Mt Lowe Grand Tour With Thomas

Thomas returned but only for about a week, so we had to make the most of it. We decided to go to Mt Lowe on Sunday and do a a grand tour of most of the trails in the area. I had started a similar (but shorter) ride the previous weekend, but it was with a large group and I ran out of time and had to cut it short. So I was amped up to conquer the whole enchilada. The planned route was to start at the parking lot just east of JPL, ride streets over to Lake and Alta Loma, up Lower Sam Merrill ST to Echo Mt, up Mt Lowe Railway FR to Inspiration Pt, down Middle Sam Merrill ST to Echo Mt (again), down Sunset Ridge ST to Millard Campground, across Millard fire road to El Prieto ST, up Brown Mt FR to the summit, down Ken Burton ST, down/across Gabriellino ST back to the car. Makes me tired just listing the route!

The ride started out great, on a nice cool overcast morning at about 8:30. Going up Lower Sam was great. This is an extremely popular hiking trail. It climbs 1400 feet in about 2.5 miles. The trail is impeccably maintained. In fact there were two rangers grooming it that morning. We passed about 30 hikers, including a boy scout troop. After a short rest at Echo Mt, we started up Mt Lowe Railway. We snapped a couple pics of the fog below, and this is where I found out my battery was low and I somehow didn't bring the spare.

We started at an easy pace but soon started pumping harder. Before long, we were at Inspiration Pt and ready for the first reward- down Middle Sam Merril singletrack. As we were catching our breath before descending, we talked to a few bikers and hikers. I told one of the hikers our route and he warned us about the water in the creek that flows through the Gabriellino trail. He said we were in for a lot of hike a bike. We took it under advisement and headed down Middle Sam.

Middle Sam was in good shape, but it is usually pretty loose, especially on the lower part. Definitely a trail to use some caution on due to lots of exposure. After a short climb back up from Echo Mt, we descended Sunset Ridge. Sunset is fun singletrack with a lot of switchbacks with railroad tie steps. Makes it challenging! Rode through Millard Campground, crossed a creek and headed up toward El Prieto. At El P we took another short break and debated whether to put on leg warmers to guard against poison oak. Decided not to and headed down. We had a couple wrong turns along the way, but found our way down the fun, fast, twisty trail. At the bottom, took a short break before heading up Brown Mountain.

By now it was around 12:00, I think and although it wasn't a hot day, this fire road is totally exposed to the sun. So we baked pretty good for the 6 miles and 2000+ feet up. After another rest, we started down Ken Burton. Right away we could see it was really overgrown. But it was rideable and still pretty fun. At least until we started hitting poison oak. We got to one spot where the poison oak was covering the entire trail. We had to just plunge on through and hope we could decontaminate later. At the bottom of the trail we hit the Gabriellino. We immediately found out what the hiker had been talking about earlier. We had to cross the stream every few minutes, and it was 2-3 feet deep and about 30 feet wide. So we were doing a lot of slogging and dismounting. At one point we got to a spot where the trail seemed to go away from the creek, but was blocked off by a row of rocks. We didn't see any other way, so we stepped across the rocks and rode on. After about 15 minutes, we came to the end- a waterfall about 100 feet tall with no way around or down! So after determining we had no choice we turned around. At this point it was getting close to 2:30. Of course, it turned out that we went astray where we stepped over the rocks. When we crossed the creek at that point we found the real trail. 30 or 40 minutes and another 10 stream crossings later we were back at the car. On the way home, we stopped at a drug store and checked out the remedies for preventing poison oak. We each bought a bottle of Technu. At home I used it to wash up real well and now, 5 days later, I am rash-free. Quite an adventure!