One of the reasons I moved here is the close proximity to many outstanding areas. Several times a year I walk 3 miles from my house to a trailhead and from there it is about 16 or 17 miles to the peak of Mt. San Jacinto. The only difficulty is the first 8 miles or so of the trail has an 8,000 foot elevation gain. This time of year it is a very serious hike requiring ice axe, crampons, and snow shoes, so I just take the tram up to the 8,500 foot elevation (takes an hour or less to drive from my house and get to the top of the tram station), because my wife won’t let me go solo up the trail in winter snow, and I can’t find anyone to do the hike with me in winter — Craig W, are you reading this ;-)
Other times I just drive 50 miles to the back side of the mountain near Idylwild and hike from there. But usually when there is this much snow I only do one or two winter trips as I don’t particularly like cold weather, plus it is exactly 51 miles from my house to both the north and south entrances of Joshua Tree NP, which makes for a more enjoyable trip. Last night the temperature in the San Jacintos was 7F, with something like -10F windchill factor and I’m a sissy when it gets that cold!
Its about a 4 hour drive from my house to the Southern Sierra, which is convenient too.
Craig and I are going to the GGG, which is an epic drive for me, about 6 hours. This fall I drove 13 hours to the Trinity Alps to do a trip with some BPLers, the furtherest I have ever driven to go backpacking — but the company was worth the time spent driving. Plus I drove home along the coast and did some great car camping, since my planned backpacking trip in the Los Padres National forest couldn’t happen because the forest was closed from Monterey down to San Luis Obispo due to a forest fire. We need the snow with our drought, although a few years ago (I think it was 2011) we had record snow in the local mountains here and in the Sierra.
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