A beautiful sight, a deadly climb. Mount Baldy is LA’s favorite mountain. That’s the problem
LOS ANGELES — About 1,000 feet below the summit of one of the deadliest mountains in the United States, Ron Bartell and Christine Mitchell stood in soft snow beneath a brilliant blue sky.
It was just before noon on a recent Friday and so warm they didn’t need jackets. Ron wore no gloves.
They had climbed 3,000 feet up a steep trail covered in snow and ice. Less-seasoned hikers probably would not have stopped. But Bartell and Mitchell have been scaling mountains for decades; they’ve each summited this one more than 400 times. They knew what could go wrong.
Getting to the top one more time might be easy, they figured; getting down might not.
Mount Baldy towers above Los Angeles, rising to 10,064 feet and looking like a winter wonderland to millions of people living below.
Despite flashing signs on the road up from Claremont that say, “WARNING ICY TRAILS” and “HIKING NOT ADVISED,” some Angelenos with little experience in the mountains
