I got tired of the bone-jostling trail surface where I've mostly been hiking lately, at the North Etiwanda Preserve (NEP) - which I've covered in previous photo diaries - so I started going to a new place, the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park about half an hour's drive Westward. Let me tell you, it is a totally different world - the trail surface is compacted and forgiving, there is much more elevation gain to be had, the air is fresh, the trail is more forgiving on muscles because it has periodic ups and downs rather than constant slope, the ecology is chaparral rather than desert, and my God the scenery leaves NEP in the dust. This may not be especially impressive to people with a lot of wilderness experience, but to me this is freaking amazing. I share my photos below.
The Park is a circuit comprising parts of several different trails that go well beyond its bounds, but for the most part I stayed within the Park limits as a matter of convenience and time-management. I do love, however, that whenever I feel like it up there I may just decide to keep going along one of the trails and "see what I can see" (I was actually whistling The Bear Went Over The Mountain at some point up there). It's actually a very popular place - shockingly so - and the three times I've been there so far had a relatively constant stream of people flowing by in both directions, including hikers, joggers, mountain bikers, and plenty of people bringing their dogs. Parking at the trail head is woefully inadequate as a result - most times you have to park at an overflow lot quite a ways downhill, and today even that was full to the brim, forcing people to park in random scraps of open dirt along the road even further downhill.
At first the Park is much like any Park, but as you'll see, it turns almost into a dreamscape. Anyway, the beginning of the Claremont Wilderness Park experience begins at a fork in the trail where you can choose the Cobal trail (a counterclockwise circuit of the Park) or Burbank trail (clockwise). So far, I've only gone counterclockwise. Note throughout this diary that these photos span three separate outings, so they may show a similar vantage more than once under very different lighting conditions. Cobal takes you first through a very pleasant, wooded area that is amazingly cold in the morning:
From there, you ascend along a winding hillside path with some occasionally striking perspectives on adjacent canyons and cliffside flora. The Park is in a Fire Zone because its slopes are covered in what is basically tinder:
Eventually you start moving West along a ridgeline trail with spectacular views that keep delivering surprises and breathtaking views around every hairpin and hillcrest:
Things begin to become truly awesome and dreamlike right about here:
I haven't even begun to exhaust the wonders of the main circuit, let alone all the trails that go beyond the Park. But if you go here, I definitely recommend printing out and bringing a map with you - it's very easy to miss the crucial turn that completes the circuit, in which case you will end up leaving the Park miles away from the parking lot. I know this from experience: I ended up hiking a greater distance through the hillside suburbs of Claremont getting back to my car than I had up in the Park. That said, Claremont Hills Wilderness Park is a chaparral wonderland, and as awesome as some of these photos are, the reality is far beyond it.