Amy and I had decided with all of the weather we had been getting in Southern California it would be a lot of fun to head out for a snow hike in the San Gabriels.  The weather was showing a break in the rain, which gave us a clear day to hike.  So we decided to head off to the IceHouse Canyon Trail.  We knew there would be snow at the  trailhead elevation and were excited to bundle up and take Mikey along with us.

The only problem is that what we didn’t plan for was road closures.  We saw that Mt Baldy Road was closed due to mud/snow slides above IceHouse Canyon Road.  Looking at the road closure maps we still felt like it was doable as it appeared the trail head parking was below the closure.  So we go up and headed off to the mountains early Saturday.  However, as we started up Mt Baldy Road we found out that all access to Mt Baldy Village was closed and we had to get a few miles beyond that.  UGH….now we had to come up with a plan B.

We decided to head to Mt Wilson as it seemed that taking advantage of the clear day we would have some great views.  The challenge now was trying to figure out how to get there.  The first choice was to head to Chantry Flats trailhead but then we found out that the road to get there was also closed due to slides.  Obviously Los Angeles isn’t use to this strange thing called rain.  We finally found an alternative trailhead and headed straight there.

We finally got going right before 10:00 am and joined droves of others who I guess had the same idea as we did but it appeared most were looking to do a shorter day hike.  The trail started out with the typical southern California landscape of  chaparral and scrub brush.  This however, turned into shaded groves of trees following a creek on our way up. Amy and I had never seen this much water rolling down the streams here in Los Angeles and we have been up here many times in the past.

Once at the top we were greeted with amazing views of the LA basin and snow cap mountains to the east.  We missed our hopes of playing in the snow but had a blast with our Plan B.  Maybe the roads will get cleaned up before all of the snow melts and we can still get out for our snow hike.