Picking up from yesterday –
One of the first things we passed was a skateboard area that people were using to their heart’s content. What a cool little out-of-the-way interesting skate park. I’ve never ridden a skateboard (though maybe I should), and if you do, you should consider checking it out.
We passed the skateboarders to the meat of the hike. There’s a lot of uphill at the beginning, which is lovely. It feels like a workout. (Oh yeah!)
We stopped a couple of times to kind of take in the scenery (which was pretty beautiful… sometimes). (I’ll get to that sometimes in a sec.)
Toward the beginning of the hike, it was sort of funny because we saw the Hollywood sign and it looked pretty far in the distance. This was only supposed to be about a 3-mile hike up. So, Charles thought we might’ve picked the wrong trail. (“Come on! Look at how far away that looks. We can’t be going the right way.”)
But I was pretty convinced that 3 miles could look that far away. Luckily, there were other hikers coming down. We asked them, and they assured us we were indeed on the correct trail.
Getting back to the beautiful (most of the time ;)) scenery – there were pretty views of the city. (It’s a little incredibly to me that LA feels super spread out, yet from parts of this mountain you can see Burbank, downtown, Hollywood, and more. The higher you go, the less spread out it seems. But I suppose that’s how perspective works.
The reason I say the scenery is beautiful most of the time is because there is this thick, black, totally interesting, actually sort of pretty in its own way, layer of smog that coats Los Angeles. You can see it differently from different places. It’s certainly something.
There were a couple of places where we could choose to go left or right along the way. We’d been given a heads up by hikers before us, and thankfully we always chose the right way (though I did wonder what would’ve happened if we’d turned right at one of the points… Would that trail have led all the way over to the observatory? I couldn’t tell in the vastness at which we were looking.
The one thing every hiker wanted to impress upon us was that when we get to the road, we turn right. So, once we got there we dutifully followed.
(We’re almost there!)
And I’ll pick this up next time.