Another great hike completed with my hiking partner, Crystal. Today we hit our 5th peak in as many days. Mount Sizer which I'm told is the most difficult of the Bay Area Six Pack of Peaks Challenge. Of course, difficulty is always subjective.

We arrived early today and began our hike just before dawn, 0610. There wasn't a soul on the trail today with the exception of a pair of ranger vehicles. One we saw on our ascent and the other as we were descending. No hikers. Just deer, squriels, and a few bugs. We ended our day with 13.6 miles and roughly 4,950 feet in elevation gain and completed the hike in 5 hours 30 minutes.

The trail is pretty straight forward and begins with a short uphill before heading down to Frog Lake, followed by another quick up and then to basically the bottom of the canyon floor. From there the real climb begins. Right around 4.1 miles the trail/road gets steep, and the ascent climbs for about 1.3 miles to Blue Ridge with about 1,400 in elevation gain. Tough little climb! Once on the ridgeline, it's roughly another 1.4 miles to Mount Sizer. A rather unassuming summit, which is nothing more than the high point of the ridgeline.

Our descent was uneventful and, considering the steepness of the descent, fairly easy. Even the final climbs out of the canyon didn't seem too difficult. That said we had pretty mild temperatures since we started so early. Probably somewhere in the low to mid-60s all morning. A later start and a warmer day could easily make this hike extremely difficult.