Winston Ridge

16 November 1996

By: Peter Doggett

Leaders: Peter Doggett, Jim Fleming

A group of ten HPSers met at 8 am at La Cañada to scale Winston Ridge & clean the Angeles Crest Highway. The standard route starts at Cloudburst Summit and after 2.5 miles of easy hiking, arrives at the top of Winston Ridge. This year we decided to explore an alternate route and we discovered a path that is much better!

We began our hike at the large 180° bend in Highway 2 that is 0.8 mile west of Cloudburst Summit. The route started as old dirt road, which we followed for about 300 yards. We then followed the faint remains of a road basically in a NE direction which dropped us from 6900' into Squaw Canyon @ 6100'. From Squaw Canyon we hiked directly up to the summit at 7003'.

The final 0.4 mile from Squaw Canyon is very steep (gaining 900'); however, the views are terrific. There was little brush on the route and there was no water in Squaw Canyon; however, in the spring there probably is some water flowing. The round trip statistics for this new route are 3.0 miles and 1,800' of gain. Although the total distance for this new path is about 2.0 miles less than the standard route, it has about 1,000' more gain and may require more time to complete.

The clean-up went well also (no weird finds, though!)