Happy Holidays! Your Trails are Closed.
Closures at popular SoCal trails, Mirror Homes in Nature, Classic Outdoor Gear Photos, Lots of Winter Fun, New Life for a Historic Ski Area, and More!
howdy
Hey all, and happy holidays!
I hope that this time of year brings you some much needed rest and respite, and you are surrounded by friends, family, fur-babies, fir trees, or whatever else brings you recharge.
I’ll also say that if you don’t already have some sort of outdoorsy holiday tradition going on, this is a good year to kick that into gear. Because honestly, there are only so many cookies you can eat (for me, it’s a lot) and so many relatives to catch up on with small talk.
When I was living in Los Angeles, every Christmas Eve Day (wildfire closures notwithstanding) I would hike a big loop in Santa Anita Canyon wearing a dumb Santa hat. This was great because the normally very crowded trailhead was usually pretty reasonable on that morning, and it was fun to just wear something silly that gave me an excuse to strike up conversations with other holiday hiking types. Both being outdoors and being chatty helped me feel connected to both the landscape and the community that was out there with me.
These days I live in a place with actual winter, and my new tradition on Christmas Eve Day has turned into an early morning ski trip with my husband and sister. It hits different, but it’s been a great way to mark the end of another year in a new landscape with people I love … and now that I’m finally starting to enjoy the sport of skiing, it’s fun, too!
So I do hope you can get outside and connect with the people and places you love over the holidays. And I hope the new year brings you lots of inspiration, joy, trail miles, bagged peaks, dirty tents, and whatever else gets your outdoor flow going.
Modern Hiking
Good stuff from the Modern Hiker site
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a bunch of tech type hiccups that have kept the updates bogged down … and not to mention I’ve been juggling a new part-time job (that I hope will continue! Still waiting on that contract renewal …) as well as a writing class, a guitar class, actually writing, making my way into some new communities here in Portland, and all that other fun and not so fun stuff we know as Adulting.
This is the part of the newsletter where I let you in a little bit under the hood on how things are going.
As has been happening to many other small publishers across the internet, the new frenzy to include AI-generated synopses of search results has taken a sizable chunk of the search traffic to the Modern Hiker site.
Before all this, organic search was far and away the biggest traffic going to the site, and that used to be a good thing. But now that search engines are just scraping websites for info and serving it up to users along their own ads, those clicks don’t go to the sites that actually do the work, which means we don’t get traffic and we don’t get ad revenue. This is the same thing that social media did to news sites over the past decade, and to be honest I don’t know what the solution is for sites like Modern Hiker. What little money the site does make goes right back into running it and paying my contributing writers. If the site’s costing me money, I don’t know what that will mean for its future … but at least I’ll take solace in helping Silicon Valley Techbros get richer on the unpaid labor of other writers while encouraging more and more extreme niches of the web, right??
The good news is that subscribers here on Substack have been pretty stable, even though paying subscribers still only make up a little over 1% of the total subscribers. So … now through New Year’s Day, I have dropped the price of monthly subscriptions to $5 a month – which is the absolute lowest Substack will allow me to go.
At $5 a month, I think I only end up getting a little over three bucks after fees and processing, but that’s OK! I’m hoping this might entice some of y’all who have been on the fence to drop in on the low-commitment monthly subscription. The price will bounce back up in January but you’ll stay locked in on five bucks as long as you want. And if you’re feeling especially generous, you can also pop in on the annual version of the subscription, too. If you’re not into the whole subscription thing, consider spotting me for a coffee or two instead. All this writing requires energy supplements, you know.
I’m now two years into doing this project, and right now I’m planning on continuing, but small publishers like me really need help from readers—especially if the AI-search trend continues to eviscerate revenue.
If you can subscribe, I really appreciate it. If you can’t, I understand. And if there’s a perk or extra thing I can do that might tip you over into the shiny bright world of paid subscribers, let me know!
Your Parks
Your Places
Mount Baldy is Off-Limits to Hiking Through 2025
The tallest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains—the hugely popular and epic Mount San Antonio (better known as Mount Baldy) has been closed to all activities through December of 2025 with fines of up to $5000 for violators. The closure was issued by the Forest Service after the Bridge Fire severely damaged Mount Baldy village in September, and the closure was put in place to help habitat regenerate and protect hikers from the dangers of burned trees.
The problem? While the lower elevations and canyons were burned, most of the high-elevation around the hiking routes to the peak were unscathed.
And an exception was carved out so the Mount Baldy Resort could operate this winter.
The Los Angeles Times interviewed a bunch of locals and hikers, who provide a mix of skepticism about the closures, and even a few who have hiked in defiance of the orders and reported no burned or downed trees along the route.
Folks don’t expect any trail or habitat restoration to actually happen—although the area around the summit could absolutely use it. More people seem to think that it’s just a blanket closure order because the Forest Service either won’t or can’t manage the area properly, which I think is probably more accurate. The Forest Service in general—and the manager of the San Gabriel Mountains in particular—always seem to be strapped for cash and cutting services, so I’d be willing to bet that not only do they not have the resources to fix the trail and do some habitat restoration, but they also don’t have staff to come out and do a proper investigation into the burn area to see what actually needs to be closed for safety and restoration and what can remain open to the public.
