Well-Turned Ankle

Lawson Peak is the second-highest peak amongst those surrounding Lawson Valley, where I live. It’s not very high in any absolute sense — just over 3,600' high. But it’s rugged and reasonably remote, and therefore not a trivial challenge. I last hiked to Lawson Peak about 25 years ago, long before I moved into Lawson Valley. But ever since moving here, I’ve wanted to do it again.

Actually we set out today to hike up Gaskill Peak, which at 3,836' is the tallest of these local peaks. With Debi and my friends Jim Barnick and Rick Pugh, we met up at Tyler’s in El Cajon, had a nice breakfast, and then set off to four-wheel up as close as we could get to Gaskill Peak. We went through Alpine to Japatul Road, and thence up Carveacre Road, where there’s a low-density but surprisingly large community developing over the last twenty years or so. Carveacre Road starts out paved, then turns into a gravel road, and deteriorates slowly after that. Once you cross into the Cleveland National Forest (where someone has just installed a gate!), the road clearly hasn’t been maintained in any way for a good many years — it’s actually quite a challenging four-wheel drive road. We made it up to the base of Gaskill Peak (about 800' vertically below it) without mishap, but we failed to find a trail going up. We did locate a trail going down, but this was not our goal.

So we kept going on the four-wheel road until we got to a little saddle, just south of Lawson Peak. The saddle is about 500' vertically below Lawson Peak, making it look like an easy conquest — just a little ways above us. We were thinking that perhaps we’d find a trail along the ridge between Lawson Peak and Gaskill Peak, and we could get up that way. So we parked the car, and set off on our hike.

It started along what looked like another spur of dirt road, but that quickly petered out into an ATV track, then a wide footpath, then, fairly abruptly, a narrow footpath that launched very steeply up over the tumbled-down boulders that form Lawson Peak. Within a short way, Debi (wisely) decided that this wasn’t worth the risk of injury to her — she’s got agility shows coming up soon, and the last thing she needed was to be laid up with a leg or ankle injury. So she took the keys, went back down to our vehicle, and (we found out later) ended up having a nice snooze.

The rest of us, fools that we are, decided to keep on going. Things only got more challenging after that. It’s not that it was dangerous, just that it was hard work — very steep uphill (about a 50% slope, by my map calculations), full of brush and narrow rock gaps, and very large boulders that had to be “conquered” in order to advance. Rick Pugh has long, long limbs, and he’s in great shape compared to me; he had the least trouble. I made it up with much huffing, wheezing, and frequent rests. Jim was somewhere in between.

When we finally made it to the area of the peak, to my disappointment there was no reasonable way up the final pile of large boulders that form the actual peak. I was hoping for a 360 degree panorama; this was not to be. We did manage to edge around the boulder pile to get a clear view — a rather nice one, actually — of Lawson Valley. If you click on the photo above, you’ll get a truly enormous version of this (warning: 4 mb). Lawson Valley is what you see in the right half of the panorama.

From this vantage point I took photos to make up a 180 degree panorama, but I had a great deal of trouble stitching them all together. The software that I use simply wouldn’t let me tack them all together — I managed to exceed some internal (and mysterious) limit that it has. The only way I could get it to stitch was to drop the two photos on each end of the panoram, which means that instead of 180 degrees, I got about 120 degrees. Worse, a nice picture of Rick and Jim hit the cutting room floor; they would have been the “frame” for the left side of the panorama. Oh, well…

The well-turned ankle? That would be mine. I turned it very well — today I’m sitting here at my desk, full of ibuprofen and with my left ankle all wrapped up. Merely putting my foot up to rest on something sends fiery stabs of pain up my leg. Ouch! There are two really bizarre things about this: (1) I’m famous (amongst my hiking friends) for never getting injured like this on hikes, and (2) I didn’t do it on the rugged parts of the hike. Oh, no. I did it a mere 20 feet from our car, as we emerged from the rough stuff onto the almost flat area where we parked our car. A 6” deep, trivial little erosion gully did me in. How embarassing! But it did get me a decent pun <smile>…

On the drive back down, we all more-or-less simultaneously noticed this eroded rock against the skyline. It bears strikingly good resemblence to the head of a squirrel or gopher. It made me want to get out my varmint rifle…