There’s a ton of venues for hiking in the San Bernardino mountain range just north of Pasadena. Some trails start just 20 minutes from campus, up by JPL. However, if you’re looking for an adventurous all-day hike, with snow to trek through in the summer, the remains of a 1950s plane wreck along the trail, and a higher summit than any other place in Southern California, the place to go is San Gorgonio Mountain in the San Bernardinos, about a two-hour drive from Pasadena. I went there a few weeks ago with a group of friends, some of whom you can see in the picture above. We were surprised at how much snow was still on the mountain! We left Pasadena at around 9 am and started on the Fish Creek Trail, which has about 3,400 feet of elevation gain, at 11. Every so often we would run into other hikers on the trail, but there weren’t as many as I would have expected for a weekend.
At Caltech, both the house dining rooms and Chandler, the lunchtime cafeteria, are closed on weekends during the school year. We’re left to fend for ourselves—which is actually awesome, because it encourages us cook our own food in the house kitchens or gives us an excuse to go out to restaurants. During the school year people eat out a lot on weekends or cook simple food; during the summer there are more structured cooking groups (which I’ll talk about in a later post!) and more time to visit restaurants outside of Pasadena.
Begin my blog by welcoming you to Tokyo, and I’ll begin mine by welcoming you to Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles! My friends Kenzie, Elisa, Ben and I celebrated the end of our sophomore year (and my 20th birthday!) by exploring Little Tokyo and singing karaoke. Little Tokyo is surprisingly close to Pasadena—only about 11 stops on the Metro Gold Line. The nearest Gold Line stop to campus is about a 20-minute walk, so it’s very accessible. Here we are with our super cool Japanese snacks before heading to the karaoke studio. All four of us started our SURFs a few days after this. Kenzie and Elisa are doing off-campus research at the University of Washington and MIT, conducting geology and biomedical research, respectively.
Hi everyone! My name is Laura, and I’m a freshman in Lloyd. I’m here to share with you the amazingness of Prefrosh Weekend. I was already pretty sure I was going to go to Caltech when I arrived at PFW last April, and my four fantastic days there solidified my decision.