6/6 - 6/7 A16 3 Peaks Challenge 2015 (b)

Tried again on a Sunday, there had not been any recent storms, so snow was a non factor this time.  Due to miscommunication, erin was unable to come, so i was going with adam and grinder.  Adam had done the 24h the year before and was looking to cut down on his time.  This time, we had applied for a permit ahead of time and had a south fork permit, so there would be no randomness in trying to get a walkup permit.

We met up at the 215/60 junction (i was coming from LA, the other 2 came up from sd) and we stashed a car at the walmart (great place to stash cars) for the day.

We took Adam's car, and started off for baldy around 730pm.

Started up the baldy hut trail at 935pm with grinder and adam, adam was lagging a bit as we got to the hut, but i did not think anything of it as there was a work party going on.  It was fun to see my friends dan and melissa at the hut.  As we departed the hut, Adam told me he might be dropping out to sleep in the car as he had overexerted himself the day before.  Grinder and i reached the summit just before midnight, it was significantly windier than last year, we waited around a bit for adam, but headed down fairly shortly.

we got back down to the car at 1:40am and found adam sleeping.

Adam was down to run support for us and skip gorgonio, so we improvised a bit.  Having the south fork permit and a driver, we decided to do a loop.  Instead of going there and back from south fork, we would get dropped off at vivian and finish at south fork.  this would save us a bit of time driving, and be more of a varied hike.  Adam dropped us off at 3am at vivian creek and we started up.  hiking up the vivian creek trail as the sun rose was pretty awesome.

We reached the summit at 745, and were at south fork trailhead by 11:20.

We had plenty of time for the tram, but it still grated on me how long it actually took to get on it.  we got to the tram station at around 115, but were not on the tram until about 2pm.  im not sure if there's a way to speed up the ticket/tram process, but that would be nice.  from the top of the tram to the summit took about 2 and a half hours, we summit-ed at 4:35pm and were back by 630.  It was fun talking to a bunch of through hikers up at the summit.

So from 935pm to 630 the next day, our total time was right around 21 hours.