Free Rock Climbing beta for Horse Flats

Elevation: 5,800' - 6,200'
Seasons: 🌸, 🍁
Routes: 35
Problems: 425+
Parking: Parking in the campground is the fastest way to the Main Area and most of Horse Flats, but you gotta pay. If you don't want to pay, park outside the campground gate (near the sign pictured below) and walk in. It's not far and in the Spring the road is lined with lupine. If you are going to the Top Rope Wall park at Rosenita Saddle. Remember to display Adventure Pass or "America the Beautiful" pass.

Horse Flats is the best and most popular place to boulder in the Angeles National Forest. It has the highest concentration of high quality problems anywhere in the San Gabes. The area test pieces are Blank Generation V9/10, Nothing but Sunshine V9, Sword of Damocles V8 R, All This Time I Thought I Was an Actor V7, and The Peanut V6/7. The hardest problems climb from a low start on The Fang Boulder and both are V11. There is also a new V10 called Knuckledragger recently put up by Kody Shutt. Other classic problems include Arbor Day V5, Falcon V5, Dragon Flake V5 R, Zach's Roof V5, High Chaparrel V5, Bow Sprits V2, and Barndoor Arete V2. The best easier problems are Thin Crack, Y-Crack, and the trailside crack under The Fang. In addition to bouldering there are some fun trad and top rope lines at Pie Slice, Scab Slab, Romeo Void and Top Rope Wall areas, including the classic route Ant Line 5.11b/c. Folks have probably been rock climbing at Horse Flats since the '50s. The newest big area is Native Lands. There is a tradition of unnamed boulders and unnamed problems at Horse Flats.

Directions

From the Shell gas station in La Cañada head north on the Angeles Crest Highway, aka The 2, for 28.4 miles. Turn left onto Forest Service Rd 3N17/Pacifico Mountain Rd/Santa Clara Divide Rd. "The gate" is 1.3 miles down the road. In the winter, this is as close as you are going to get because the gate is closed from around November to April, but it changes every year depending on the weather. From the gate to the Horse Flats campground loop is 1.08 miles so it's not that bad in the winter; it adds a couple miles. If the gate is open, congrats. Drive down the road for 1.0 mile to the entrance of the campground. If you don't want to pay for a site, park here. Unfortunately there is no day parking in the campground. Campsites are $20. The main area trail is 0.7 miles away from the Horse Flats campground entrance.

Lisa Rands, "The Hit List"

Damon Corso, Chris Leger, and Lance Carerra Video Playlist

Guide Book History

The first guide book to mention Horse Flats was Paul Hellweg and Nathan M. Warstler's 1988 Climber’s Guide to Southern California. It has beta for 7 routes on the Top Rope Wall and some dope pictures (Mike Ayon on Bat Flake Arete and Roger Whitehead climbing Thin Crack). They write that, "Horse Flats has yet to be heavily developed, and newcomers can still find and develop their own original routes." Craig Fry's Southern California Bouldering Guide came out in 1990 had maps for the Romeo Void, Main Area, Pie Slice, and Top Rope Wall. Teflon President area was added in the 1995 edition.

"Horse Flats was first explored as a climbing area in the early eighties," Fry writes, "Mike Paul, Mike Guardino, Matt Dancy and Mike Ayon were the first to develop the bouldering," -Craig Fry, 1995 guide page 77

In 1998 folks were teased with Wills Young's Climbing magazine article, "Escape from L.A." and in February 1999 Rock & Ice published James March's bouldering guide, which was undoubtably the framework for the Five Star and L.A. County guidebooks. Young writes, "Arriving early in the season, James and I get the best of the summer weather. As the evening air cools, soft clouds roll towards us. Plumes of white cloud ripple accross the sky, and the sun descends into a fiery horizon. Conditions are good for trying new projects."

After describing the first ascents of Sword of Damocles and Orange Flambé, Young describes Horse Flats "pioneer" Neal Kaptain, "Kaptain, a quiet spoken vegan, had moved west from Colorado to Beverly Hills. Like March, he was a Venice Beach habitué, and found that the acoustics in the local sewers made for great drumming parties. At Horse Flats, his favorite place to climb, Kaptain established the micro-edged Mr Skin (V7), one of the hardest problems of his era. Kaptain likely could have bouldered harder, but was satisfied to enjoy the solitude of evenings alone on the clean granite among the coulter pine and agaves. 'I just kept bouldering up there and never saw anybody,' he says. 'It was kind of a retreat for me.'"

Young finishes the Horse Flats section of the article, "Though the area boasts numerous gems from the 1980s like Bow Sprits (V3), The Great Curve (V5), and The B1 Traverse, it wasn't until James March showed up and laid siege to The Blank Generation that this destination began to realize its full potential. In one season, March single-handedly developed around 100 new problems, and hundreds more lie waiting. Ironically, while clamorous hordes attack the sport routes of Mount Williamson only 15 minutes away, the boulders of Horse flats have remained relatively quiet."

One year later (1999), James March released his Horse Flats guide "Seeking Refuge: Higher Ground Bouldering in Los Angeles County," via Rock & Ice issue 90. He recalls his first trip to the area in 1992, "With bottled water, some apples, trail mix and rock shoes, I drove the winding Angeles Crest Highway towards Chilao, eager to get on the boulders I'd heard so much about. When I got to Horse Flats and stepped from my car, I was immediately struck with the area's mystical ambiance. A hidden force (magic? spirits? God?) seemed to lurk above the Jeffrey pines that lined the trails and stretched towards the cloudless, azure sky. I spent a splendid day on superb rock, enlightened by my alpine surroundings and feeling especially ultra-light and fearless."

