I live in Ventura so we needed to be up and out pretty early in order to beat the morning commute. We arrived at 6:45 and were hiking by 7. I had never been here before so we took the paved road to the canyon floor. My hiking partner and I commented how we both hoped we did not have to climb that road to get back to the truck. The weather was perfect for hiking low 50’s to start and the shade of the valley floor helped keep us cool. The trail is well marked and well maintained. However, that did not stop my hiking partner from making a wrong turn because he had his head down and was busy trucking along. He had never really hiked before so he did very well until mile 4.8 then he hit the wall. A nice slow grind to the top and we took the required pictures, ate some lunch and headed down via the Mt Wilson trail to lower winter trail.
About 4 miles from the parking lot a somewhat deranged man came down the trail. He was spouting something about maslov theory, torture dead…needless to say we let him go by us and waited for a bit. At about 3 miles we met Chad. He was headed up the hill when he said, can you help me, I’m lost, like we were going to say no. Seems he decided to climb to Mt Wilson from the Mt Wilson trailhead with only a bottle of guava juice. He made it to the top and was headed down when he made a wrong turn. He was pretty stressed and admitted that he thought he was going to die. We offered him a ride to his car since it was our first time here we had no idea how to give him directions to where he needed to go. During our walk to my truck we talked about being prepared and some steps he needed to take in order to hike safely in the wilderness. Definitely a good hike but I’m ready for the next one: Cucamonga on 2/28.