Barley Flats, Mount Lawlor, Strawberry Peak, Josephine Peak

2 April 1995

By: Patty Kline

Leaders: Patty Kline, Frank Goodykoontz

About 20 people were ready to go at the La Cañada rideshare point at 7:30 am, but the leaders weren't there. Was it the time change at 2:00 am that morning that slowed them? No, it was the Angeles Chapter Awards Banquet the night before, where Frank Goodykoontz was presented with the highest outings award the Angeles Chapter can bestow, the Chester Versteeg Outings Award. Patty presented him with the award in front of about 16 HPSers among the 240 plus crowd of people. Way to go, Frank. Congratulations!

The group was finally underway about 20 minutes later. We did the traverse from Barley Flats (5600), Mt Lawlor (5957), Strawberry Peak (6164), and Josephine (5558') all on ridges until we intersected the dirt road to Josephine after coming off of the ridge from Strawberry. 6 of the 20 people didn't want to do the whole thing, so decided not to sign in. My thought was that they didn't want Barley Flats. Barley Flats was my second peak years before anything was built near the top. I still like it in its present form.

In order to do this traverse there was a car shuttle with cars at the 2 road heads: Josephine and Barley Flats. The Barley Flats road gate at the Angeles Crest Highway had been open lately, otherwise we wouldn't have added Barley Flats to our hike. We drove through the open gate and drove the 2.5 miles to park just below the detention camp gate at 5500'. It was cold and Frank loaned out 2 extra jackets and one pair of polarguard side zip pants from his car before we started our hike.

After 1/2 mile of hiking we were signing in on the register on Barley Flats. We then took the ridge to Lawlor where we had a snack. Lunch was on Strawberry, where we met the six other people. On the way down from Strawberry towards Josephine was the "famous" but easy 3rd class on Strawberry. The group had a lot of fun on this. The wind was quite strong on Josephine where we had another snack before going down to the intersection of Angeles Crest Highway and Angeles Forest Highway where we left the other 1/2 of the cars.

The trip was 12 miles and 3500' of gain. It took 7-1/2 hours. There were a lot of people new to the peak begging mania on this trip. I hope we hooked in some on this 4 peak day. The participants were Mark Wallace, Gordon Lunder, Nancy Vera, Donna Hansen, Peter Wiley, Wiley Wohtf, Dave Welborn, Lynn Heather, Suzanne Williams, Robert Garrett, Karl Kraves, and Flora Johnson.