I kind of wish that sign wasn’t in the middle there, but my Photoshop (well, Gimp) skills aren’t quite up to it. Maybe I’ll give it a shot with context-aware fill at some point.

It was awfully hazy toward the north, though, and you can see the San Gabriels are fading into the haze toward the left of the frame.

These were taken at the same spot as the loooong snowy panorama from January 2008, the Misty Mountains from December of the same year, and the cloud window panorama from January 2010. (I should really just come up with something to tag all the photos I’ve taken there.)

Several trails run from the entrance around the edge of the park, and one goes inward to an area that’s currently closed off. Because…well…take a look:

I couldn’t help but take a picture. It went so perfectly with this sign I found in Hawaii near the active lava flows:

Actually, the afternoon reminded me of that evening as well in that I went hiking without really being prepared for it. So in this case, I only spent about 30 minutes in the park, but it was a perfect de-stress and mental recharge.

Keep in mind that this is Southern California. Winter is when the wilderness (such as it is) turns green, and while temperatures are often in the fifties, it’s not uncommon for them to climb into the seventies or higher.

Who knew this was just minutes away from suburbia?

Actually, the park is nearly surrounded by suburbs. It’s a long finger (running along the canyon) with hills full of expensive houses to the west, newer suburbs to the south and east, and a little more wilderness to the north. Somewhere in the suburbs to the south, there used to be a Boy Scout campground called Camp Myford. When I was in scouts during the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was one of the counselors at the very last Cub Scout day camp held there, the week before the bulldozers came in to build new suburbs. If I have my bearings right, the gate is still there, not far from the intersection where I occasionally stop to take photos of Saddleback and the nearby hills.

I hiked along the Eucalyptus Trail, through that grove of trees up a hill to a viewpoint and the intersection with the East Ridge Trail. The first part was great. The second? No shade, no switchbacks, and a very steep trail full of ruts that I suspect is a converted firebreak. Lots of people were walking, jogging, or even biking (I’m not sure how they managed that part), but after only a few minutes of going up and down those hills, I decided it was time to head back.

Nice view, though!

In a couple of spots I saw posts that had been damaged by fire. I’m not sure when they were damaged, but if it was in the Santiago Fire back in 2007, that means it got a lot closer to homes in that area than I thought.

I have a few more pictures in a photoset on Flickr.
At some point I’ll have to go back when I’m actually prepared to hike!

When I stopped to take a picture, I realized that there was a whole line of little puffball clouds, tracking the mountain range exactly, but not appearing anywhere else in the sky. It really shows the effect that mountains have on cloud formation!

I decided to try for a four-shot panorama of the whole range.

It came out better than I expected, actually. I believe this is the first time I’ve stitched together a panorama using phone pictures. I used Hugin, which was a little hampered by the fact that I couldn’t find specs on the G1 lens type, focal length, etc., but it seems to have done reasonably well.

Saddleback Haze, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Taken Friday morning. You can really see the layers in the haze that (I assume) has drifted down from the Morris Fire near Azusa.

Launchpad, originally uploaded by Kelson.

We went out to the “Great Park” yesterday to see if we could go up in the balloon. It turned out to be completely booked or the day (there was some big ice skating event going on) but we got in some photos on the ground, including a couple of pics with our copy of Scott Pilgrim 5 to submit to the contest.

More photos: OC Balloon set on Flickr.

Saddleback Snow, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Not as spectacular as December’s display, but still nifty. The San Gabriel Mountains were really impressive this morning, but I didn’t have time to catch a picture.

Also: it’s way too cold for Southern California. The car thermometer said 45°F.

I’ve added a few more pictures to my Snowline photoset showing the unusual amount of snow in the local Santa Ana Mountains.

There’s a few more from Thursday, plus a couple of pictures I grabbed Friday morning, like the one shown above.

Update: Here’s one more, from a batch of photos I took at lunch today. More at Flickr…

Saddleback and the Santa Ana Mountains got an amazing amount of snow yesterday, and I went out to a couple of spots this morning to take photos. Check this Flickr set for more.

Well, we’ve had several months of normal (for SoCal) rain, and the hills have turned green. Mostly. It’s clear that the scars from the fire are going to take at least another season to heal. The last couple of days have been very clear, so I went back to the same spot to take a “four months later” photo.

March 10, 2008. Click for a larger version

Now compare it to the November (post-fire) and October (pre-fire) photos:

November 24, 2007. Click for a larger version

October 6, 2007. Click for a larger version

I’m 99% certain that this section of hills normally turns completely green in winter. The San Joaquin Hills to the southwest (not visible here) certainly have. All along the area that burned last fall, there are gaps in the vegetation. Interestingly, it looks like the empty patches today line up well with the darker areas that I took for scrub back in October. Maybe grass doesn’t grow well in those areas because of the soil or slope, and it just takes longer for the other ground cover to come back?

Not just the tops of the mountains on the eastern half of the range, but everything, even the lower parts you can just barely see by the Cajon pass, and this huge expanse north of Los Angeles that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen covered.

I pulled over as soon as I found a spot I considered safe, then walked back up to the top of the ramp. I talked briefly with the man I’d seen taking photos, and he said he’d lived in the area for 50 years and had never seen the mountains like this. He also mentioned he had a friend who had served at the base*, and he was going to send him the pictures.

I ended up taking a 12-photo panorama (zoomed) spanning at least 120° from the blimp hangar on the left, across the San Gabriels, past the hills above Orange and Tustin, the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, on to Saddleback, which had a few bits of snow clinging to the mountainside.

Click to view panorama (424 KB 6648×500 JPEG)

*This is the location of the former MCAS Tustin. The Marine base was closed in the mid-1990s, and the land is only just starting to be developed—notably The District in one corner, which is what brought us to the area yesterday.

UPDATE DECEMBER 18, 2008: This post is getting a lot of traffic today, but it’s from last winter. If you want to see photos from this week’s snow, check out Misty Mountains: Another San Gabriel Snow Panorama from the same spot on Tuesday, December 16, and my Snowline photoset on Flickr, for those pictures and several of Saddleback and the Santa Ana Mountains on Thursday, December 18, 2008.