Please read the brief Introduction to San Gabriel Mountains Sites first.
Purposes of This Site
Introductory Remarks
Advantages of an Online Hiking Guidebook
Printed SGM Hiking Guidebooks and This Site
How To Use This Site
Upcoming Change To Focus On Trails
This site has four main purposes:
The site also includes:
- To maintain a comprehensive list of all the hiking trails of the San Gabriel Mountains (SGM), and the hikes using combinations of those trails.
- To collect and organize all the web information available on these trails, and current trail information submitted by readers.
- To present information from my own hikes in this area, including detailed trip logs including hiking times, mileages and altitudes at various points along each trail.
- To gradually add comprehensive information about every trail, including a map of the trailhead, a description of the highlights of each trail, current trail condition, a plot of altitude versus distance, and a description of the views from the trail.
- detailed updates to Jerry Schad's 2000 book Afoot & Afield in Los Angeles County and to John Robinson's 1998 book Trails of the Angeles;
- analysis pages related to hiking such as the accuracy of trail mileages, tables of distances and elevations to various peaks as seen from each other, and information about expected temperatures at various altitudes at various times of year; and
- collections of information related to hiking such as an index of pictures related to the SGM, a list of deaths from outdoor activities and a list of all mountain lion attacks in California.
Introductory Remarks Advantages of an Online Hiking Guidebook
The web provides a wonderful medium for a hiking guidebook, for a number of reasons:
- An online guidebook can be much more up to date than any printed guidebook could ever be. Trails change, conditions change, rules and regulations change, yet guidebooks are often 5 or more years out of date. Any guidebook that contains 100 trails or more will be out of date by at least a year for at least some trails even the moment it is published, since it takes considerable time to hike 100 trails. (It takes a full year of weekends to hike 100 trails, averaging one trail per day.)
An online guidebook can provide the latest information about a given trail with essentially no delay at all. Further, with feedback from readers, current information can be provided about nearly all the trails at once, an impossible task for a single author.
- An online guidebook can be much more comprehensive and authoritative than any printed guidebook. It isn't practical to publish a 5 volume, 1000 page tome containing complete information about all the trails. Guidebooks by necessity have to eliminate trails or cut their descriptions. An online guidebook has essentially no such space restrictions.
A guidebook that incorporates webpages authored by others takes advantage of the expertise of a large number of hikers and other authors, a tremendous resource in providing very comprehensive information. Geologists, biologists, historians, etc. provide expert pages in far more volume than any printed guidebook could ever contain.
A guidebook that organizes information put online by others makes that information more valuable. More and more sites contain hiking trail information, but it is very difficult to wade through search engine outputs to find the trail information when you want it. Further, it is quite difficult to search for a trail that you do not even know exists.
- Another major advantage coming from the webpages of others and input from readers is the diverse viewpoints offered on a given trail or subject. A single author guidebook draws only on the experiences of that author, and there is no room for diverse viewpoints. On the web, reader comments can be placed online to give a different perspective on a trail or subject. (See for example, the new Fish Canyon Trail.)
Printed SGM Hiking Guidebooks and This Site
This site has not yet become a full self-contained guidebook. There is no reason to duplicate the very good guidebooks that currently exist to the SGM. Instead, this site builds upon those guidebooks as a foundation. In return, this site provides updates and corrections to those guidebooks to extend their useful lifetime and make the books more valuable. In addition, many of the hike descriptions provide valuable feedback to others for places where it was difficult to follow a guidebook author's instructions.
In some cases, this site does contain full information about a hike, including how to get to the trailheads and directions along the hike. The trail section writeups often have all that information, and the places section writeups nearly always contain directions to a given place, which is often a trailhead. For hikes without existing writeups in the trail section, the information may not be found all in one place. We recommend that readers use the search function to find all pages relating to a trail and trailhead to piece the full description together.
There are two major printed hiking guides to the SGM, each of which contain descriptions of ~100 hikes:
- Trails of the Angeles by John W. Robinson, Seventh Edition, September 1998, 191 pages, published by Wilderness Press. It is the only comprehensive guide devoted solely to the SGM, and it has been around for nearly 30 years. John Robinson published the first edition in 1971, and has continued to update the guide regularly.
I maintain an Update page to that edition. Please email me of any changes you have found, and I'll put them online with credit to you. In addition, because so many people have the previous 1990 edition, I have written a Comparison of 1998 edition to the 1990 edition.
