Trip to Arrowhead

We went to Lake Arrowhead and part of the way to Big Bear yesterday. Me, Tom, Justice and Tristan. This was all that Tristan wanted for Christmas: To go to the mountains and sled in the snow.

This is a map of the drive from Irvine/Tustin to Lake Arrowhead:

After you get on the 215, you take the 30 to the 18 and that begins your journey up the mountains.

This is the part that scared Tristan and me the most. I don't like heights, and I especially don't like heights and being a passenger in a car and coming close to the rail. We ended up being about 5 or 6 thousand feet up from the city. I really hate heights. I guess Tristan has a bit of me in him. This video tells the story:

(Okay, the video will be coming soon, or at least a link to the location of that video.)

I'm so scared of heights, and obviously Tristan was, too. I remember one time going to the top of a really high abandoned building in San Francisco. There were no rails. You could walk right up to the edge of the building and simply walk off. The most they had was a curb. I had to get down on my hands and knees to get away from the edge.

At the end of the drive was the lake, but we didn't get out and take pictures because now, we were hunting for snow!

It's amazing. From down below, the mountains are white from the top to about half way down. When you get to the top, it's perplexing because we really had to search for the snow.

We drove around by Lake Arrowhead, hoping to see a place to sled, but there really wasn't much snow.


So we left Arrowhead and continued on down the 18 and started driving towards Big Bear Lake, hoping that maybe the north side would have more snow since the south side was facing the sun and obviously melting quicker than we thought it would. Where you see Treasure Island is where Big Bear Lake is.





It was about half-way to Big Bear where we finally found a good patch of snow and other people sledding. This video is actually kind of boring. I think you probably had to be there.

(Second video will be linked here someday.)

We were kicked out because it turns out that the place we chose to sled was private property, but at least we got a good hour or so of sledding. We drove a little closer to Big Bear after that because someone said he was aware of a sledding area in Big Bear. I had forgotten about this place where you can ski, and they had an area where kids could sled. Tristan didn't want to sled any more, though, so we headed for home.

Driving downhill wasn't as scary as going uphill. Probably because it was dark.

We're going to try to get back up to the ski area the next time it snows, but we're going to go the very first weekend after it snows. I can't believe how quickly the snow melted. It just snowed about 2 weeks ago.