Robert Walter and I began at 7:00 am on Tuesday morning (14 May 2019) at the Icehouse Trailhead parking lot.  It was great to not find a full parking lot.  The sky was overcast on the way up the hill toward the parking lot, but we broke through it about 4,000 feet elevation. The trail got washed out at the first creek crossing after entering the wilderness area. The trail continues on the North side of the trail, but we stayed with the creek and did not notice for about ten minutes that we were a little lost. Then we located the trail again across the creek and continued to the saddle.

We spotted a photo opportunity at 34.24063, -117.59894 with Mt. Baldy in the background. So we stopped there at 9:13 for photos. We hit the saddle a little after 9:30 where we encountered some chilly winds. We stopped for breakfast.

As we left the saddle, we began to find some snow on the trail. It was not bad–especially with trekking poles. But we were using neither poles nor Crampons. We followed pre-existing footprints and kicked into the snow a bit to firm our steps.

The final trail up to Cucamonga Peak had rocks and sticks blocking it as if to indicate it was not the way to go. So we continued left along the Cucamonga Peak Trail toward Etiwanda Peak then took a hard right up to the summit of Cucamonga Peak. We found that both of the wooden signs had been moved to the “money shot” photo-op rock so we walked around the summit in a clockwise direction to grab a photo with the sign.

The whole trip took ten hours but my AllTrails recording says we were only moving 7.5 hours.

We had a good day.