I spent two fun days hiking these 5 peaks in the San Gabriel Mountains. While I could have tagged all 5 in a long day, or in two easier day-hikes, I decided to do it as an overnight backpack just for the fun of it. I first hiked Pine Mtn Ridge and Wild View peaks from Guffy campground near Wrightwood, making good time on relatively good trail. From there, I made my way to Dawson Peak and slept near the summit. The section between Wild View and Dawson was considerably more challenging, and it took me almost 4 hours to navigate the 3.5 miles (luckily I’d read about this section ahead of time so it wasn’t a surprise). There is an old trail along this part, but it was pretty hard to follow in places and had a moderate amount of brush to fight through. I slept well near the summit of Dawson that night…

The following morning, I climbed up the last few hundred feet to Dawson’s summit, and made my way to Pine and then Wright Mountain before looping back to my truck for a short day. I had debated on including an ascent of Baldy from the north, but in the end, laziness and the thought of getting back to my truck early to catch up on some reading won me over.

One very memorable thing that happened on this trip is that I ran into David Francis near the summit of Pine Mountain Ridge. David was just leaving the summit as I was arriving and we spoke briefly, but I didn’t realize who he was until I checked the summit register, after which I sped up to catch up to him. We had first met briefly on Squaretop’s summit, a super obscure peak in San Diego in 2012. Since then, we’ve missed each other on another peak by a few hours near Idyllwild a few years back and have been friends on Facebook. David and I caught up on each other’s peakbagging adventures and probably could have talked all afternoon had we each not had plans for more peaks that day 😉 Very cool…