Trails Fenced off at Griffith Park
The people who love LA’s Griffith Park really love Griffith Park. Even though I sadly don’t live near the park anymore, I still include myself in this population – so when a reader dropped me a line to tell me some fences went up blocking official trails in the park, my interest was definitely piqued (thanks, Justin!).
The Los Angeles Times’s Steve Lopez wrote a column about the fences, which look like they were put up to stem the tide of use trails cutting swaths through the coastal sage scrub habitat. Admittedly, that is a big problem in Griffith Park, where the official trails are often easily confused with unofficial routes … but I do remember a few years ago the park took to curbing those use trails by planting a bunch of spiny plants in the way and posting smaller-scale signs, not these giant metal fences that also apparently cost over $45,000.
This is going to require a bit of grace on the part of both park officials and park users—some of the routes that were fenced off are popular trails that are technically not officially sanctioned routes, and hikers using those routes can often increase erosion and cause damage to habitat and other nearby official trails. But I do hope that we can figure out a solution that’s less invasive than those giant metal fences, you know?
The Return of Waterman?
Earlier this year, I wrote about the historic Mount Waterman Ski Area in the San Gabriel Mountains going up for sale. Well, unless you are the people this New York Times article (UNLOCKED) is talking about, you missed your chance, but the new owners have some great improvements planned for the ski area!
The new owners plan to add an amphitheater, upgrades to the warming hut, some glamping cabins, a snow-tubing area, and year-round disc golf and archery along with biking trails for the warmer months. They’re also going to install some snow-making machinery, which is badly, badly needed.
To raise funds, the new owners are also offering a founding membership program called Waterman100, which gets you some equity in the operation as well as some really fun perks like helicopter rides when the Angeles Crest Highway is closed (which is often).
I am really stoked to see people willing to breathe some new life into Mount Waterman. It is a funky and unique remnant of an older, quieter San Gabriel Mountains and everyone I’ve ever met who’s skied there only has fond memories of it. Good luck, team! Hope to ski there soon!
Snowshoe in Cedar Breaks
Although you might think the winter season can put a damper on some of your national park and monument trips, in many case you can still travel to some of your favorite spots to experience some really unique stuff! Case in point: Utah’s Cedar Breaks National Monument, which is bringing back its ranger-led guided snowshoe tours every Friday and Saturday through the season (weather permitting).
Guests will have to make a reservation ahead of time, but there is no additional fee for the short 1-mile trip. And even better? All the gear is provided, too! Keep in mind you will be above 10,000 feet of elevation, and snowshoeing is a bit tougher than hiking if you’re not used to it, so take it easy!
Yosemite Christmas Pageant Returns
Speaking of weird fun winter things, the storied Bracebridge Dinner returns to Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel this winter after a five year hiatus. The holiday dinner and pageant began in 1927 with the opening of the hotel, and took on new life when pageant actor and budding photographer Ansel Adams took over the production and rewrote the script in 1929.
The elaborate multi-course dinner is accompanied by music and comedy performances and is said to involve over a hundred people per show. Tickets are not cheap, but they always tend to sell out and many guests come back for more.
I’ve definitely always wanted to check this thing out but have never found myself near Yosemite in the holidays. Has anyone ever seen the Bracebridge Dinner? Should I just book a ticket for next year???
Tech Talk
Gadgets, Technology, and Hype
Hiking Gear of Yore
And by yore I mean the 1970s, when many readers were probably alive and hiking. Sorry!
I think we can all agree that there have been a lot of great advances in hiking tech, gear, and clothing over the past forty years, but if you love nostalgia or images shot on film or have ever once said or thought “they don’t make backpacks like they used to,” then you may want to check out this honestly very beautiful photo thread of images from a hiking Facebook group that found their way over to the abandoned shopping mall that is the site formerly known as Twitter.
Did you have this gear? Is one of the people in these photos you?
Mirrored Homes in Nature
You can definitely make a case that glamping as a concept is a terrible thing that’s ruining the outdoors. Me? I don’t mind it that much. I don’t think there’s a ton of overlap between glampers and regular ol’ dirtbags, and you know what? Sometimes it’s nice to camp with a bit more comfort than a partially inflated sleeping pad.
In an increasingly competitive market, glamping operations have had to push to differentiate themselves, and one trend that is also equally modernist-cool and modernist-obnoxious is the mirror house. If you’re on the radar of Palm Springs’s Modernism Week, you’ve might have been able to see the art installation Mirage before it was torn down, or perhaps you’ve noted the ‘Invisible’ home in Joshua Tree that went for sale for $18M last year?
If you can’t spring for that sort of adventure, you can park yourself in a mirrored luxury cabin outside Sequoia National Park via the Estonian glamping / rental company ÖÖD, which has a few cabins available to rent. Prices aren’t always listed, but the ones that are visible seem to run around $500 a night so … a bit more expensive than a spot in the woods.
Oh, looks like they also bought the Invisible House, which makes sense. Rates their start at $1800 a night, but it sleeps 8, so that’s a steal at just $225 a person … right?
One More Thing
Oh yeah, before I go …
Once again, have a great holiday season and happy new year.
And if you need some resolution-worthy hike ideas … here ya go!
Until next time,
Happy Hiking
These mirror houses look cool but I really wonder how often birds fly into them.