In 2005 Joan Bertini and Paisley Close published "5 Star Bouldering in Southern California." The most important contirbution to Horse Flats this book made was adding letter names to boulders. I have ultimately chosen to mostly ignore the letter names and chosen names based on their most popular problem, general location, or some other attribute/discriptor, or I have reverted to earlier names from the Craig Fry book. They may have listed Kody Shutt's 2024 V10 Knuckle Dragger as a V? project!

While the 2017 L.A. County book may have not documented any new problems for Horse Flats, it did bless the community with it's history: "The initial development at Horse Flats was by Keith Lehman and friends in the early 1970's. They mostly did roped climbs but also did some bouldering. In the 1980's Matt Dancy, Mike Ayon and Mike Guardino were the people who brought the area to the attention of the SoCal climbing community. The climbs up at the Toprope area were done by Tony Yaniro and Vaino Kodas but they concentrated on routes not bouldering. Classics like Yardarm, Bow Sprits, and Teflon President were done in this period. Erik Ericksson lived nearby at the time, and added some stout test pieces as well. A second wave of development by James March and Wills Young in the early 90's added many more problems and saw some truly heinous boulder problems get done." - Los Angeles County Bouldering, page 251

Non-Climbing History

Upon first glance the history of Horse Flats plays out like a movie: bandidos stealing horses from the government, running them up into the hills, rebranding them at their hideouts, and selling them elsewhere.

"The last three years of Vasquez operations were, with two notable exceptions, almost entirely in Southern California. In the Los Angeles area he had many places, strategically located, to which he could retire when hard pressed, among them Chilao and the great boulders of Mt. Hillyer; the gorge of Big Tujunga Canyon; the rough and wild area of Pico Canyon, west of Newhall; the famous Vasquez Rocks north of Soledad Canyon; and the rock-strewn mountainside north of Chatsworth, dominated by the famous Castle Rock.

East Chilao, now the site of Newcombs Ranch Inn, but then deep in the wilderness and little known, made an ideal hideout; the long, narrow valley of West Chilao and Horse Flat with its secret trail, both were excellent pasture for stolen horses, and the great rocks of Mt. Hillyer above Horse Flat furnished an impregnable fortress if hard pressed by the law. Vasquez made this his mountain headquarters for many years and through Chilao went a steady stream of horses, stolen in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, brands changed or blotted out at Chilao, and then on to Yuma and the mining areas to the east and north.

Members of his band frequently stole horses from the United States government at Yuma, re-branded them at Chilao and sold them in the San Fernando Valley. It is told that one of his men once stole a pair of enormous mules, so well known for their size and strength that they dared not offer them for sale. That, after keeping them in the mountains for a time, they were finally taken into a secluded canyon and shot. The best and fastest of these stolen horses were always kept for the use of the bandits themselves.

It was said that Jose Gonzales was guard for the camp and stock, living in a little log cabin near the present site of Newcombs Ranch Inn; that he battled with and killed a big bear when armed only with his knife, and this gained for him the nickname of "Chillio," or as we today would say it, "Hot Stuff." In those days the area was known by that name but down through the years the spelling has been changed, by those who did not know, to the Chilao of the present time." -Will H. Thrall "The Haunts and Hideouts of Tiburcio Vasquez," 1948

Sadly Thrall may not be a reliable source, as John Boessenecker explains, "An enthusiastic and oft-quoted writer about Tiburcio Vasquez was Will Thrall (1873—1963), a popular Los Angeles explorer, chronicler, historian, and protector of the San Gabriel Mountains. Unfortunately, some of the Vasquez "history" he compiled was patently false. Thrall, in an effort to demonstrate a strong Southland connection with the bandit leader, claimed, "The last three years ofVasquez operations were, with two notable exceptions, almost entirely in Southern California." That, of course, is wildly incorrect, as Tiburcio spent only a few months in 1873 and 1874 in Los Angeles County. Thrall created a busy life for Vasquez in the San Gabriels. He had him running a gold-mining operation in Big Tujunga Canyon and building an arrastra for crushing ore. He claimed that Vasquez hid out in Dunsmore Canyon in the San Gabriels and at an Indian village north of Castle Rock, near Chatsworth. He created an extensive horse-theft ring, in which Vasquez stole animals from the U.S. government at Yuma, Arizona, drove them to Chilao, in the San Gabriels, and sold them in the San Fernando Valley. Why the U.S. government would have herds of horses in Yuma he did not explain. Nor is there any contemporary evidence that Vasquez ever set foot in Chilao. What is known is that the only time he fled into the San Gabriels, following the Repetto robbery, he needed a guide to lead his band. When the guide failed to appear, Vasquez got thoroughly lost and was almost trapped. This is not indicative of a man who had spent years living in the San Gabriel Mountains. Oddly, Thrall does not even mention two Los Angeles County locations that Tiburcio actually visited — Vasquez Creek and Piedra Gorda, now known as Eagle Rock. He seems to have compiled folk tales and legends and failed to adequately consult contemporary published accounts, of which there are many. Thrall's fictions have been widely accepted, and tourists to this day visit Chilao to see Tiburcio's hideout." Boessenecker pg 370-371