Old Baldy Ridge - Oct. 23

I got a long weekend a few weeks ago so I went hiking with a couple of friends from work. We were all of to a bit of a sluggish start so decided to go with Old Baldy Ridge. The name deceptively suggests that it's a ridge walk, but the vast majority of it is along a river through the valley. Tom had the GPS so we were on our own for navigating except for my (mostly) trusty guide book... which should have been fairly easy except the trail was completely unsigned, very rough, and covered in snow so we couldn't actually see the trail for part of it - just one set of boot prints that we followed hoping they knew where they were going. We lost the trail towards the end of the hike, but I think we made about 12 km (estimated in blue) of the 14 km trail (remainder shown in red) before we lost it completely. No GPS profile on this, but based on the topo I'm estimating we made about 720 m of the 800 m or so total.

Krista, Heather, and Breanna... not quite sure what B's finding so funny here...

The trail:

Looking back towards the highway... not sure what the name of this mountain is, but we got lovely views of it.

In many places the trail was barely wide enough to walk on (probably started off as a game trail) and covered in snow, of course increasing in snow as we meandered up the valley.

This was our point of confusion. We started up a little ridgeline with a lovely view of this little cascade, but lost the trail. We were probably supposed to keep going up it and loop around but we couldn't see any more boot prints.

We spotted some back down in the valley and up on an opposing ridge so we went back down and started up the other side. Tom would be proud that I led them scrambling up this... a very Tom-like off-trail maneouver.

The way up to Old Baldy Ridge? ... there were boot prints at least, but lost them on the scree slope above and couldn't find the trail through the forest to loop back down.

View from the ridge:

Apparently an excellent place for a photo op:

We paused there for lunch, long enough to get a good chill going then headed back down with a few more layers on... stopping for a group shot along the way. Great use of a day off!