Gower (SDC #47, 3110′) • map • directions

Eagle (SDC #86, 3226′) • map • directions*

Mt. Gower lies just 6 miles outside of downtown Ramona and faces Eagle Peak across the headwaters of the San Diego River. Early this Sunday morning, Anna and I parked on Daza Drive and walked  between two houses, having similarly started out between two houses the previous weekend on the hike to Bell Bluff. We reached a paved road and followed it uphill, using a pedestrian entrance when we came to a locked gate, and continued around the water towers and onto the trail.

We followed the trail for a mile and a half or perhaps a little further before we took a left (east) turn onto a steep use trail. The use trail was marked by a few ducks and led up steeper ground to large rock slabs, from where we began scrambling towards Mt. Gower’s west summit.

 Upon reaching the top of Mt. Gower, we snapped a few pictures and quickly retraced our steps, stopping for a break on the slabs a few hundred feet below to take a breather and get some food. A mountain biker had ridden over our foot prints since we’d gone higher but we never saw another person the entire three hours we were out there.

UPDATE

Since my visit to Mt. Gower with Anna in September 2010, I had questioned whether or not we had actually reached the high point. After reading that there was a register at the correct location and comparing the SDC listed coordinate against my topo, I realized that Anna and I had not reached the true summit of Mt. Gower. I returned on March 13, 2012 and almost missed the summit a second time by heading to what the map shows as the high point. I eventually made my way to the correct location and did indeed find a summit register placed by John Strauch in 1996 with very few entries. The map at the bottom of the page reflects both the location of the register and the SDC coordinate.

Eagle

As the crow flies, Eagle Peak is only 4 miles from Mt. Gower but with the San Diego River between them it took us an hour to drive around through Julian to reach the starting point for Eagle Peak. I had entertained the idea of trying to link the two peaks together into one hike but it would have involved loads of cross country travel and elevation gain and never would have fit into our leisurely day.

The trailhead for Eagle Peak is on Boulder Creek Rd, a graded dirt road mild enough for passenger cars, and was familiar from my previous visit. I’d been up Eagle Peak three years or so before, on a loop hike to visit the Three Sisters waterfalls and the Devil’s Punchbowl. We had reached Eagle Peak pretty late in the day on that trip so I was looking forward to another visit.

Within a few minutes of Anna and I leaving the truck, we dropped a few hundred feet of elevation to a trail junction for the Three Sisters falls. There guys in their late teens or so were sitting under a tree there and inquired about my destination. They confessed that they had wanted to go to Eagle Peak but had turned off towards the falls by mistake and were too tired to explore both directions in one day. The sun was beating down hard now, seemed like a good call. Had I not been trying to clear my fall schedule for desert peaks, I may have chosen another day for Eagle Peak as well!

I regained elevation with Anna close behind, before losing it yet again into a thinly forested basin just northeast of and 300 feet lower than the summit. We followed a use trail that broke off to the left and switchbacked up onto the main ridge, which we followed the rest of the way to the summit.

The last 1/4 mile of Eagle Peak was awesome, and it truly up to its name as birds of prey (Red-Tailed Hawks I think) swirled overhead. We followed the same trail back to the truck, making the roundtrip hike in less than 2 hours, plenty of time left to stop into Julian for dinner on the way home.

*-I’ve added an intermediate ponit in the driving directions to insure a northern driving approach for Eagle Peak.