Located in northern San Diego County, Palomar Mountain is well-known for its telescopes. I had visited the 'scopes up here back in 1989 with some astronomy-minded buddies while still in college. However, the concept of visiting the mounatin's summit, labeled "High Point" on the map, was not in my mind at that time. It is one of five highly-prominent peaks in San Diego County; in my quest to visit as many of these peaks as possible, I wanted to "bag" Palomar when an opportunity arose. By itself, though, it wasn't worth the drive all the way from Phoenix. Beth and I planned a visit to hike up Tahquitz Peak in Idyllwild, and saw a chance to work in a visit to Palomar's summit as part of this trip. At least that was the plan. Long story short: my truck's timing belt went out while in Idyllwild, stranding us there for a couple days while it was in the shop. This was after the Palomar leg of the trip, so we were shut out on Tahquitz, which was our main goal anyway. Kind of a bummer trip overall. The return-on-investment for this trip was just a bit low. Ship happens, as they say down by the docks. Nevertheless, we had a fun and interesting day exploring Palomar's roads and the region, including driving through areas that we'd never been to before.

The trip itself was delayed when Beth's trusty Subaru needed its alternator replaced, so this put us back half a day until we could get it out of the shop. We finally left Chandler at 2 p.m. on Saturday the 16th, the hottest part of the day. The drive along Interstate-10 was long and boring as usual. We rolled in to Palm Desert around 6:30, spent some time getting food and supplies, then drove up the scenic Palms to Pines Highway (CA-74) to the Pinyon Flat Campground about 15 miles up the road. We just stayed here by luck: we hadn't planned it necessarily, but it's a nice area at about 3,000 feet elevation. We were the only people there that night. We had a full moon and clear weather, with a nice cool breeze, so all in all we had a good night here. The next day - Sunday - we'd be exploring Palomar Mountain, then camp again in Idyllwild for Monday's planned hike up Tahquitz. From the Pinyon Flat campground we continued west on CA-74 a short ways to the junction with CA-371, which cuts southwest diagonally through the town of Anza and the Cahuilla Indian Reservation. Twenty miles later CA-371 ends at the junction with CA-79 in the town of Aguanga. The land here is semi-arid desert and hills, with granite rocks and outcrops everywhere. In my 20+ years living in SoCal, I had never been in this particular area before. Beth had "driven through", as best as she could remember, about twenty years earlier when she lived in San Diego.

According to the various reports, the summit is only reachable by rough dirt roads, of which there are three possibilities. The observatories are not at the summit proper; in fact, they are clumped about two miles west and about 600 feet lower in elevation. There is a road from the observatories to the high point, but apparently it's not legal to hike this road; why, I don't know. Palomar is a big broad mountain; the summit access roads all emanate from the north and east along highway CA-79, while a paved road goes to the observatories from the southwest via CA-76. To go from the north side (e.g. Aguanga) to the south side (e.g. the Observatory Roads) is a drive of at least 50 miles. The first road possibility comes up from Aguanga, just a short bit east of the junctions of highways 79 and 371. We found this easy enough - and the twenty or so "no trespassing" signs posted everywhere. Geez - they get a special on quantity? There were literally three such signs within ten feet of one another in one place. There's an RV park here, plus some residences. Maybe they put them all up. We could play ignorant on one sign, but not two dozen. This eliminated this approach pretty quickly, so we exited back on to highway CA-79 and proceeded east to the next town, Oak Grove.

In Oak Grove there is a road that goes to the top, and it's marked as a forest road, but we found some "no trespass" signs again. This was getting kind of silly. It felt like we were in Texas. Again, we backed out and went along our way. Well, plan D, I figured, which was to drive up the paved roads from the south and stealth the summit via the access road that way, laws be damned. So we drove along and about six miles later I happened to notice another road with a forest-service sign, set back kind of in from the main highway. It was luck I saw this sign: we drove right past it and I caught it in the corner of my eye, then went back to check it out. Quite by luck, it was labeled the "Palomar Divide" Road and went all the way to the top in 13 miles! Cool - we decided to take this road as far as we felt comfortable. It is marked as Forest Road 9S07 on the map.

