People have been telling us to explore the area outside of the city, so now that it has stopped raining we decided to head up into the Angeles National Forest. This is a surprisingly huge wilderness area outside of LA that goes all the way up to 7400 feet. What’s really cool is with a couple hour drive you can get from city to snowy mountains and since we love scenic drives we wanted to try it out.

To be honest I wasn’t crazy about the landscape until we got above the cloud cover and were in a beautiful pine forest. What was particularly cool was being above the cloud cover, I don’t think I have ever seen that before.

We were headed to the Mt. Wilson Observatory which turned out to be pretty cool. There are multiple telescopes in the compound and it has fulltime staff who live there. There is also a trailhead at the observatory, but we walked around and saw the buildings that were open. It’s really pretty and dog friendly which I appreciated. A couple of the staff even had a couple of dogs which they were letting run loose in the fenced in water tank area.

There was a museum that was open that explained all the history. It was founded in 1904 as part of Carnegie University and in 1919 it housed the largest telescope in the world (the 100 inch). Now over 100 years old this telescope is still there!!

One thing that was weird was despite tons of huge antennas there was no cell signal up there. Lee and I were actually separated at one point and had a heck of a time finding each other.

My favorite part was the large observatory had a glass in viewing platform where you can see the huge telescope. VERY cool.

After seeing the observatory, we went back on the skyway and headed further up into the mountains. We knew going in that the the road was closed at some point but we got pretty far up. There is a ski lift (family owned) on the mountain, but some skiers we talked to said they rarely run it. Instead they hike up and ski down which is some serious dedication if you ask me. We also saw lots of families with little kids playing in the snow and everyone seemed to be having a nice time. The unfortunate thing was we had to drive back the way we came and going down that twisty turny road was less fun for me. Lee loved it though.

To be honest the drive was just ok, but the Observatory was nice. And even though it was hazy there were some nice vistas.

Next up we are finally getting to visit Universal but it may be awhile before I post. I have two back to back work trips (one in OKC and another in Milwaukee) and wont have a ton of personal time. We are also still working on the budget, hopefully Lee will have the base data ready for me when I come back from my trips.

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