*There are many, this is one.
I live in in Southern California, specifically in the Inland Empire, in a little city called Upland, 36 miles east of L.A. Nice place, I guess. I grew up hiking, playing and otherwise enjoying the San Bernardino Mountains since about 11, when my Mom took me up to Mt. Baldy, about 10 miles north of my house as the crow flies.
There are many things to do in the local Mountains, hiking, skiing, driving, and camping, for a local kid it was heaven, and at 18 I finally climbed Mt. Baldy, and I saw Catalina Island 80 miles away. I could see all the way around it, I was that high.
Anyway, one of the nicer trails goes from Icehouse Canyon, into the Cucamonga Wilderness, and if you go up high enough, at least as far as the Saddle, you might see big horn sheep. So, my son and I decided to take his cousin Brody up and show him the sights. An April storm had just passed and it seemed warm and dry enough, so off we go….
As soon as we gained some altitude we encountered some nasty weather leftover from the storm, but nothing we weren’t ready for, so we pressed on, the whole hike turned dark and eerie, but that just added to the awesomeness we were shown.
When we finally entered the Wilderness, we are treated to a stone that doesn’t belong here, Serpentine, again showing the suspect terrane of the San Bernardino Mountain Chain.
Higher we went, and things were getting even more fogged in, but no Ice or excess rain so we kept going, we are City boys remember….
We stopped at Columbine spring, the last water available, for a top off and some pics, then made our way to the saddle.
This section could be in Scandinavia or something, fully socked in with swirling clouds and such.
Once we arrived at the Saddle, we had a bite to eat. BTW look at our faces.
So, Son wants to head East on the Etiwanda trail, OK. About 100 yards in we spot bighorn sheep!
They look like giant dogs, that would kick your ass, so OF COURSE idiot Son tries to get as close as possible. I laugh and tell Brody, “I can’t wait ’til that thing kicks him off the side of the mountain,” but they left, and gave us something to remember them by…..
The downhill was uneventful, ’til I got home and found a knee-sized blister on my knee. I was favoring my left leg going down, and rubbed it on my Dickies I suppose. Don’t let anyone fool you, SoCal has gems all over the place. You might find it hard to believe the pictures my Son took are so close to a metropolis, but there it is.
Here’s the Gallery, please slideshow this one, there are so many pictures I just didn’t have space for, it is chronological down/up/ down.
It really is spelled Terrane
I guess WordPress spell check doesn’t speak geology! I corrected the WP correction.
?
“Don’t let anyone fool you, SoCal has gems all over the place”
That’s California’s problem; it’s so beautiful and has such a great climate that everyone decided to move there and ruin it.
Maybe after everyone leaves it can return to its original splendor.
The only people who will go that high on the mountain take good care of the place
I got lucky with the two places I’ve lived the longest – Western Pennsylvania and Minnesoda. Both are beautiful, both have a shitty climate (cold in minnesota, depressed economic climate in PA) and keep people away. Didn’t know how spoiled I was camping in PA as a teenager. Hopefully, my kids have the same epiphany in twenty years about MN.
My brother walked a stretch of Pecos over the course of a week about a decade ago. His dog decided it wanted to be a sheepdog rather than a pitbull and attempted to intimidate a bighorn. Ended up getting tossed paws over ass.
Great pictures. Thank you so much.
Thanks
I went camping at Bear Mountain just north of NYC once. Similar experience. Didn’t see any wildlife, thank goodness, because if we had, it would have been bears.
Another story: backpacking (again, with my brother) up to Horsethief Meadow, which we somehow overshot by an hour. We ended up pitching tents on the Santa Fe Baldy saddle , where we drank and smoked and watched an incredible thunderstorm roll over the city.
Another other story: hiking up La Luz with a couple friends, both women. We ran into a big black bear that kept cutting across our path as we ambled up the rock scree switchbacks. Thankfully it wasn’t at all interested in us. One of the women was my good friend’s soon-to-be wife, and the other was my kinda girlfriend, so if anyone wasn’t going home that day, it was me. On another hike (this time, just the kinda girlfriend), we rounded a switchback and saw a big, shaggy dog walking the trail fifty feet ahead. Wasn’t a dog! Juvenile bear.
