Julie and I were hoping big time that it wouldn’t result in a really bad injury to one of them where we’d likely get blamed for bringing them to this hike in the first place should such a calamity…

..I was busy taking pictures before heading out, we noticed that Sophia slipped and fell into a shallow part of Willow Creek. Dad aggressively went into the creek after her when he, too, slipped…

Actually, the scrambling up to the top of the falls wasn’t very trivial as I had to grip some sloping hard-rock surfaces that could easily be difficult to get a grip, especially if wet…

It didn’t even matter that some of them had the forest service pass on their dashboards or hanging from their rear-view mirror. The cops also got them for parking over the traffic lines so trying…

…the kids were playing Pharoah or something like that where Joshua buried himself in the sand by camp. Clearly he was oblivious to the fact that he wasn’t going to shower for another night…

…Julie and Tahia made it back to the room as they were returning from their day out. Julie told me about a scary moment when an Uber driver ran the red light and they almost got broadsided…

Not recalling that I had to go that far up to continue the ascent, I briefly descended to where there was a familiar steep climb though it definitely lacked the vegetation that I swore was there…

She suddenly started to do things like picking her nose and smearing the byproducts onto me. Or she would be snacking on puffs and leaving crumbs everywhere…

Julie quickly handed Tahia a spare plastic bag, and roughly a few minutes later, she hurled into the bag. The foul smell of bile and other stomach acids or other nasty things definitely didn’t…

We also saw lots of cars looking for parallel parking and that parking situation looked pretty hopeless. It kind of made me wonder if we should abandon our attempts at…

When Julie finally got back to the trailhead at 12:25pm, she told me that she saw a ram! And she made sure to let me know that I should have taken the main trail back instead of the alternate one…

So given all of those factors, today’s excursion really felt like we were shaking off the cobwebs and getting back into the old MO of doing waterfall hikes opportunistically while writing about our…

There were people…rowing just outside in the harbor in plain sight from the restaurant. Then, suddenly, we heard loud booms, which rattled the windows…The waiter said that they were from cannons.

And so we were merrily driving up the Hwy 39 into San Gabriel Canyon en route to Crystal Lake. But we were doing this drive without much preparation as we didn’t bring Ann Marie Brown’s book…

I eventually scrambled up to rejoin Julie and Tahia where they were snacking on broccoli chips. As we were snacking up here, we were suddenly inundated in an insect swarm. It was quite a surreal…

As we were making our way over, Mom was telling me that Joshua had gotten carsick and threw up in a plastic bag. At first, she blamed Dad’s driving…

And as I was making this apparently unnecessary crossing to get back to the original side, I made a misstep and next thing I knew, both boots were wet as well as my wool socks! So much for hiking…

With the time being 2:50pm, I figured that it would probably be another 40-50 minutes before we’d finally be back at the trailhead. But at least now, we knew that we’d be hiking on trail again…

That said, Tahquitz Creek and Tahquitz Falls had quite the healthy flow. In fact, its flow was so strong that the creek flowed right over the connecting trail leading to the other side of the loop…

It wasn’t long before we saw a large group of hikers gathered near the mouth of Millard Canyon and the concrete ford. There was definitely a lot of water rushing across that concrete ford though…