the type of bush-whacking that you think you like. It’s thick chaparral and head high poison oak. Think of struggling through sharp bushes where your feet don’t touch the ground. Consider volunteering in Ventana.

Ventana Wilderness maps

The Ventana Wilderness Alliance stewards trail location and condition information on their website. Hikers report on trail conditions in their forum. You can click on Ventana’s trails and get the same trail condition information on their interactive map. More interactive maps on ventanahiking.net, including the great Gmap4 and Google Map (and Earth) basemaps, present the exact same data.

You can download and print this Ventana Wilderness map information too. It’s a good alternative to the Wilderness Press and National Geographic maps.

Unfortunately, you probably don’t want to hike some of these trails.

Sierra peaks, routes and passes on a webmap

There are so many great new web maps. If you already have baseline knowledge of the Sierra, they’re better than any guidebook or blog. I’m not linking to alltrails, everytrail and similar websites because I find stewarded data sets are usually better than crowdsourced.

Click and zoom. There goes the afternoon. Did you click on the picture? It’s just a picture.

Hiking North Dome in Yosemite

As the years go on, I get closer and closer to having done all of the “marquee” hikes in the region. North Dome is the latest.

Driving across Tioga we ran into some friends riding their bikes. We’d hosted them a week or two before. They’re on a giant cycle touring climbing trip. A few thousand miles with FIVE climbing racks. Each of them carries a jar of honey too. It was fun stopping them on the side of the road and re-uniting. We weren’t expecting to see each other.

The North Dome hike deserves it’s place as a famous hike. A couple of miles of mature forest, an epic lunch spot and a return the way you came. Anytime you’re on the rim, it seems like you’ve got the best view there is.

North Dome in October isn’t crowded. Nice crisp view of the full face of Half Dome too.

My friend Ben would be on El Cap rescuing a climber the next day. Good guy. We snuck out just before the first big winter storm of the season.

Sonora Peak

Hiked up Sonora Peak on Saturday. It was windy and chilly. Not a surprise for mid October. We were thinking of taking the ridge to Stanislaus Peak but the cold and altitude motivated us to head lower instead. The fall colors were stunning.

It’s going to start snowing up there tonight.

Looking out into Carson-Iceberg Wilderness.

Showered, unpacked, and have my photos posted within 75 minutes of getting home. That’s got to be a record.