Reminds me of a story I saw where a bear attacked a couple and went after the wife.
The husband fought the bear, but all he had was a 3″ pen knife so the bear just kept knocking him down and mauling the wife.
She was killed and he was beat up pretty badly, but nothing life threatening.
I was torn between admiring the guys bravery and being angry that he would take his wife into bear country with his only weapon a 3″ pen knife.
That Treadwell creep still upsets me. Fine, find your solace in suicide by bear if you like, but leave your chick out of it.
Any chick hanging out with that clown was coming to a bad end, one way or another, sooner or later. The bear was mere detail that just made it memorable; we’d never even known she’d been born if it weren’t for the bear.
Did he hang pork chops around her neck or something? Why did the bear keep going after her even when he was pissing it off with a pen knife?
Sorry: my joke didn’t work. I just meant he was going to crash their car into a tree or bitch-slap a tough at a Black Panther rally or at least giardia themselves to death sooner or later. It’s unlikely that innocuous grizzlies was his only delusional calculation.
She may have been on the rag.
The fictionalized version of that was enough for me. The only thing that kept me from turning it off was Missy Peregrym.
Cool write up.
I can’t open the slideshow at work, but I’ll check it out this evening.
Beautiful photos, Yusef. My enjoyment of the outdoors has been severely curtailed by new fatherhood; many thanks for letting us live vicariously through you.
Soon you’ll both be outdoors, then the fun begins…..
Thanks
I took a crew through 50 miles of NM back-country around 2008: a couple of dads and maybe eight boys. A couple of days in, one of the dads quietly confesses a surreal sense of peace, calm, and meaning has taken over him; a PhD behaviorist, he seemed dumbfounded. “Mike” says I “you’re doing what you were meant to do: you’re playing hunter-gatherer with your son learning at your right hand. Your genes are actualized for a change.”
Exercise, elk, fresh air, and decent grub probably helped . . . and being a billion miles away from a cell tower.
I’m overdue for a trip. Fuggin neuroses got me feeling a little tender.
Give it about three years. Camping and hiking is a great activity with short people.
My girlfriend’s short, but she’s got no interest in camping. For as much as people bitch about technology, I’d love to see some of those people spend a week in the woods. I’ll give them a canvas tent, blankets, a single book of matches, a hatchet, a knife, and enough food for two small meals a day. I have the feeling they’ll stop bitching about technology in about three days.
canvas tent
you beast !
Ok, shelter half.
This is camping with a lot of drinking involved.
I’ve got several friends who have been going there for several decades. I know of the strawberry surprise, and the men without pants party. Never went myself, I don’t have the garb, nor the appropriate camping materials.
I’ve been once. I have heard the phrases: “strawberry surprise” and “the men without pants party”, but have not experienced either.
I took my wife camping with our sons once. ONCE.
On the second morning she informed me that she is not a “camping lady.”
After that it was my two sons and me until the oldest joined the Marines at 18 and the youngest decided he didn’t enjoy it without his brother when he was 16.
Camping and hiking is a great activity with short people.
My short person likes the camping part.
She’s excited about the hiking part until we get 100 yards up the trail when she mysteriously gets tired.
Bear Mountain camping trip I mentioned above: I’m in my mid-thirties, not the best of shape, and it’s about a 2 or 3 mile hike to the site, over steadily rising, rocky terrain. I’m wearing sneakers.
I will never, ever make that mistake again.
You named it after your favorite beer?
Nice pics of the bighorns.
I was driving to Gardiner one day, in the truck, and came swooping around a curve to find a big old ram in the middle of the road. He looked like he was made of concrete, with great big horns with lots of chips and fight damage. Fortunately, I got whoaed down and around him. I don’t don’t think the full sized four wheel drive pickup would have survived hitting that thing. I’d be nothing but a cross on the side of the road if i ever hit something like that in the 914.
