Martin's DW

Santiago Peak, highest point of Orange County, California, has been on my to-hike list for several years. I had finally intended to check it off last summer, but high heat made it infeasible last July Fourth weekend so I ended up doing a number of shorter hikes instead. Memorial Day weekend this year, however, seemed a good backup plan -- it's cooler, the days are still long, and my annual Adventure Pass wouldn't have expired yet. So I booked a hotel and made my plans.

I ended up getting a rather late start out Saturday morning due to last-minute packing. I hadn't really packed the night before on account of heading up to San Francisco to see the Funny Girl tour, and it didn't help my speed that I got woken up unexpectedly early by loud noises from upstairs. Looks like the neighbors are moving out. Hopefully they'll be finished by the time I get home. Nonetheless, I was on the road shortly after 10 a.m. I decided to take the scenic route via 101, and took a pit stop in San Luis Obispo for gas and what was intended to be a quick check of the local comics shops. Instead, I ended up digging through Captain Nemo's back issue bins for over an hour, finding a decent number of my highest priority collecting targets. It was worth it but did put me behind schedule. After a dinner break in Goleta, I ended up getting in to my hotel in Lake Forest just before 9 p.m.

I woke up bright and early the next morning and after a quick food stop at a nearby Ralph's, headed to the trailhead. Well, attempted to head to the trailhead. Turns out Trabuco Creek Road was gated a couple miles short of the actual Holy Jim Trailhead due to three creek crossings that were still quite wet. I grabbed what was possibly the last parking spot near the gate, discovered to my irritation that one of my trekking pole's tip protectors was jammed onto the pole (necessitating hiking with only one pole) and set off at 7:38am. It was cool and foggy -- great hiking weather.

The first part of the hike was pretty dull since it was just Trabuco Creek Road, although the creek crossings did provide a bit of unwanted spice. When I finally reached the normal parking area, I turned onto the first part of the Holy Jim Trail, which involved another locked gate and a road hike through a bunch of cabins. The lower ones looked to be pretty dilapidated -- I noticed large fungal growths on at least one of them. After all of that road walking, I finally got to the signed Holy Jim Trailhead, at which point the route turned into an actual single-tracked trail. It still follows Trabuco Creek, and there are several additional creek crossings, but these were actually more pleasant than the ones on the road since there were rocks and logs that obviated getting one's feet wet.

At around 2200' there's a trail junction. Turning right would lead to Holy Jim Falls, which will have to be an adventure for another time. The left branch went up, and proved to be a narrow trail through a couple miles of green tunnel. It's not my favorite kind of trail as I tend to feel a trifle claustrophobic with overhanging vegetation that's barely taller than I am. But it kept the sun out and the temperatures cool, so that was upside. There weren't really views yet anyway since the fog didn't even start thinking about lifting until 3000' or so.

Eventually the Holy Jim Trail opens up a bit and eventually meets up with the Main Divide Road at 3965'. I got a bit turned around by the HPS directions here and ended up doing some unnecessary hiking west (following a GPS track I had downloaded) before deciding that no, I didn't want to pick my way through a tiny, steep use trail. I eventually determined that the HPS route followed a trail almost directly north of the Holy Jim trail junction, at Bear Spring, but at that point I figured I'd just go with the road. By that point the day was warming up and the fog was dissipating, and I got to enjoy the views of the Santa Ana Mountains all around. At 4874' there's a nice wide area with good views to the north, where the Three Saints -- two still with crowns of snow -- could be seen off in the distance, as well as the I-15 corridor directly below.

The thing about hiking on an active dirt road is that you do have to deal with vehicles. (I viewed doing Santiago Peak as a drive-up to be unsporting, but if you've got the right vehicle, it's sure easier than a 18-mile hike with four thousand feet of elevation gain.) And it seemed like the vehicles only increased in frequency as I got closer to the summit. Having to wait out a quadruple Jeep convoy was bad enough, but the coup-de-grace was getting passed by, of all things, a Cybertruck. Gross.

At any rate, I got to the summit a bit after 1 p.m. and took all of my regular pictures. The views on the true summit are pretty sharply limited by all of the communications towers, and there were still a lot of low clouds to the south which further obscured things, but Trabuco and Modjeska Peaks were very visible, as were the rest of the nearby peaks. Also there were lots and lots of flies. I took a photo for one family that had driven up and the youngest son was trying to kill all of the flies that he could -- he wasn't lacking for targets. No summit register, but there was a little "Santiago Peak" sign to hold. I ended up taking my summit break (and eating lunch) on the north side of the summit area, which had better (and less cloud-obstructed) views, fewer people, and fewer flies. There's a cool little setup at one point with tubes pointing at the nearby mountains and lakes.

I started down at 2:20pm. The hike out was largely uneventful, although early on my descent a Toyota Tacoma driver pulled over to ask me if continuing on the Main Divide Road would get them out. I confirmed that they were on a thru-road but couldn't help them more than that. It's not like the maps I brought covered the full road. I was pretty exhausted by the final push down Trabuco Creek Road when the elevation loss was too minimal for gravity to be much of a hiking aid, but I made it back to the car just before 7 p.m., a good hour before sunset. And then it was time to drive back to the hotel, get dinner, and pass out.

