Climbing Peaks in California’s Chumash Wilderness

 

As is the case for most people in California, the Chumash Wilderness was, prior to last year, off my radar screen.  I first visited the wilderness at the end of April last year, searching for more summits to climb in the spring “shoulder season,” when it is difficult to bag peaks in the High Sierra, due to lingering snow.  I was also curious to explore a little traveled backroad into the Wilderness, the Lockwood Valley Road.

The Chumash Wilderness is named after the Native Americans who inhabited this area before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.  It rises up from the southwest corner of the Central/San Joaquin Valley and Kern County.  The wilderness covers an area of 38,150 acres and is part of both the 85,000-acre Mount Pinos/Cuyama Badlands Roadless area and the much larger Los Podres National Forest.  Elevations here range from 4,200 to 8,848 feet, making Chumash the highest wilderness area between the Sierra Nevada and Southern California’s rugged San Gabriel Mountains.  The tallest peak, Mount Pinos, is 8,848 feet high and lies on the eastern boundary of the wilderness; the second tallest peak, standing at 8,828 feet, Sawmill Mountain, is 2-3 miles west of its slightly taller counterpart.   These mountains are the highest points in Ventura County (Mount Pinos) and Kern County (Sawmill Mountain).  Finally, as anyone who speaks Spanish will say, Pinos is the Spanish word for “pine,” so the peak could also be called Pine Mountain.

The quickest way is to the Chumash Wilderness is to get off I-5 at the Frazier Park Road exit, which is between the exits for Gorman (to the south) and Lebec (to the north).  One then takes Frazier Park Road through the unattractive and strung-out town of Frazier Park, keeping on it past the point where the Lockwood Valley Road runs into it.  Once past that junction, the road will quickly begin climbing and you’ll encounter a number of snow gates.  Due to its high elevation, these mountains get snow during the winter.  Indeed, the road ends at the Mt. Pinos Nordic Ski center—see the photo below this paragraph—and its large parking lot.  There is one road turnoff during this stretch, which should be avoided, as it goes northwest, to Hwy 33 and is not fully paved).

A second and more roundabout route for reaching the Chumash Wilderness that makes for a scenic and interesting backroad drive is the above-mentioned Lockwood Valley Road.  I took that road on my trip to the Chumash Wilderness last April to climb Mount Pinos.  Since I was driving from Fresno, I headed down Hwy 99 south to I-5 and then took State Route 166 west from I-5 to State Route 33.  Lockwood Valley Road “T’s” off of State Route 33 some distance south of the tiny unincorporated community of Ventucopa.   Lockwood Valley road is the only road through the Los Podres National Forest.  One goes through wooded and hilly terrain before it runs into Frazier Park Road on the west end of the town.  There is a small grocery store at this intersection and you need to turn left to head west up Frazier Park Road to the Mount Pinos Nordic Ski Center.

Mount Pinos is a very easy climb.  The trailhead starts high, at around 8,400 feet, so I did just 400-500 feet of climbing during the 2-2.5-mile hike to the summit.  The trail starts on the left side of the parking lot—assuming you’re looking toward the Nordic Ski Center building.  I immediately encountered an open gate, going past it up the trail, which is really a dirt road, to do the gentle ascent up Mount Pinos.  Most of this trek took me through a fragrant Single Leaf Pinyon and Jeffry Pine forest.  While doing this last year in April, I noticed a few patches of snow alongside the dirt road trail, even though California had just endured yet another dry winter.  The last part of the hike takes one into open terrain, where the receiving tower on the summit of Mount Pinos came into view.  

At this point, one is just about to the summit.  You’ll shortly reach the point where the trail Y’s off in two directions.  Head right, or east, to the summit of Mount Pinos.  There is a summit marker and sign by the receiving tower indicating that you’re indeed on top of the mountain.  Limber pines grace the flat summit of Mount Pinos.

Given its relatively high elevation compared to other summits in the area, the views from Mount Pinos can be pretty spectacular and wide-ranging.  I put in the word “can” here because Bakersfield/Kern County has been rated by the American Heart and Lung Association as the most polluted city/region in America—my hometown of Fresno has the dubious honor of coming in second in this department.  Much of the year, including most days in the spring, the south Central/San Joaquin Valley is covered by blanket of acrid smog, limiting what one can see from Mount Pinos.  That, alas, was the case on the day I first bagged Mount Pinos.  On a clear day, which I suspect happen almost entirely during the winter after a storm, when people cross-country ski up Mount Pinos, the vista is really fantastic.  On those days, one not only gazes down into the South-Central Valley, but can see all the way to the Southern High Sierra to the Kern River Plateau and beyond to Mount Whitney.  

All of that said, as the above photo shot from Mount Pinos shows, even with all the smog, the views from its summit are pretty darn decent.  I got a good sense of how rugged these mountains are, despite all of them being sub-alpine.

Since I took the long way to get to the Mount Pinos trailhead during my April 2022 trip there and needed to drive back to Fresno, there was no time to do any further exploring after climbing the mountain.  I knew that Mount Pinos’s neighbor peak, Sawmill Mountain, was not that far away and resolved to make a return trip to this neck of the woods to climb up it.  I finally got around to doing that early this month, opting on this round to get to the Mount Pinos trailhead via the more direct I-5 route.  I got up at 4:20 am and left Fresno at 6:30 am.  It still took me 3.5 hours to arrive at the trailhead at 10 am.  After wolfing down a pack lunch consisting of a ham sandwich, chopped apple, almonds, and some chips—one should never hike on an empty stomach!—I hit the trail at around 10:30 am.