Giant dogs with Exoskeletons!I seriously big, and they looked at us like Fuck off!
Wow, man, that is beautiful country. I always forget that there’s a lot more to California than terrible politicians and the big cities.
I can be at the trailhead in twenty minutes
On another hike (this time, just the kinda girlfriend), we rounded a switchback and saw a big, shaggy dog walking the trail fifty feet ahead. Wasn’t a dog! Juvenile bear.
I was headed into town one day, and as I was getting to the main road, I saw something wandering around up ahead of me. “What the fuck? That is one ugly dog.”
Bear cub. Headed over to the gas station to do some panhandling, I guess.
In Russia bear cub panhandles You!!!
Speaking of bears and woods…
Winnie the Pooh, PI
Who was it? Piglet? Owl? Alexander Beetle?
I knew it wasn’t Tigger, he was out of town on a hit for C.R. He was the best damn tiggerman in the business.
Testing… getting “418 unused” errors when I post.
Ugh. Here’s the link. I quit, I’m going home.
Cool scenery!
You got cat-butted by a sheep!
HEY YUFUS!
Sup tres I wonder where all hunters are?
Dat one fine ass
When you say hunters, are you talking about the people that want to shoot these things then eat them, or are you doing some Steve Smith play on words here…
Hmmmm, both it protected so STEVE SMITH safe, and mean safe……..
strange bedfellows at USSC
. . . Justice Neil Gorsuch pounced. “Can we just get one thing off the table?” he asked. “We all agree that the excessive fines clause is incorporated against the states. … Can we at least agree on that?
. . . Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Gorsuch’s new criminal justice ally, looked unamused. “Justice Scalia said it very well,” she told Fisher, quoting Scalia’s opinion in Austin. “For the Eighth Amendment to limit cash fines while permitting limitless [property confiscation] would make little sense.”
These people are making so much sense I’m terrified.
Unlimited fines
I see you share my pessimistic view of the SC.
Don’t worry, they’ll let you down soon enough.
and now over to Kagan and Roberts for the counterargument that somehow limitless property confiscation is alright by the Constitution.
“Only Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito expressed any interest in allowing civil asset forfeiture to continue unabated.”
Fuck both of them with a rusty chainsaw.
Time and time again Alito shows that he is enough of a cop lover to suck their balls through 30 feet of garden hose.
OT: Why our credentialism based system is opposing change:
“For some time now, the credentialing of new American elites has centered not on knowledge and ability but on a set of cultural postures and social signals. No less than with the etiquette of earlier aristocracies, the gestures that hold a place in the upper classes are learned, absorbed, and relentlessly lived. As Codevilla noted, our cultural upper classes and our economic upper classes don’t invariably overlap; a magnificently wealthy pro-Trump owner of coal mines or slaughterhouses is a lower-class person who happens to have a bunch of money. Don Blankenship doesn’t dine in the Hamptons with Lynn Forester de Rothschild.
National political journalists, a status group that once ranked on par with show people and bartenders, are upper class, no matter their salaries. They lose their class status the moment they speak the wrong social code words, like, “I think Trump is doing a good job.” They know this, and live with an existential sense of status anxiety over it.”
Our problem is that the credentials of our elites aren’t about actual competence. The fact that cultural marxism is the pre-req to belonging to this class all but gives that away…
The hollowing out of our credentialing institutions has been abundantly clear for years
This is mostly true. But, as a seasoned, credentialed sort myself, I like to point out that these sorts of problems seem worst in the chattering classes: the accomplishments of such sorts of people are dubious on a good day and, by any stretch, pointing out that a Harvard degree failed to solve the near-east Asia problem is disingenuous. In my world passing an exam is the useful and universal starting place; I don’t know what to do to certify yappers because obviously most state bars are too easy to pass.
Donald Trump hired generals, CEOs, and governors, people who were credentialed by lives of action and management. This isn’t disagreement; this is a difference of foundational premises.