5.8 miles each way, about 1600 feet of net elevation gain along the Woods Trail. Parked at Woods Road in Almaden Quicksilver Regional Park and spent just under five hours on the trail, at which point I linked up with my previous Bay Area Ridge Trail track on a December 2016 ascent of El Sombroso. Minimal views of the Bay Area along the way but some decent views of Umunhum.

Sights of interest: A few turkeys, and a bunch of trail runners (who turned off onto the Barlow Road Trail, leaving the rest of the hike pretty quiet).

The good version of this post got eaten by an inadvertent back button since apparently Dreamwidth's autosave still doesn't work.

I spent the afternoon and evening up in San Francisco today. First, a much needed beach walk along Ocean Beach, paralleling the closed portion of the Great Highway. (I parked at Sloat and 43rd.) Then I went to this month's SF in SF event. After some remembrances of Terry Bisson from Cliff Winnig, Jacob Weisman, and Rudy Rucker, we heard readings from David M. Sandner's upcoming horror novella His Unburned Heart (featuring Mary Shelley and the, well, unburned heart of Percy Bysshe Shelley) and David D. Levine's science-fiction heist novel The Kuiper Belt Job. Swag acquisition: a cute wind-up Frankenstein's monster.

Humorous snafu of the evening: Sandner's nonfiction book The Afterlife of Frankenstein was held up in the mail, so instead of having the book signed we got nifty special bookplates to get signed instead if we ordered the book. (It'll be delivered Soon.)

I had already hiked 1.1 miles of the Santa Teresa County Park ridge trail section back in 2018 en route to Coyote Peak (1155'), so I decided to start today's outing from San Vicente Avenue so that I'd be ascending at the start and descending at the end. (I always find hikes that do the reverse obnoxious.) Better yet, I could make a loop of it—ascending via Stile Ranch Trail, the Ridge Trail route, following the Mine Trail to the Rocky Ridge Trail junction, and then descending via the much more direct Fortini Trail. It all made for a good start to a nice sunny day. Bonus: the trail wasn't that muddy, except where it paralleled Santa Teresa Creek.

With a bunch of energy left over, I kept going beyond my parking spot to the Calero Creek Trail. This was less enjoyable and mostly flat, with one rather exciting creek crossing. I eventually turned around at Harry Road, where the trail becomes a wide multi-use paved experience. Better to come back to that with sneakers.

Total new Ridge Trail mileage today: 3.2. Actual mileage today: 5.5.

Picked up where I left off last time. The most exciting part of this section was an unexpected closure due to Valley Water release, which meant I had to bypass a bit over a mile of the trail as it was flooded. (I did think about fording it, but the current was quite swift.) Other than that, a notable point of interest is the model airplane field just past the Ogier Ponds. It was cool watching the little aircraft do acrobatics.

So that's eight more Bay Area Ridge Trail miles, ending at the Anderson Lake visitor center. In actuality I had quite a few more, between the detour and the trek to and from the bus stop. (The 68 is kind of a car shuttle, right?)

It's an approximately four-minute walk in the woods both ways from the highway. I imagine it being quite pleasant at certain times of year, but unfortunately today was chilly and gray and the woods were a bit damp. Hey, they can't all be exciting.

I did get super lucky and run into a couple who were also chasing state high points so I got a proper "summit" picture instead of an awkward leaning-the-backpack-against-a-tree one.

State high points: 2/50. I've now done possibly the easiest one and one that's probably about on the edge of the upper quintile.
County high points: 70/3143. Well, Rhode Island abolished county governments in 1842 but I can still color Providence County in on a map.

I probably should have kept driving west a bit after tagging Jerimoth to touch the ground in Connecticut, another state that I have never visited. (Just like I had never visited Rhode Island until yesterday.) But hey, I still need to visit the state to tag its high point.

I started off today by wandering around Winnipeg for a couple hours and checking out used book and comic shops in the area. I didn't find anything too exciting, but I did grab a back issue that was on my priority list and, of all things, an Aquaman collection from Red River Book Store, a shop in the Exchange District. This all took a bit longer than I expected and I had to dash a bit to get my loot back to my hotel, then head to the convention in time for the first panel I wanted to see today, at 1:00pm. This was "Dinosaurs! We want more Dinosaurs!" which was basically Julie Czerneda (and the audience) asking Dr. Philip John Currie, a paleontologist, questions about avians' Mezozoic predecessors. Dinosaurs are always fun to hear about.

After that panel I hung out in the exhibit hall a bit, checking out the exhibits, the Art Show, and being amused by a fanzine discussing the Memphis 2023 Worldcon bid. I then headed downstairs to Nisi Shawl's Guest of Honor interview, and after that I attended the memorial for John Mansfield, the Fan Guest of Honor. Following that it was after 6pm and NASFiC site selection had closed. As one of the WSFS staff members for this convention, I went to help count the ballots, which went reasonably expeditiously and resulted in ... well, you'll all get to find out tomorrow morning at 10am CDT.

