Mt. Wilson is the closest real mountain to Los Angeles, and it is my first larger hike that I did in preparation for my first Whitney summit. Go up from Chantry Flat, which makes it about fourteen miles and roughly 4,600 feet of climbing by the time you are back at the car.
It is not a hard mountain. Nothing on it is technical and nothing on it will scare you. What it has is length and steady climbing, which is exactly what you want when you are trying to find out whether your legs will hold up on something bigger.
What makes it worth repeating is the top. There is a historic observatory up there and the Cosmic Cafe, so you can finish a fourteen mile day with a cookie and a sandwich at a picnic table before you turn around and walk back down. I think this should be everyone's beginner hike. To me, it never gets old, and I'll repeat it every year.
Second lap, almost a year to the week after the first. Moving at 8:09 a.m., and an hour and one minute faster than 2025. I think eventually I can get it down to three and a half hours. I'm definitely partial to starting earlier. 7:00 a.m. would be a good sweet spot, maybe even 6:00 a.m.
The interesting part is where that hour came from. I spent longer standing still than I did the first time, about thirty-nine minutes off the clock against thirty-three. So none of it came from skipping breaks. All of it came out of pace.
First time up, and the first of two SoCal warm-ups before Whitney six and a half weeks later. Walking by 7:11 a.m.
Six hours and seven minutes car to car, about thirty-three of those minutes spent stopped, most of it at the Cosmic Cafe at the top. This was the day the training stopped being theoretical.