That’s a stretch driven by a confirmation bias towards believing Individual 1is an effective manager. But almost daily we have DJT45’s criticizing tweets about the very officers and staffers he had so recently praised himself in his own nominations; everyone from the Federal Reserve to the janitor is a goddamned genius until he’s suddenly the dumbest cretin to have ever held office. This predictable path of behavior can’t be attributed to 45’s maturity, I’m told, because there is no standard of behavior in the White House; okay / agreed / it’s because he’s acknowledging his own managerial incompetence in the selection, direction, and support of the people he chooses to help him. But that can’t be the case because “I went to the Wharton School of Finance . . . I’m, like, a really smart person.”
Actually, I do recall that, years ago Trump did acknowledge that he wasn’t a particularly good manager. His skill, he said was in deal-making. It was his deceased brother who was the talented manager. Then again, that could have just been his excuse for the failure of his casino.
Nonetheless, I do wat to point out, there’s nothing necessarily incompatible with being “a really smart person” and a bad manager. Managing is a skill. And some really smart people don’t have that particular skill.
Agreed – no arguments there. I was just using “manager” in a generous but generic sense, a vague collective of professional, as in: I’m gobsmacked that Mr Harvard PhD failed to manage the resolution of the Palestinian problem over the Labor Day weekend.”
And I throw myself in that manager category: part of my time is spent sizing and arranging equipment, but even more is spent teaching, aligning, documenting, budgeting, prioritizing, delegating . . . all things I do better because of technical experience (a lot of maturity comes from wrecking or watching others wreck).
as in: I’m gobsmacked that Mr Harvard PhD failed to manage the resolution of the Palestinian problem over the Labor Day weekend.
Agreed, that is unfair. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people invite it upon themselves by overestimating the breadth and extent of their expertise.
No doubt
Speaking of inviting it upon themselves: everyone knows that particular task takes 16 months and Mr Jared Harvard Kushner tied a bow on it back in June; problem solved
Nice. Stuff like this is a big part of why I started losing weight and getting in shape. Forget hiking at your age, if I didn’t make some changes I’l be dead at your age. Hopefully new-Leap will be ambling around the woods for many decades to come.
On the prowl for STEVE SMITH???
Looking for love in all the right places.
Well played, sir.
Amble on!
OT: I knew about this disease but that doesn’t make it any less terrifying.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160118-the-tragic-fate-of-the-people-who-stop-sleeping
I have spent the last 4 decades of my life sleeping between 2-5 hrs. Sometimes I go days without it. Doctor tells me it is because of a chemical imbalance caused by the concussion I had at 14, and that if I don’t find a way around it I will die from organ failure. But until then I will party like you read about…
“die from organ failure”
The blue pill is coming off patent in December, should help you keep your organ up.
Don’t curse me there brah, but the organ that I was told was gonna go first was my liver. So I am working real hard to drink as much as I can to mitgate that…. or something.
I generally sleep 4-6 hours a night.
Jeese, just drink until you pass out like a normal person.
Viktor Orbán Gives Chuck Norris a Tour of Budapest
The coolest part – Orban drives his own crappy van.
Chuck Norris is 78? Sure don’t look it.
He’s probably gonna roundhouse kick Death when he comes a calling.
Maybe he already has.
Beautiful, Yufus. That was a treat. Thank you.
Nice bighorns. I get why a person wouldn’t want to piss them off.
At least, without a big gun.
those sheep.. real beauts.
This is an amazingly creepy comment, like Sugarfree level creepy. You should be proud.
Honest, he was just helping them over the fence.
Two shepherds are walking along and spot a sheep with its head caught in a fence. The first shepherd pulls down his pants and begins having relations with the sheep. He turns to the second one and says “Do you want some of this?” The second one says “Sure!”, and sticks his head in the fence.
Gorgeous country. An old friend of mine from my Long Beach days now lives in Running Springs, near Big Bear. I’ve never been there but his pictures are spectacular. California is a truly incredible place as far as nature goes. It’s a shame that everything else about sucks so much ass.
Great article Yusef. Extra points for the proper use of terrane.
