So far as I'm concerned, the easiest summit in SoCal is Mt San Jacinto from the Tram, so I arranged to pick her up in LA at 6:00am on Saturday and try to catch the first tram up. My niece also decided to come along.
All they needed for this hike, I suggested, were some decent shoes. Personally, I like to encase my tender feet in steel-shanked, lug soled mountaineering boots for high country hikes like this one, never mind the weight, but I told my sister to at least get some trail hikers at REI or something. As it happened, she didn't have time to pick up anything, so she and my niece did the climb in ordinary tennis shoes. This wasn't much of a problem going up, but they paid dearly during the long, long, long trip down.
My sister and niece had never before been on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, and indeed, like most urban SoCal natives, they had no idea there was anything like Mt San Jacinto (or San Gorgonio, or even the San Gabriels) in the area. The ride in the tram was an early highlight of the trip:
They were very impressed with the scenery. Lush meadows and thick forests of lodgepole pine are not what folks, even natives, usually associate with Southern California, unless you've actually been up there to experience them. And then there are the views above Wellman Divide . . .
The hike up was easy and uneventful for all of us. We started at about 9:00 and arrived at the summit just before noon.
We had lunch on the summit and were up there for about 45 minutes or so. While we were there, I think there were only about a dozen or so people up there with us, though a party of about five or six arrived just as we started down. However, as we proceeded back down the trail, we must have passed between 60 and 100 people heading up. "This," I told my sister after we passed one of several parties of about ten college-age Asian-American kids, "is why we get up on the mountain as early as possible, among other reasons." The summit of Mt San Jacinto simply doesn't have space for all the people we saw heading up there while we were coming down. I can't imagine what it must have been like.
As usual, the walk down seemed a lot longer than the walk up. My sister and niece complained bitterly about this. I confessed I hated return hikes as well, and they do indeed always seem longer, and they also hurt my feet far more than the hike up. But it comes with the territory. Their misery was compounded, I believe, by their substandard footwear. My sister said she will definitely be getting some boots before the next hike.
In the morning as we set out down the long ramp from the tram building, I warned my sister and niece that ramp would a final unpleasant challenge at the end of the hike. Indeed, as we puffed up the ramp in the afternoon, we agreed it was a dirty trick to have put it there like that, and my niece wanted to know where to write to insist an escalator be installed for tired hikers (and maybe for all the overweight people we saw strolling around the tram area when we arrived back at the station).
But in the end everyone enjoyed the hike and was pleased with how well they did. I promised more summits to come, but we will be working our way up to tougher ones like San Gorgonio and Mt Baldy (when I mentioned the possibility of return via Baldy Notch and the chairlift, there was a great deal of enthusiasm for a Mt Baldy hike). Once everyone gets better shoes, we'll probably tackle Mt San Jacinto again from Humber Park or Marion Mountain.
More pics here.
YOU HOOKED EM SIMONOV! 
Good footwear and good socks make a world of difference.
