This was my first peak in the challenge and I was a little anxious in the days leading up to the hike. Overall, it was a great experience and I'm super motivated to summit the next one in the challenge (Cucamonga Peak)!

The experiences and descriptions in the forum on this website were extremely helpful in navigating Wilson as there were some confusing components to the hike. We started at the Chantry Flat trailhead at 7:15AM, took the detour to Sturtevant Falls (lovely and worth the extra trek) made our way up through Camp Sturtevant (had to stop and enjoy the swing) and continued up the incline to the summit. We enjoyed beautiful vistas on the way and stopped to enjoy the silence and tranquility around us. We were fortunate to have great weather despite the winter storm warnings that we read about a day earlier. It wasn’t windy and the sun was out.

Once we summited and walked past the observatory, we made our way to the cosmic cafe and stopped to use the clean restrooms, eat lunch and refill our water. It was cold so we didn't stay long and this is where the challenges of the hike arose. Finding the trail from the main parking lot was not easy. We eventually found it though it would have been nice if it had some identifiable marker. I’m guessing that we didn’t actually start where we were supposed to as we had an extremely steep descent onto the trail and we would have slid down without trekking poles.

The next obstacle was trying to figure out which road to take a left on as there were 2 (one was higher). Another hiker happened to be passing through at the same time and told us it was the lower road as he does this hike once a week. We took the lower road, which ultimately brought us to the nice wooden bench, where we took another left at Winter Creek trail and we were on our way.

Once we made it to Winter Creek and Hogee’s Camp, we decided on the Lower Winter Creek Trail thinking that it would drop us off at the parking lot- instead it took us below Chantry Flat and challenged us with a lovely uphill climb for the last ½ mile. Reading all the information on the trail now that we’ve hiked it makes a lot more sense than reading it before.

Overall, it was a GREAT experience and I’m so excited for the next one!!! We hiked 14 ½ miles in 10 hours- way over the average time but this included numerous stops for pictures, adding/removing layers, restroom breaks, lunch etc. Now that we know how we can be more efficient we hope to improve our pace with the next challenge!