Discover Top Posts Tagged with #mt baldy

Quite the View...

But behind the beauty lies some rather serious danger. The snow covered peak visible from the Palos Verdes Peninsula is Mt San Antonio, more commonly known in Southern California as Mt Baldy, and is the site in recent weeks of some hikers deaths and disappearance.

Two hikers fell to their deaths from collapsed snow chutes and at least two hikers have disappeared amid the recent storms, one of whom is brittish actor Julian Sands. As a relatively experienced hiker and outdoors-person, I can't stress enough that hiking in bad weather is folly and a recipe for very real disaster.

Now this is not victim shaming, but in the last few years here in Southern California we have had numerous stories of people who went missing because they went to hike closed burn scar areas, or hike in the middle of active snow storms. Some of these folks were rescued, some were not, and it needs to be understood and remembered by everyone who ventures out into the backcountry that there is calculated risk in this even under the best of conditions. When you do so under less than ideal conditions, the risks increase almost exponentially.

Now there are ways to mitigate these risk, but some scenarios should be avoided, even by the most experienced of hikers, and attempting to summit a mountain that has just had feet of fresh powder dumped on it is one of those scenarios.

You can't tell were the cliff edges are.

You can't tell what is solid ground and what is a snow chute.

You can't tell when a snow bridge may collapse, or even clearly identify the snow bridge in the first place.

If you find yourself off-piste (as it were), which is very easy to do when you can't see the intended trail, your chances of triggering an avalanche greatly increase.

Now not all snow hiking goes hand in hand with such dangers. Flat land snow hiking generally runs free and clear of all of the afore mentioned potential dangers, but there are still a few risks, circumstance dependant.

All of this is to say that it behooves each and every one of us that go out on trail to know what we are doing, and to take every available precaution. But more than all of that I'm imploring you all to not take any unnecessary risks, and peak summiting in very bad weather is one of those risks.

Be smart.

Be safe.

Live to hike another day.

#hiking #hiker #public service announcement #the hikers eye #safety #mt baldy #hiker safety

smol flowers

In order:

Longstalk phacelia (Phacelia longipes)

Splendid woodland gilia (Saltugilia splendens)

Scarlet monkeyflower (Erythranthe cardinalis)

Plummer's mariposa lily (Calochortus plummerae)

Grinnel's beardtongue (Penstemon grinnellii)

Cliff aster (Malacothrix saxatilis)

Branching phacelia (Phacelia ramosissima)

#wildflowers #california native plants #southern california #chaparral #woodland #mt baldy #phacelia #botany #plantita #endemic