Mt San Antonio (Old Baldy) Bowl

[Rick M]

Baldy Bowl is one of my favorite places in the winter provided it has good snow coverage.

This is where I learned cramponing and ice axe skills and building igloos out of the old BackPacker shop in Claremont with Don Douglas of Alpinlite frame pack fame. I remember in that class we had something like 54 people and they had us all tie in on two ropes to go to the summit (a person every 6 feet or so...looked like one of those old Pacific Northwest climbs with a zillion people all lined up with their alpenstocks). A total of 12 igloos were started and ours was one of two finished with room for four. Years later we built an igloo at the top of the bowl that we stayed in off and on from Nov to April, a good snow year.

It’s where I hiked up in a storm to test out my newly made Gore-Tex bivy sac (when Gore sold the fabric by the yard) to discover I could survive in it but that I should bring a sleeping bag with the next time I ventured into such conditions or try it out next to my car so I could drive home after becoming sufficiently chilled.

I once soloed the bowl where San Dimas SAR was ice axe training and a dog followed me up Baldy. Figured it belonged to someone in the SD group but on returning to the top of the bowl EVERYONE was gone. The dog followed me down to my car and when I called the number on his collar at the lodge, no one answered. I didn't want to leave him so I brought him home and found out that night that he "lives" on Falls Road and would follow hikers up the trail for handouts. Fortunately, the owner worked in Ontario near me and picked up the dog the next day.

It's where we crawled several hundred feet under the snow in the streambed just below the hut...why I don't know other than it was cool to do.

It's where we trained for Rainier and Robson and at one time Everest (our financing from UNICAL fell through on that one).

It's where I carried 12-foot long 2x4s to for the construction of a new "outhouse" for the one burned down at the Ski Hut.

Brings back lots of memories...

[simonov]

It's basically where I have been learning winter mountaineering this year.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=baldy&w=26209464%40N00

Back up again this Saturday . . .

[Tim Le]

Nice topic! I also have a soft spot for Old Baldy and the Bowl. My first real hike ever was up the Ski Hut trail. I went with a group from work who were training for the LA Marathon. Most of them were also first time hikers. After summiting, the leader took us down the steep scree field in the Bowl. This terrified a lot of people in the group. I got the hang of it and thought it was really cool. I felt like an Apollo astronaut, hopping weightlessly from one foot to another and letting the scree carry me down. What an unreal feeling it is to float down a river of rocks!