Escaping The Nutshell

Starting from Lefthand Canyon Dr, we parked above Buckingham Park off of Lefthand Canyon Dr where it crosses over Lefthand Creek. The elevation at the parking place was 6073 feet. The eventual high point was Fairview Peak where our GPS gave an elevation of 8592 feet. So the elevation difference from low to high was 8592-6073 = 2519 feet, not counting a significant plunge into Spruce Gulch from the forest trail 286 overlook.

This hike formed a loop in a counterclockwise direction, as you can see from the GPS tracks. The GPS didn’t start tracking until the overlook above Spruce Gulch just before we plunged down into the gulch. The missing part of the GPS tracks was a continuous trail almost directly across from where we parked to the overlook, which is forest trail 286-1.

From Spruce Gulch we ascended the east ridge of Fairview Peak, which started with easy meadow walking but got more rough, rocky, and brambly as we continued up. Following the ridge, we clambered to the top of rugged knob 7880, and continued along the ridge until we finally got onto an old 4WD road on the north side of the ridge which took us in the direction of the Fairview Peak summit. We reached the summit at a time of about 3 hours from the start of the hike. As the name suggests, the views from the Fairview summit are really nice.

For our return trip, we continued on the 4WD road that we came in on, heading southwest until its intersection with forest rd 87J, then took 87J east. Note that heading east on 87J we came across numerous “No trespassing” or “Private property” signs that were pointed the other way. We also came to a gate with same signs, and then another one, and continued on forest trails 288 and 286 back to Lefthand Canyon. The total time for the hike was about 5 hours.

Our video of the hike