Sometimes I go mountain driving and bring along my camera. Today, for instance. I went for a drive in the San Gabriel mountains, which I've blogged about before a number of times, but this time I had a different target in mind: CA Route 39 - which Google Maps shows connecting a mountain road I'd driven before to the Angeles Crest Highway, which I haven't seen and had been anxious to explore. Since I had no intention of driving to Pasadena in order to access Angeles Crest directly, I thought this might be a shortcut. Although it didn't turn out that way, I was far from disappointed by this trip, and got a number of beautiful photographs - not to mention the scenery I got to see that I didn't have a chance to capture. I hope you enjoy them too.
I've blogged about the first leg of the trip before - Glendora Ridge Mtwy - but there were some beautiful and unique views today due to mild late-winter conditions:
From there, I took a narrow but fun downhill jog on something called East Fork Road, whose very narrowness, curviness, and funness made it impractical to stop and take pictures. But near the bottom, where it ran alongside the canyon river, there was another uphill road that I turned into on a lark. It went a ways and them came to a dead end with a closed sign, but there was a paved outlook area to park, and I found the whole atmosphere to be sweet and a little mysterious:
At that point I turned around and headed for the main objective of the trip, CA Route 39 and, I hoped, Angeles Crest. The air was exactly the way I want it - the sky that hypnotic infinite dome, and the mountains eerily clear against it looking North, in the direction I was headed (though South, toward the LA basin, there was haze):
I was having a really good time, and looking forward to Angeles Crest, but then..
So apparently Route 39 was still closed, just a ways further up than it had been shown in Google Street View. A couple who were also apparently exploring reached the end about the same time as I did, and the guy asked if I knew why it was closed - which I didn't. So when I got home, I looked it up. Get this: It's been closed since 1978. Yup - 35 years that last stretch between where I stopped and Angeles Crest has been closed. Apparently it just plain costs too much to maintain, even though millions of people love driving even the cul-de-sac version of it every year. Mostly recently, last year, CalTrans threatened to abandon it completely and let it revert to nature if the US Forest Service didn't take over, which they won't. That sucks. Without a Route 39 connection to Angeles Crest, any trip I could take to it would be 4-5 times as long, and possibly impractical.
I was a little disappointed at not being able to drive any higher - I was starting to feel a bit buzzed from the altitude, and wanted more. But there was nowhere to go. Fortunately, however, there was a paved area here at this dead-end too, so I got plenty of great images:
On the return leg, Route 39 turns into San Gabriel Canyon Road, which has both awesome landforms and, closer to the foothills, a dam and reservoir:
This was probably the perfect time of year for this trip - the snow's totally gone from the altitudes I was at, but it's not yet a fly-buzzing semi-desert cauldron. Not far below the dead-end, there's a turn off for "Crystal Lake" (no, not the one Jason Voorhees inhabits), which heads up to a nice campground shaded with lots of huge trees. Very pleasant, although not very interesting to look at, and not what I was originally looking for. But even with Route 39 dead-ended, I totally recommend it in mild temperature and wind conditions.