Our Idyllwild Excursion

We've lived in San Diego for almost FIVE years now (hard to believe, I know!!) and somehow we've never managed to make it up to the San Jacinto mountains, despite the fact that they're only a beautiful 90-minute drive away. Shame on us!

The town of Idyllwild, located in Strawberry Valley of the Jacinto range, has a special place in my heart - I spent two summers in high school attending a music camp (yeah, yeah, commence band camp jokes) at the small performing arts high school located just outside of the town. I have amazingly fond memories of the area, and I wasn't too surprised to find out that Idyllwild is considered one of America's "Top 100 Towns." I did know that the hiking trails in the area are the cleanest and most well-groomed in the country, and are one of the main attractions of the tiny town. The San Jacinto wildnerness is called the "Cleanest Forest in America." Hmmmm, they sure do like titles, don't they? It was time to judge for ourselves.

We made a trek up there recently and had a fantastic time hiking, eating, and strolling through the tiny town. Our big hike up to Suicide Rock came on a bit of a gloomy day, but I think it actually set kind of a cool mood: as we ascended, we passed through the fog and clouds, and the wind blew the fog through the trees. Eerie. At the summit, though it was very windy and quite chilly, the view down into the valley was constantly changing, so we stayed up there a while. The clouds would roll in and completely block our view of anything below us, but then a big gust of wind would shepherd the clouds away and we'd get an amazing (though fleeting) view of everything. As usual, I took plenty of pictures ... sadly, I couldn't really capture any of those special cloud-free valley views, but there are some other good ones in here. Click on this link to take you to the whole album.

Here's Nick with a massive fallen tree up at the summit:

This was about 2/3 of the way up the mountain, before hitting the clouds:

Suicide Rock, socked in with fog and/or clouds: