We reach the Notch and order our first pitcher of Claremont Craft Ales Double Dude IPA (8.5% ABV), which goes quickly. This was John Muir’s turf, and in his 1918 book, Steep Trails, the naturalist and Sierra Club co-founder described the San Gabriels as “pure and untamable as the sea.rigidly inaccessible…fairly dwarfing the utmost efforts of human culture out of sight and mind.” He went on to say that “in the very heart of this thorny wilderness, down in the dells, you may find gardens filled with the fairest flowers… Bears, also, and panthers, wolves, wildcats wood rats, squirrels, foxes, snakes, and innumerable birds, all find grateful homes here, adding wildness to wildness in glorious profusion and variety.” Lilly and I board the 62-year-old chairlift, and I look over my shoulder at the Los Angeles basin’s gauzy sweep. “Much different and groovier than the surrounding mountains.” Baldy is a surfer’s mountain if there is such a thing,” he tells me. Baldy before moving to Oregon for college, “and to chase a freestyle skiing career.” But he later returned, and after a 5-year stint as National Sales Manager at Boardworks Surf in Encinitas, he came home. He has pale eyes, a strong jaw, and an intense scar running the length of his left forearm (skateboarding accident, jutting bones, skin graft). Ellingson strikes me as a tireless explorer, the kind of guy who keeps a low profile but still knows how to have a good time. Robby Ellingson shows up and explains that a Beatles tribute band, The Beatunes, will be playing tonight at the Top of the Notch Restaurant, a chairlift ride up Mt. But, according to Tamara Hanson, member of the environmental preservation and activist group Keep Baldy Wild, “I would definitely say that the people who find themselves here love it, so any kind of inconvenience or risk, they’d say it’s worth it.” There have been a number of wildfires, floods, mudslides, and blizzards. Additionally, in 2008 an EF-2 tornado crossed I-215 and lifted a semi-truck about 40 feet off the ground. Baldy area earthquake activity is “significantly above” the state average, and 4,060% greater than the national. Ann Croissant, Ph.D., President of the San Gabriel Regional Conservancy, tells me that, “As a young and growing range, the San Gabriels are seismically active and peppered with hazardous conditions, including unstable hillsides prone to earthquake damages and multiple safety issues.” At any given moment, a massive tectonic shuffle could essentially collapse the mountain and send the entire Los Angeles basin furling into the Mojave like a fist. Baldy stands as the highest peak in the San Gabriels, surrounded by the Angeles National Forest and bordered on the north by the San Andreas Fault. We’re waiting for Robby Ellingson, General Manager of “Southern California’s most epic mountain,” at the base of Southern California’s most epic mountain. Paranormal folklore tends to crop up when folks of a certain age get to talking in the woods, on the outskirts of a sparsely populated village, amidst the widespread wilds of the San Gabriel Mountains. And then there was this other guy along the same kind of story, and he ended up blasting most of his face off-still kinda had part of an eye and part of an ear, but you know, he basically had no face. People say they’ve seen him hitchhiking, but I don’t know. He loved mining, so that was his deal, right? So he became known as the Hook Man. He ended up continuing to mine-they fabricated a hook for his hand so he could still pick and be able to mine with it. “ was a miner who used a lot of blasting caps, and he blew off one of his hands. “The Hook Man is one ghost story,” Phillip Tibbetts, Product Manager at Mt.
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