Hiking Buzzard Peak

The mountains can call to you to climb them, even if they are in the most un-wild of settings. How much chaff can you take on a trail before you get to the wheat? Don't get me wrong, I have hiked through many a neighborhood on my weirdo hikes over the last few years but my recent hike to Buzzard Peak in Covina took a lot of metaphorical cakes.

To get to Buzzard Peak you "hike" through traffic

Through dogs

and through pavement

for .8 of a mile until you even sniff what could be considered wilderness. Still, once you do get to that wilderness your outdoors-y-ness might just start kicking in.

I mean, the rest of the hike is pretty sweet, switchbacking up through a parkland setting

and as much as I hate switchingbacking up mountains, I much prefer that to switchingbacking through angry dog backyards.

Eventually the switchbacking stops and you top out a ridgeline with very little shade as is often the case here in SoCal but the sun on a ridgeline feels much nicer than the sun on pavement (or so I tell myself).

Then its an amble and a steep scramble (well, steep coming down with a dropoff on one edge) to the summit.

The summit offers some killer views of the front and back range of the Angeles national forest which is the numero uno reason to do this hike but you can't sit down as there is broken glass everywhere on the summit.

This seems rather par for the course of this hike and in the end, I am not sure if the chaff could be separated from the wheat on this one. On the one hand, it was great to drive to a suburban neighborhood and climb a mountain. On the other hand the .25 miles wasn't really worth the 1.2 leading up to it. I desperately wanted to like this hike just for the "hidden gem"/"weirdo" factor of it all but in the end I end up rather "meh". Still, a bad day on the trail beats a good day in the office!

For a more in-depth review of the trail, check out Nobody Hikes in LA's write up: http://nobodyhikesinla.com/2013/10/03/buzzard-peak-west-approach/