The good news: It's steep as heck and free of bushes for the first 2000+ feet of elevation gain. Beautiful views, and a really enjoyable adventure.
The bad news: It's going to take some serious recon to find a way around all the 5' oak scrub that haunts the ridge. It may be possible, but it's kind of an impassible wall where I ran into it.
I met a really friendly, helpful guy who lives in the last house before the ridge. He told me about a 200' long tunnel the water has gouged out in the canyon west of the ridge. If anyone wants to go explore that, I'm in.
I opted to go up the canyon a little way, rock hopped across the glacial moraine, then went straight up the ridge. Not because I had a game plan, but just because I had no idea where to go or what to do. See the picture below, and follow the line of the bent fence post to see the flat face of the ridge I followed up to the third tower on the ridge.
The third tower is tiny, but you can just see it up there. Nice view from up there. The tower is much bigger in person:
Is this gunsight notch?
The view off to the west:
This is why I didn't go further up:
I headed down a different route, following the power lines. The wind was gusting 50+ mph, and kept blowing me back up the hill. That was weird. Look at the terrain heading up along the ridge. Open, clear, wonderful.
I showed Cat this picture, and she said it looks like she could be up there in 2 minutes, it looks like the easiest mountain ever. Bad kid.
There are a few more in the album at webshots if you wanna see them. I'd say it's not ready for a summit attempt until we find a route from 3600' to 6000', that could be easy or extremely hard. As in un-fun. Personally, I'd rather know in advance.
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Just looking at the scrub oak made my skin hurt -- I'm glad you opted out before looking like you battled demonic cougars. After Leatherneck, I have even more respect for going cross country up, down, over and around rock and brush choked ridges.