The San Bernardino Mountains are one of the most active mountains on Earth with the San Andreas fault complex pushing them up annually about one adult thumbnail (~3/4 inch). But as you know all too well they quality of the rocks suck and they erode around the same amount.
Neat picture of the serpentine.
Is there a good way to search old Glib posts?
I tried to Google site:glibertarians.com keyword but nothing came up?
Better tool? Better method? Better arguments?
Is there something in particular you’re looking for? I’ve used Google to find several things here with just the site addition.
What do you seek?
I had a terrific search plugin, but, because it searched comments as well, it started messing with the database. (We have over 800,000 comments.)
The regular search up top does an OK-ish job, but I can usually find whatever you need.
Does the millionth comment win a prize?
you probably went pass the millionth boob a year ago
“I remember my first million…”
STEVE SMITH HAND OUT PRIZE TO WINNER.
old comments really
it’s the same for here and the TOS: comments seem hidden
That’s why I had that particular plugin, because it did search comments. Part of our problem is that particular words and phrases are repeated sometimes dozens of times in a single comment thread by you people. 😉
So unless searching a very uncommon one, it’s going to be pretty problematic.
Apparently I like to use the word apparently a lot, apparently…
You know who else complained about us?
Preet?
Crusty?
It’s easier for me: my experiences and preferences are so unique and bizarre viz-a-viz the rest here that my stuff sticks out; I don’t really share key words with many folk.
Totally OT: Maybe this makes me a judgmental asshole as I typically don’t care much about people’s weight and/or appearance (unless it’s a woman whom I’m trying to bed), but there’s a guy in my office who has an otherwise normal frame but an absolutely enormous gut like he’s about 12 months pregnant. He’s a nice enough guy I suppose, but he talks way too much and comes off as kind of fake. His personality along with his supernaturally enormous paunch combine to make me almost physically wretch when I see him.
I know I’m a bad person but on a scale from jaywalker to Charles Manson, where does this land?
Maybe it’s a toomah.
How you react to him is natural, I’d say. But everybody’s got their struggles. He’s probably well aware of how he looks and tries to overcompensate by trying to be too friendly.
So in essence, what you’re saying is that Q is a horrible person. Literally, worse than Hitler.
But am I worse than Tulpa?
You are Tulpa. Hitler Tulpa.
But am
I worse thanTulpa?Yes
Literally.
I had to work closely for awhile with a guy who smelled bad. Doesn’t get much worse than that.
Indian smelled bad or cheetos and video games smelled bad? They’re different smells, but they will both make you wretch.
Like not acquainted with water and soap smelled bad.
Ha, years ago I had an Indian buddy who smelled… off. More recently I was surrounded by them every day at work and they smelled fresh as a daisy. So, uh. There’s that.
I try to train myself with new mental responses. For your guy, maybe try to just think “bless his heart, he ain’t never getting laid.” Presto: judgment changed into sympathy.
When I’m reminded of old traumas (flashbacks, PTSD, whatever we want to call it, I’ve never been diagnosed) I think something like “I’m better than that” or “I’m past that” and I force myself to physically grin. For me, this breaks the negative cycle of a flashback popping into my mind and my reliving or resolving or relitigating it or seeing it over and over in my head; the old mental image of that ambulance ride or social tragedy just goes off the air and all I see is a white noise static screen for a few seconds until the “I’m past that” washes over me and I turn my attention to some real task or entertainment.
I Live in My Own Mind, which is dangerous if I don’t exert control over the dark ideas. Good news: it gets better; if it don’t, don’t worry: The world will end most any day
Thank you for the tip. I work at home, mostly alone and am also in my head a lot. It leaves lots of room for ruminating on past mistakes that I can’t get past. This may help.
It leaves lots of room for ruminating on past mistakes that I can’t get past.
I thought that’s what the booze was for.
As I don’t drink, that’s not a valid counter-measure.
And if it were, I’d get myself into a lot more trouble drunk than I do sober, which is plenty, trust me.
I find that I go through phases. Sometimes past mistakes/embarrassments/etc just roll off and go away. Other times, they’re extremely hard to make go away. Most the time I find myself telling the memory to fuck off or some similarly inhospitable phrase.