Once the site selection result had been obtained, the WSFS staff (all five of us) had an enjoyable dinner at the Elephant & Castle attached to the Delta. Towards the end of our meal, thunder started booming and rain began pouring down. Fortunately, we were shielded by the building overhand and a table umbrella, but it was still a bit exciting. We paid up and headed back inside, dispersing. Linda Deneroff and I swung by the parties (there were three tonight: Seattle in 2025, Glasgow Worldcon 2024, and Minneapolis in '73; unfortunately the parties were operating under fairly strict capacity restrictions by hotel mandate) before heading back to our respective hotels. The rain had, fortunately, blown over by this point.

Tomorrow morning: the first ever NASFiC Business Meeting.

Today was the longest travel day I've had in quite some time. I woke up at 4am PDT to drive up to Millbrae BART, where I dropped off my car and headed to SFO. I got to the airport at about 5:30am. It was pretty quite that early. Security was really fast (to the point where I was scrambling to have my documents ready for display—I'm used to having a bit more time in line to get them out). SFO has nifty new baggage screening carousels that at least look a lot cooler than the old ones we're all used to. And I got ferried into a metal detector line to further speed things up. So that was all very convenient.

This would be my first flight out of the revamped Harvey Milk Terminal 1, and while I think I missed the biggest part of the exhibition outside of security there were a good amount of Harvey Milk pictures inside the secure area. There was also a cool little SF Opera Centennial exhibit with a bunch of costumes from a century of opera productions. I had a decent amount of time to kill so I checked out as much of the area in B concourse as I could before boarding began. It started promptly a bit before 7am and I was soon on the airplane, a WestJet 737 MAX 8.

And there I sat for a bit longer than expected. Despite getting in the night before, the airplane apparently had a last-minute mechanical issue that needed to be addressed. Fortunately this only took about fifteen minutes, which was just long enough for me to start researching backup flights to Winnipeg before the situation was resolved, the gate doors were closed, and the flight proceeded apace. We made up the time en route to Calgary. I didn't get to see much, being in the aisle of a row where the window-seat occupants decided to close their windows the entire flight, but I did get a couple glimpses of the Canadian Rockies. And I read about half of Silvia Moreno-Garcia's The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, which was the one Best Novel Hugo finalist novel I hadn't read yet.

We got to Calgary a bit after 11am MDT. Canadian customs was quick and fairly painless (sadly, no passport stamp) and so I had a good three hours to kill at YYC before my connecting flight to Winnipeg left. And, well, it feels that a lot of YYC is awaiting new tenants. I was flying out of Concourse C which was absolutely packed, so I headed down to the other domestic concourses and while they were quieter, they also were mostly devoid of anything I wanted to eat. I did get a bit of fun planespotting in: most notably WestJet's Mickey Mouse Disney World 737-800, but I also appreciated the Dash 8 turboprops that the Canadian regional airlines still fly. (The U.S. majors phased out turboprops in their regional affiliates some time ago.) At any rate, hungry, I finally joined the Tim Horton's line at Concourse C. This was a mistake. Not because of the food, but because the queue was painfully slow.

After eating I wandered over to my gate and ran into a few fans; we chatted until it was boarding time. The 737-800 (in normal WestJet livery, in case you were getting any ideas) was on a very quick turnaround from YQQ and ended up departing a bit late because there just wasn't any way to board everybody in time. (And by everybody, I mean every seat—both flights today were full.) That's on whoever in WestJet wrote up the schedules. This time the windows stayed open but there wasn't a whole lot to look at between takeoff and landing, so I finished the novel about fifteen minutes before landing. The ride down was a trifle bumpy but nothing to write home about.

Upon deplaning in Winnipeg, I headed for the bus stop outside the airport. Just after I got there it started pouring rain, so I had to duck into the covered bus shelter to grab my hoodie out of my suitcase and don it. The bus started out pretty empty but filled up quickly as we got close to downtown. (Amusingly, it's the exact same kind of bus that VTA runs.) By 6:30pm CDT it had stopped raining and I was at my hotel, the Holiday Inn & Suites in Downtown Winnipeg. This is actually the overflow hotel for Pemmi-Con because I was lazy about booking my reservation. I actually don't mind, since it's an excuse to walk around the city more. I got a top-floor room and even a little welcome gift of Perrier and lemonade, which surprised me since I have, uh, "Club Member" status with IHG. Still it's actually really nice to get a treat when checking in.

After taking a half hour or so to decompress a bit, I decided I needed to stretch my legs a bit in a luggage-free environment, so I walked down to the Forks Market. This took maybe another half hour. I passed by the Manitoba Legislative Building, the RBC Convention Center, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights on the way. What really struck me is that I also passed by a bunch of low-density commercial and industrial lots, too. For being in, or at least very close to, downtown Winnipeg, it's really not that built-up and feels surprisingly run-down in sections. I was actually a bit surprised.

I wandered around the Forks Market, which is an old railroad site near the conjunction of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers, for a bit before heading back to my hotel (okay, I wandered around the convention center a bit too on the way back). I grabbed pizza from across-the-street Freshslice Pizza and finally felt full. And then I wrote all this up!