After saying hello again to Mount Pinos, I turned back to “Y” in the trail just before going up its summit.  Heading left on that “Y” quickly took me to the Condor Observation Center on the west and lower part of the Mount Pinos summit block.  Sightings of Condors are fairly common from this place, but I didn’t see any sign of these magnificent raptors.  The center also has a brief but informative explanation of the importance of Mount Pinos for the Native American Chumash people, who regarded the peak as the center of the universe.  This place also here a pretty decent view into Lockwood Valley and mountains in the Sespe Wilderness to the south.

The trail to Sawmill Mountain takes off from Condor Observation Center and begins by a sign that is behind the large brick and cement block noted above.   Minutes after hitting that trail, I saw a short trial veering off to the right that goes to another observation point.  Stay on your left.  The main trail then drops sharply down a bunch switch backs before making a final very steep descent to a saddle between Mount Pinos and Sawmill Mountain.  While doing that drop, I passed by a “Chumash Wilderness” sign.

As that fundamental axiom of hiking/mountaineering states, when climbing a mountain, anytime one goes down, that elevation loss will have to be made up later on.  After I reached the saddle, the trail climbed steeply before leveling off.  At this point, I thought, “Why couldn’t they simply build a bridge between Mount Pinos and Sawmill Mountain, Lol?!”  Shortly after reaching that point, I should have noticed a trail veering off to the right—the day I went, a pair of long sticks laid on the ground marked this junction.  It takes about 10 minutes to do the last short climb up to the Sawmill Mountain summit from there.  A pile of steeply stacked rocks, along with a sign saying “Sawmill Mountain, 8,828 feet” marks the top of the mountain.

As was the case with Mount Pinos, I had nice views of the rugged terrain around Sawmill Mountain and distant views into smoggy Kern County and the south Central/San Joaquin Valley.

As was mentioned above, I initially missed that side trail to Sawmill Mountain.  The trail is not signed and not that noticeable.  Making matters worse is the fact that, unlike Mount Pinos, the Sawmill Mountain summit is hard to spot and not at that all obvious as one hikes through the trees.  I went well beyond the turnoff, losing and then gaining elevation, before rapidly dropping again and thinking to myself, “Holy crap, I’m losing a lot of elevation!”  At that point, the trail, which I believe leads to Grouse Mountain, was getting sketchy and, being unfamiliar with the area, I thought better to turn back before getting lost. 

At that point I was really miffed about not having climbed Sawmill Mountain.  Fortunately, on the way back, I noticed that side trail to the mountain that had been missed earlier.  My little detour probably added a couple of miles to the total distance of my hike, along with hundreds of feet of unnecessary climbing.  I got back to my car at around 4:30 pm, so was on the trail for around 6 hours—a half hour was spent chatting with older couple after returning to the Condor Observation Center—to do a 10-mile hike with probably around 1,600 feet worth of climbing.

On my way back down and up the saddle to the Mount Pinos Condor Observation Center, I bumped into a woman in her late-40s or early-50s.  She made the same mistake I had made in missing the short side trail to the Sawmill Mountain summit, which made me feel a bit less stupid.  I was even happier to have climbed up Sawmill Mountain, which had been the main point doing the 7 hour-long round trip drive from Fresno to the Mount Pinos Trailhead and back.  Conquering Sawmill got me up to 45 peaks climbed in California, and I’ll be doing more posts about those other mountain adventures featuring my photography later on. 

A couple more comments about hiking in the Chumash Wilderness before ending this blog post.

The first concerns the number of people I encountered on my two Chumash Wilderness hikes.  My April 2022 hike was done on a Saturday and I was a little surprised by the crowds on the trail up Mount Pinos.  Based on my conversations with fellow hikers that day, nearly all were from Southern California.  This makes sense, as it’s a 90-minute drive from Santa Clarita and Valencia at the north end of the Southern California Los Angeles megalopolis to the Mount Pinos trailhead.  My July Sawmill Mountain hike, on the other hand, was done on a Thursday, and when I pulled into the Mount Pinos Nordic Ski Center parking lot, just 7 other cars, along with two school buses, were parked there. 

The school buses had transported a bunch Taft High School students to Mount Pinos.  They were climbing it as an activity in their summer school PE class.  Speaking of young people being introduced to mountain climbing, on my way down from “Y” between the Mount Pinos Summit and Condor Observation Center, I spotted a younger fellow with his two little daughters, probably aged 3 and 4, respectively.  As is my habit when spotting parents doing this kind of thing, I went out of my way to compliment him on introducing his daughters to this great form of recreation at such an early age.  His older daughter was already on her way at a very young age to becoming a mountaineer.  I’m not entirely sure, but I was probably no younger than 10 when I bagged my first mountain, the 10,045-foot Loper Peak near Chimney Lake in the Woodchuck Country, John Muir Wilderness (the trailhead to Chimney Lake, which my father took me up to in many early horse packing trips, is at the Wishon reservoir). 

The other note concerns the sun.  The weather for my Sawmill Mountain hike was lovely, with the temperature staying in the 70s, maybe getting up to 80 degrees—it was in the high 90s in Bakersfield—with nice cool breezes.  However, I was in open terrain part of the time and the sunlight up there was quite fierce.  Since I was wearing short shirtsleeves, my arms got pretty sunburned, as did the back of neck, even though I was wearing my trusty Tilley Hat.  So either wear long sleeves or put on the sunscreen!

That’s it for now, until this Mountain Man’s next hiking adventure story.  In the meantime, get up to the mountains and go hiking somewhere.  Take my word, doing that is extremely therapeutic and will really help center you psychologically!!