Mt. Lowe Railway Trail

Sorry to have been absent from my blog for so long. Turns out dissertations are actually kind of hard to do, not to mention time consuming. Regardless, mine seems like it might actually happen this year, and I am also set up with a job in LA for next year, so I am breathing a little easier this week. In celebration of having a weekend that I didn't have to work through, I decided to go for a hike today. I picked the Mt. Lowe Railway Trail pretty much at random from my book of local hikes, and I thought it was pretty awesome. Basically, there was once a funicular that went up this mountain to a grand hotel that was the place to rest and recuperate in the late 1890's for a few years before it was destroyed in various fires and storms. They had bowling alleys and billiard rooms and all kinds of diversions for the rich and famous of Los Angeles and Pasadena to amuse themselves. Once you were at the top, there was also once a trolley line that went around the edges of the mountains purely for sightseeing purposes, and it went over all kinds of crazy bridges and horseshoes to make it up the necessary elevations. Apparently it was an engineering marvel of the time. Now the hotel is in ruins and the rail embankments have been converted to a lovely hiking path that anyone can enjoy, even impoverished saps such as myself. You park at the edge of Altadena on surface streets, and then walk up one hell of a hill to get the hotel. This stretch is like a non-stop party on Sunday mornings, because there's just so many people. Little 4 year olds running around and trying to dig up erosion-control equipment, delightful older couples taking their morning consitutional, just everybody was out. Once you get to the hotel, then you take the old train embankment around in a big loop that goes on for most of the day. This stretch was almost entirely empty except for a few pairs of mountain bikers speeding down the hill (one pair with a hilarious dog wearing a backpack running madly after them with its tongue hanging out the side of its mouth). Here are pictures of the things that I saw!

This is a picture of hotel ruins, possibly a dance floor? Possibly with a bartender informing you that you have always been the caretaker?


Here are funicular ruins, which sounds like an Enya song:


Here is the rail embankment as it goes through the "granite gates", which apparently took eight months to cut. People were way more patient back then.


Here is a burned out stump of a tree that is filled with rocks. I assume this happened when there was a crazy rockslide and all these rocks bounced into the tree and got stuck there. Nature crazy!


Here is inspiration point, which has little fake telescopes pointing to all the things you can see from there when it's not too cloudy or foggy. It was beautiful and sunny when I was there but unfortunately the lowlands were socked in with fog, so I couldn't see shit.


Here is the scope aimed at Silverlake. You can just make out some fucking hipsters.



Going on hikes for me is like a neverending conversation between Little Toph and Big Toph. Big Toph is all, "In any venture, it is paramount to consider not only the probability of misadventure, but the consequences thereof in the current setting - we may be certain that we will not fall, but if we should fall, will it lead to a bruised ego, a twisted knee, or certain death?" Little Toph is like, "Holy crap, there's a cave in that rock wall. There's probably treasure in there. We should try to scramble up that patch of scree and check it out."

Strong recommend for this hike! Although it's 12 miles and took me about 6 hours with lunch and snack breaks, and now my knees feel like I'm 90, so I'd pre-dose with Tylenol if you are old and feeble like me.