USA - Day 4 - Valley Forge trail camp - Mount Baldy

This is the route we biked today

I had a really good night so I got up and went to check our bear hang and it was still where we left it, hooray!

We cleaned up our tents, made breakfast and saw the sun appear. That was welcome after a pretty cold night. We got on our way at 08:30.

The first section was really cool, nice road and a really special valley to cycle in. After a while we started climbing again. Luckily it wasn’t too steep so we made good progress.

The view from the top was nice, you can always see LA. We’re so remote but still very close to the city. After this we went downhill. We saw on the map there was a camping spot and a water tap but we missed it. It was so hot and we were biking along an asphalt road that we decided to continue on to Camp Williams as we saw there was a cafe there.

But when we arrived the cafe was closed. It should have been open according to the sign… So that was a big bummer, really hot and no food. We asked around and we did found a spot to fill up our water.

So now the question was: continue on the route or find a camping spot. As it was only 13:30 we decided to start climbing. If it didn’t work out we could always come back down (as we saw a camping spot a bit offroute).

The climb uphill was luckily not steep but I was really tired so it wasn’t fun. There was shade now and going higher and higher made the heat more bearable.

On the way up we didn’t discover any good spots to camp so we continued on. At the top was an ok spot but it was 15:30 so we once again decided to continue on as the next part was relatively flat.

But the flat part didn’t yield any result, so we just started climbing again as we didn’t want to camp next to the road unless we had no other choice. We found a couple of small roads which we explored but they were either private or there were bee hives ( Bart got stung but not too bad luckily!) We saw on the map that there was a parking spot so we decided to continue on.

The last kilometers were really exhausting, I had to regularly stop to eat something. When we arrived at the parking spot it wasn’t that great (we were hoping there would be a nice secluded spot) and we were in full view op passing cars.

There was a separate dirt road starting there and we explored it and saw a possible but small place to camp out of view. So we decided to put our tents up there and not soon after we heard noise from the parking spot.

So in the end we found a pretty good spot and weren’t disturbed (except for some kind of bird which Bart scared away) and I fell asleep really quickly. I’m now writing this post in a restaurant in Mount Baldy so everything is perfect!