Loch Leven Hike

There is a 14 mile hike on our mountain that goes from a conference center at Loch Leven up to Angelus Oaks and back. It has a total of about 2600' of climbing and it's all on old highway 38 which was abandoned in 1933. There's quite a bit of decayed pavement left, heavily overgrown and with several land slides and fallen trees to negotiate.

My wife and I are fairly experienced hikers but our daughter, Amber, has hiked Mount Whitney twice plus Half Dome and a bunch of others just this year . We were happy she could join us. We started at 7:30am because even though this is October it's still Southern California and we expected it to get to 80F at 4000' later in the day. Fortunately at that point we would be headed downhill. 

The trail only has one short technical section. The rest is simply hiking.

We were all moving well as we climbed from 4000' to 6000', averaging 2.9 mph according to my phone which was running the ridewithgps app. We turned around at the Oaks Restaurant at Angeles Oaks where the food and service are excellent. I've only ever eaten there midway through this hike so I'm probably going to think any food is excellent at that point.

In some ways, heading down is harder because the load is now on your calf muscles instead of the larger quadriceps. I've always found the hikes with long downhill sections are harder to recover from. The temperature had risen to 72F as we started back but we had a light headwind which felt refreshing. The bugs were becoming a bit of a nuisance so we got our bug nets out

We got back to the cars in the early afternoon with an overall average of 3.3 mph. Total distance was 14.3 miles with about 2,600' of climbing. I'm not sure how we picked up another 500' on the way back.

So that's that for the year. We have such a short window for this hike between blazing heat and snow we missed it last year. Let's do it again next year.