The title of this hike report should have been “La Tuna Canyon Trail hike” but when we (Mario, Sandra, Crystal, David and I) all showed up Sunday morning for this one we parked at what we thought was the trailhead since there were a bunch of cars there and it was at the La Tuna Canyon off ramp. This trail is located on the north side of the Verdugo Mountains and was my first time starting from this side so I was excited to take a new route. The first part of this was a paved road that quickly turned into a dirt fire road where there was a sign that said “Hostetter”, since we all thought we were on the La Tuna Canyon trail we ignored it and kept going.

This was supposed to be a nice quick 4-mile hike (I ran a trail half marathon the day before so I was looking forward to an easy one )so we were surprised when we got to the 2-mile point and we were still far away from the top, luckily the road was not too steep and the weather was nice so we kept going. We had good views of the San Gabriel Mountains that were to the north and also of the damage the recent rains caused. One part of the fire road was completely washed away even!

After a little over anther mile we reached the top where it meets up with the Verdugo fire road and took a quick break. There was a sign here pointing to the various other points this road connects to and this is where we noticed one that said “La Tuna Canyon Trail 2.3 miles”!

We went up the wrong way!

Well isn’t that lovely, hahahaha. Oh well what can you do, we came back down the same way so our 4-mile hike turned out to be 7 miles. After we made it to our cars I had to find out where the real trail was so I drove west along La Tuna Canyon road. I didn’t have to go very far because a mile later I found the real trailhead. It was a much smaller parking area so it would be easy to drive by if you were not paying attention. That means we will have to come back and do the “Real” La Tuna Canyon Trail in the future.