Lutz Canyon Trail

Distance: Almost 7 miles.
Elevation: 5890'-8650'
Time: 4.5 hours

Last night, while mentally organizing a term paper on George Eliot, Brenda called. She wanted to know if I could join her and two of her friends for a quick hike up Lutz Canyon. "We'll be done by noon" said Brenda. Since I'm on fall break from the school this week, I bit.

Rain was forecasted for today, so I was a little unsure about hiking. Last night I saw lightning behind the mountains while walking the dogs at 8pm. This morning there were some low-lying clouds before sunrise, but by the time we met at 7:15am, the skies were clearing. We had blue skies with partial cloud cover all morning. Weather couldn't have been better.

We were four: Brenda, Debbie, Ellen and I and dogs Sadie and Chalita. We started the steep trail at 7:30am, hiking up at a steep pace, stopping only twice briefly to water the dogs, and made it to the Crest Trail just before 10am. The loose rocks in the lower half of this trail made the footing treacherous. It was worse going down. Two of us also carried firearms, as the Lutz trail is notorious for drug caches and illegal hideouts (because of the many small, abandoned caves along the trail).

This is the kind of workout I needed: a pace and distance that challenged me without killing me...or keeping me waiting. We all hiked up this trail at the same pace. I stayed in the back to talk with Ellen, but found myself out of breath. Am I losing the conditioning I gained hiking the JMT this past July?

We stopped briefly at the Lutz mine, took a few photos, checked out the entrance to the mine, then resumed the steep grade up to the Upper Bear Mine, where more Mexican trash lingered. This site wasn't as bad as my last hike this way in January 2009, but it was obviously recently used as an illegal resting spot for those coming up from Mexico. Several sun-burned backpacks hung abandoned on a dead tree. We took those down and carried them in a trash back on our return hike, taking turns carrying the bag.

We stopped a few times to enjoy the view. We arrived at the Crest Trail just before 10am, where we rested for 30 minutes before going back down again. There were few trees except for some ash trees in fall splendor. Water that was in the creek earlier this year was all gone. This was a dry hike. We never met another soul on the trail.

We got back to the cars just before noon, ate lunch at Vinny's in town where we chatted another 45 minutes. The gals were talking passionately about caving and seemed to want to recruit me on a spelunking trip with them. I told them they sounded like smooth-talking army recruiters. Caves scare me, but this group of women would put me at ease...and the idea is tempting!

I got home at 1:45pm with a large cheese pizza for Kevin. This was perfect for me as I had the rest of the day to get homework started. An hour later the skies turned grey, the wind kicked in, and just before sunset it began to rain. The forecasters were right after all.