Meetup Link here
My photos here
Weeks ago we were set on a big hike up Baldy via Register Ridge, then over to Dawson & Pine, but the snow thwarted that plan. Instead, we decided on hiking Iron's little brother, Rattlesnake Peak.
It does share some traits with Iron including steep use trail and annoying brush, but not as bad overall. Eight of us headed out around 8:20 up Shoemaker Rd. The low grade gave us a great warm up, but I knew that meant lots of gain in the few miles left over till the peak.
After a mile or so on the fire road, Taco (aka "Ryan") lead the way up the side of a gully on the left to find a use trail that would take us to our destination. After a bit of easy grade, we began to ascend with steepness and brush (not bad at all) typical in the picture below:
It was a pretty clear day, and views of the imposing Iron Mt and Baldy in clear range the entire hike
I was pleased that were a few sections of rocks to do some bouldering / scrambling (or whatever you call it) to add to the variety of the hike. My legs were pretty springy this day so I was enjoying the steepness.
As usual, the north side of Twin Peaks looks ridiculously steep from afar
Traversing the bumps along the south ridge:
Taco and some more rocks
And odd and brief wooded section near the peak
$250 fine, don't dare steal it!
Reached the peak in good time, probably 2.5 hrs from the start. We originally planned to possibly checking out the NW ridge, but some of the group was not feeling the idea, and frankly, the descent looked pretty harsh. So instead, we decided to check out the east ridge route to turn the hike into a loop. Luckily Taco had gone up this way before and as a backup I uploaded Travis's route in my GPS.
The views coming down this ridge were awesome. Just big imposing mountains and drops all around.
The brush on this route was certainly far worse than the standard south ridge ascent. Now if you wore pants of course it's bad at all, but true to form I wore shorts and enjoyed some leg stinging. Our descent was pretty steep on average but had some flat stretches in between.
Taking a short break waiting for everyone to catch up. As a rock feel into the canyon left in this photo, you could hear it banging around & gaining momentum for a while. This would certainly not be a good spot to deal with snow/ice!
At one point, we had to veer off the ridge toward the south to head back to the trail off the end of Shoemaker, which involved some very steep descent, as bad as some parts of Iron. But as the hike was not as long and tiring, this posed less of issue.
Right at the point of reaching this trail, some out of place scenery was found:
We were very happy to hit fire road and the 2nd tunnel and be done dealing with the brush
Don't walk into the light!!!!
And with that, and enjoyable easy trek on fire road back to the cars.
My GPS got screwy as I tried to collect data in 1 second intervals without saving to data card, but still got a decent read of elevation gain. I'd say just around 4,000 ft for this one.
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