The first mile and a half was typical moderately-rough dirt road: bumpy, some of it eroded by water, etc. Not too bad, but thirteen miles of this would get old fast. Then, another nice surprise: the road became paved! It stayed paved for the next four miles or so as it gained considerable elevation up the southeast flanks of the range. It wasn't paved according to normal highway standards, it was just a layer of asphalt covering the narrow road. We still had to go slow, and it was bumpy, but it did make the tread more solid, and removed a small amount of pucker factor from the drive. The pavement ends high up on the main ridge near the ruins of some old building. We guess they paved this portion since it would be cheaper than to come by and grade it all the time. Parts were very exposed and looked prone to erosion. Near the ruins, the observatories were visible way off to the west, and the summit - "High Point" - was also visible, topped by a tall lookout tower. Being able to see our destination was a good feeling. We drove another 5.5 miles along the dirt ridge road. Mostly conditions were pretty good, but some parts were bumpy or eroded. Berms in the road (for erosion control) were high enough to make our going over them in my truck a careful process, and probably would high-center a smaller vehicle. Only one point in the road - at about mile 9 - was tricky, where a big rock in the road forced us to drive through at a fairly hefty lean. Other than that, it was just slow careful going. We parked in a glen of trees at about 11.1 miles, still a couple miles short of the summit. I wanted to make a short hike to the top, and this looked like a nice place to park, with shade and nice views. Beth was conserving her energy for Tahquitz and really wasn't interested in Palomar's summit, so she was content to sit for an hour or so while I ran off to tag the top. We had full provisions in the truck, so we set her up in a camp chair with sodas and reading material. The drive up had taken us just over an hour. It was about 10 a.m. when we stopped.

For the hike, I grabbed a couple bottles of water and basic supplies and started off the remaining portion of road. We had parked at a small rise, very close to 5,700 feet elevation. Just a few feet down the road, there was a fork, the main road going right which I followed, and losing about 60 feet where it junctioned with the Oak Grove access road. I went left here and regained the lost elevation, then a short while later, came to another junction, unsigned in any manner. However, it was obvious to go left (and up). According to the map there is a spring here. I noticed a concrete structure (a foundation?) below the road a bit, but did not bother to check it out. Hiking the main road, it gains moderately up the east and north of the summit before bending onto its west side, where a side road juts off to the top. This side road is gated, but publicly accessible. I hiked the remaining leg to the top, arriving about 25 minutes after leaving Beth back at the truck. A big lookout tower sits at the summit, and it looks active, although on this day I didn't see anyone or any vehicles. The natural highpoint is in a clump of rocks nearby the tower. I stepped carefully so as not to wake any snakes from their mid-day naps. After tagging the top I made the easy hike back to the truck, a total time gone of 45 minutes. According to the maps and my best guesses, I figured a gross gain of 450 feet to the top and a total of three miles of hiking. I took a short-cut, following the road I had ignored at the very start of my short hike. In all, an easy short walk. In the dry, warm conditions, I still broke a heavy sweat. Bugs were everywhere. The views were very nice, with Lake Hinshaw below us, and Cuyamaca Peak off in the distance looking south. Other interesting views included the county highpoint, Hot Springs Mountain, off to our east, and countless peaks and ridges in all directions. The sky was kind of hazy so that far-away peaks were partially occluded. Big Mount San Jacinto was fairly easy to spot, while bigger Mount San Gorgonio, believe it or not, was visible as a whitish apparition far to the north, its unique light-colored summit (not snow) poking through the atmosphere.

The drive down went slow, and shortly after noon we had exited back onto the paved highway. We decided to skip the observatories altogether, mainly since we've been there before and didn't feel like 80 miles of extra round-trip driving. From here we retraced our steps through Aguanga and Anza along CA-371 back to highway CA-74. Here we went west and up into Idyllwild, getting a campsite at the Idyllwild State Park in the heart of town. We had a cool, pleasant night and both of us slept reasonably well. The next morning we packed up and drove up the roads to Humber Park, the trailhead for our hike up to Tahquitz Peak. Well, we never got there. Stopped at a stop sign my engine simply kicked off on me. Thinking I had messed up on the clutch I tried to restart it to no avail. We tried to push-start it, but it was just me doing the pushing with Beth handling the driving. On this hilly terrain, we were in a small low-point, so I could not push it anywhere much. A man living in the house nearby came out to help us. Ultimately we had to call in a tow truck to haul us down to the Idyllwild Garage in town, where the bad news came down: a busted timing belt. This was a big job, and up here in the little mountain town of Idyllwild, they'd have to order up the parts from San Diego. So we cooled our jets at the Bluebird Cottages for the next 28 hours while our truck was being worked on. We walked about town and tried to fill in our time, but we were both bummed about the whole situation for many reasons. Finally, 2 p.m. the following day, the truck was done and in good working order ... luckily no other damage had been done when the belt "broke" (It actually lost its cogs, not actually breaking). The drive home went okay, but my truck ran hot most of the way home, so I still need it looked at some more. A real downer way to end the trip. We will most certainly be back to hike Tahquitz, and I thank the guys at the garage and the proprieters at the Bluebird Cottages for being cool while we waited this whole thing out.