Lake Arrowhead Trip

This weekend we took a mini-vacation to Lake Arrowhead! I booked an AirBnB a few months ago to coincide with Valentine’s Day. I had been wanting to take Amparo there, since the first time I went she wasn’t living in California yet. Lake Arrowhead is located up in the San Gabriel Mountains about an hour and a half away from us, which makes it a really reasonable drive to get to. There is a lot of skiing in the area, and it is also located next to the larger Big Bear Lake to the east.

We got there on Saturday, checked into the AirBnB, and then went out to pick up dinner and wander around Lake Arrowhead Village. It’s a decently sized shopping area with a grocery store, restaurants, and touristy shops like a Jurassic Park themed store (not sure why that was there, I’m not aware of any dinosaur fossils found in the area).

We called a pizza place nearby to order dinner, which we fortunately did relatively early because there was a 3 hour backlog to pick up pizza orders. We killed a couple hours in the village and made a brief grocery store run, then went to the pizza place because it had a downstairs bar where we could grab some drinks while we waited the last hour. It turned out that the bar was closed due to slow business that day, but the back patio area still had space heaters turned on and music playing over speakers. So we decided to go back upstairs and buy some bottled beer from the pizza parlor, and then bring them back downstairs to the patio and drink them since it was completely deserted.

The lager which I bought started foaming immediately after I opened it, and kept fizzing for about 20 minutes until I had drank enough of it for it to stay in the bottle. Despite this, the beer tasted good and we had a great time hanging out and dancing by ourselves on the patio with no else around! Then when our pizza was ready we went back upstairs, paid and left with our pizza to go eat dinner at the AirBnB.

The following day we went on our planned hike, starting from Tunnel Road which was only a mile or so from our AirBnB and going down Sawmill Trail. It was a moderate difficulty hike on AllTrails, about 5 miles along with 800 feet of elevation gain. The only thing that made it slightly more difficult was some snow covering parts of the trail, but it still wasn’t too difficult with our new snow spikes for our shoes!

It was a perfect day for the hike, and had some amazing views along the way with plenty of snow-capped mountains in the distance. We saw very few people along the trail, only later on after we stopped for lunch and encountered some people snow tubing down a hill on the way back. The trail started to get a little muddy on the return trip, as the snow began to melt. But we still had a great time, and had some snowball fights along the way!

After the hike we headed back to the AirBnB, showered up, and then went to Lake Arrowhead Brewery to pick up dinner and some drinks. There was a food stand selling BBQ sandwiches, so we bought two tri-tip and cheddar sandwiches for dinner, with a side of beans. We also got a couple of 32 ounce “crowlers” (they basically looked like 40’s that you would see at a gas station) filled with beer. Amparo got another IPA, and I got a stout which was quite tasty and had a hint of coffee. Then we headed back to the AirBnB once again to eat, relax, and watch dumb comedies on Netflix the rest of the evening!

The following morning we packed up and drove back home. I think our trip to Lake Arrowhead was quite successful, and I look forward to the next time we come up there!