Huh. My family criticizes me for not living more in the past or dwelling on past mistakes. I was more like that when I was a teenager into my early 20s, but since then I’ve been more forward-looking, and I think others believe that I’m somehow “insensitive” or insufficiently self-aware because of it. I never know what to say, other than “I can learn from the past but I can’t change it, so once I’ve done the learning, why bother obsessing over it?”
That attitude really bugs the rest of my family.
One brother spends stupid amounts of his remaining time on this Earth in (to me) pointless self-recrimination for past errors, which he re-lives over and over and over again, never forgiving himself or others and never getting past ’em.
That really bugs me.
My husband can put the past away like that. I envy him that ability. He’s gone through a lot worse stuff than I have, for sure.
Irish philosophy:
There are only two things to worry about, either you are healthy or you are sick. If you are healthy, then there is nothing to worry about.
But if you are sick there are only two things to worry about, either you will get well or you will die. If you get well, then there is nothing to worry about.
But if you die there are only two things to worry about, either you will go to heaven or to hell. If you go to heaven, then there is nothing to worry about.
And if you to go hell, you’ll be so darn busy shaking hands with your friends you won’t have time to worry.
On that scale:. Iustin Bieber
Is that the Romanian Justin Beiber? Can we get Pie to give a ruling?
Try focusing your disgust into an incandescent rage at the medical establishment that has taken thousands and thousands of dollars from his, has a corpus of literature on reliable interventions that would help him, but has never gotten around to actually helping him by saying “well, we can’t expect every family doctor to keep up on all of this stuff!”
Works for me.
Exactly. Ask him if he has a gun in his home; if so, you can relax: he’ll be dead in a week or two.
LOL
Nice write up, Yusef! I spent a lot of time in my youth in the Sierras. Here in Idaho, we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to trail choices. My personal favorite is grouse hunting with my dog and working through open forest with no trails in sight.
Neither my wife nor I have ventured into the interior of the country, really, and when our neighbor moved to Idaho we were both kinda like, “What’s there to do in Idaho?” And I think the answer is, “Go outside.” I’m not sure I can name three major cities in Idaho, but every picture I’ve ever seen of the place has been some idyllic outdoors scene.
Idaho is one of the few places in the U.S. I would willingly live in. Wyoming is another. Both are relatively empty of people.
I sense a trend.
What is up with all the pics.of ram ass! Ram Ass
Family Friendly rating haz sadz.
Cool stuff Yusef
Loved Mt. Baldy when I used to live there. Azusa canyon used to be nice but people trash the hell out of it.
More OT:
Question. How do physicians square the Hippocratic Oath with puberty blockers for minors and even sex change surgery (under certain circumstances) when there is lots of conflicting evidence about the cost/benefit of such things? What’s the burden of proof of “do no harm”? Sure, there is research showing that it’s beneficial, but there’s just as much research (if not more) showing that it does nothing or makes things worse. Will we get to a point in which doctors that refuse such treatments will lose their license?
I would guess they beg the question, just like everybody else. It’s not harmful to prescribe puberty blockers when you buy the “wrong body” bullshit hook, line, and sinker.
Great article and photos, Yusef! I especially love the images where you can make out a tiny bit of the fog’s edge which really puts the density into perspective. That part of the country looks beautiful, and I hope to be able to visit it sometime.
I was favoring my left leg going down, and rubbed it on my Dickies I suppose.
Either that’s a typo, or your endowment is . . . complicated.
https://www.dickies.com
(SFW)
Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind ?
They’re headquartered in a special place.
Great atmosphere (literally) in those pics, makes me want to go hiking.
Thanks Yusef great pictures. I grew up in California and didn’t know this existed.
Thanks, Yusef. Hiking new places has become our favorite thing. Great pics!
Thanks Yusef! Things look a little eerie with all that fog, but I bet that was a nice hike. Thanks!
very nice! The kid just returned from a school trip of four days backpacking in Joshua Tree and he saw Bighorn Sheep too. That’s pretty cool.