August 2012 - Hermit Valley - Mt. Baldy part 2

We made it!! These photos don't express the beauty that I saw from the top of Mt. Baldy.

A little video from the top of Mt. Baldy. (Top of Mt. Baldy video)

Lisa took this amazing photo. It's one of my favorites.

(I have a hard time using Blogger to put my photos where I want them. I finally gave up and they just went where they wanted. If anyone knows how to make the photos behave, let me know)

After an enjoyable stay at the top of Mt. Baldy we decided it was time to head back to camp. We later discovered that we went down the mountain farther back than we realized and had a longer journey to camp.

Since we hiked back a different way back, I had never noticed that there were little ponds around the mountain. This one was dried up a bit, but showed signs of animals gathering at the watering hole. Danny hurt his back so we were taking a break to stretch it out and Lisa tried to massage it.

I wasn't wearing hiking shoes (mistake #1) I was fine hiking up the hill but coming down we had some steep inclines that we just kind of skidded down. I was being overly confident (mistake #2) and rolled my ankle at one point going from rock to rock. I found this handy dandy walking stick to help me keep some weight off my ankle. Because of my sore ankle, we realized we had a lot farther to go and I was slowing everybody down. So instead of following the mountain around to the side where our camp was, we went down the side of the mountain, crossed a stream and climbed a very very steep hill up to the road. When I say climb, I mean on all fours as if we were rock climbing. That's how steep this hill was. We made it up to the road and my ankle appreciated the flat walk back to camp.

The End :)