Tom Grundy's Iron Mountain Page

11-26-2020 Thanksgiving Day - we climbed some bumps near Iris' place. These were just little bumps in the Chino Hills, but we wanted to get out and stretch our legs and do something. It was pretty windy with gusts up into the 40s at least, maybe 50s. The areas had burned pretty recently, so there was no bushwhacking, just walking up the moonscape slope from the nearest fire road. The summit registers on the last 2 bumps had been toasted and the plastic bags in them melted. The sun set before we finished, but we had headlamps.

Iris leans into the wind

panorama on a windy moonscape bump

southern California sunset

11-27-2020 For my Birthday we climbed a few more little bumps. One was overlooking a landfill. We also found some wild walnuts. This was a more modest undertaking than the day before and we didn't even need our headlamps.

Iris says hello to a cow

11-28-2020 - For the Saturday after Thanksgiving we joined Tom Becht in his annual hike up Iron Mountain. This is one of the harder local trails with about 7,000 feet of gain on a pretty steep trail with not the most secure footing. It shares a trailhead with some more popular trails, so we weren't so surprised that there were plenty of people and vehicles when we arrived around 7. Patrick was also joining us for this hike, although he didn't know how far he would make it. The first half of the distance isn't too steep up to the "helipad" - a small clearing on a bump on the ridge. From there it gets a lot steeper. This is where we last saw Patrick. We also saw a woman heading down who said she had counted 51 people so far (we expected to see single digits). It seemed that everyone wanted to hike up Iron for some reason, including a pretty sizeable group that started at midnight and another at 3 am. Other than a few trail runners we were passing most of the people we saw, although the majority were already coming down.

Iron Mtn from the "helipad" (on the descent)

We continued on up to the 8,007 ft top getting there in about 4:40. There were a heap of people around the summit taking pics, so we went past it to a rock where we had sandwiches and summit cookies until they left. Then we went up and signed the register, silenced the creepy singing santa doll, and headed down. We were going down a lot faster than many of the people and passed most of them. We made it down before dark. There was a pretty nice nearly full moon we could glimpse on the drive back.

Iris imitates people posing on the summit

Tom and Iris on the descent

over 360 degree Iron Mountain summit panorama, Baldy is above and left of Iris

Iris' Strava page for Iron Mountain - map and pics

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