- Afoot and Afield in Los Angeles County, by Jerry Schad, Second Edition, 2000, 328 pages, also published by Wilderness Press. This is an often overlooked book, because it is a relative newcomer (first edition in 1991) and covers a larger territory than just the SGM. However, this is an excellent resource. Since the print is smaller in Schad's book, the 149 pages devoted to the SGM contain about the same amount of information on nearly the same number of hikes as in Robinson (99 in Schad; 100 in Robinson).
I also maintain an Update page to that edition. Again, please email me of any changes you have found, and I'll put them online with credit to you.
Both books contain maps for each hike. Robinson gives a good large-scale map showing all the hikes, whereas Schad gives good small-scale maps showing each hike in better detail. In 1999, I have begun to reference the entries in these books for hikes in the links page for each hike contained in one or both of these books.
Many of the trip logs I write up for hikes contained in those books are supplemental to those books, and I encourage you to take one of those books (if the hike is covered by one) and the appropriate USGS Topo map on hikes you are not familiar with.
In addition, there are a number of books that contain descriptions of a few hikes in the SGM - see Books About the SGM: Recreation: Hiking.
As advertised above, this site contains hikes and trails that are not mentioned in any guidebook. As of 10 November 1999, I list 175 different hikes from 86 different trailheads. I have put 22 detailed ANF hike descriptions on the web, and I have found 159 other hike descriptions containing some information about a hike, including the ones I have put online for others. Because some of these reference the same hike, a total of 131 hikes of the 175 listed here (75%) have some web information. For later updates, and a breakdown by area, see Hike Information Summary.
If you know of trails I have missed, or any web information that I have not found, please email me. A number of these links were brought to my attention by Anthony Sebestyen and by Jane Strong, my coauthor for The San Gabriel Mountains website.
How To Use This Site
The main page of this site is divided into two columns. The left-hand column is the access to information about specific trails or specific hikes, as well as to other web information indexed here such as pictures connected to the SGM. The right-hand column gives ancillary hiking information, including general conditions in the SGM, collections of information related to hiking, and analysis pages related to hiking.
In the left-hand column there are many ways to access the hiking information contained here on the hiking trails of the Angeles:
- by the maps organized by region, which is by far the easiest way and which are the most up-to-date. The regions are defined primarily by trailhead access. Thus the Mt. Islip region contains all the hikes accessed by the Angeles Crest Highway from Cloudburst Summit to Big Pines Ranger Station. In addition, it was natural to include the two trailheads just to the north of that area. The San Gabriel River region has several hikes that go to many of the same peaks as in the Mt. Islip region, but the access to those trailheads from SR39 is much different. There is no easy possibility of a car shuttle between any trailhead found in the Mt. Islip region with any found in the San Gabriel River region.
- By mileage, sorted first by the length of the hike and then by altitude gain. This table is useful for picking out a hike by mileage and altitude gain. I update this and the following table only at periodic intervals, not after every hike I add to the region tables.
- By hike number. The hike numbers are used simply for quick reference with Robinson's 1990 book, and can generally be ignored for all other purposes. The hike numbers are interchangeably called trip numbers. See more information about trip number.
- By date, for those hikes that I have done and written up. This table tells you at a glance which hikes I have written up and how up-to-date my information is.
- By web site, for just those hikes on the web.
- By trip number, for just those hikes on the web.
- By travel time and distance from Caltech. I have tried to be complete for all the hikes closest to Caltech, but this page has not been updated by me for some time. A little bit of work on your part can adjust those times to derive travel times from other places, knowing that Caltech is about 5 minutes from I-210 and either the Hill or Lake exits.
I have linked all the information available on the web to each table. If multiple links exist, the link in the tables takes you to a list of all available links, sorted by date. Some links are only contained within my write-up if I have written up a given trip, but I am gradually converting those links to that format.
Don't forget to use the search function to find all the information available here about a hike!
Upcoming Change To Focus On Trails
In its current incarnation, hikes are the main focus of the tables. This makes it difficult to get all the information about a given trail in the single links page, since a trail can be part of many different hikes. Therefore I am gradually writing up the trails of the SGM, and thus centralizing the information about a given trail in one place.
This change will also make it much easier to add trail conditions submitted by readers. If you have later or additional observations about general or specific trail conditions, please email me. I will put your emailed info on the web, with credit to the reporter. As those are received, I will add new trail pages when they don't previously exist.
Because it will be some time before this change is fully implemented, be sure to check for other hikes that use a given trail to find all the relevant information.
Go to Hikes in the San Gabriel Mountains
Copyright © 1996-2000 by Tom Chester.
Permission is freely granted to reproduce any or all of this page as long as credit is given to me at this source:
http://tchester.org/sgm/site/intro_hike.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Updated 14 November 2000.