Mountain High, California?

I haven’t been to Southern California since the 1980s so I had to look up Mountain High, which is a ski resort in the San Gabriel Mountains about 80 miles from Los Angeles. This probably means a Mount Baldy ascent for the 2014 Amgen Tour of California, which announced host cities for their 9th edition of the professional road stage race.

Amgen Tour of California 2014 host city map

The race begins May 11, 2014 at the California state Capital Building in Sacramento. Here are the start and finish host cities for the Tour of California.

  • Stage 1: Sacramento – Sacramento.
  • Stage 2: Folsom (individual time trial)
  • Stage 3: San Jose – Mount Diablo
  • Stage 4: Monterey – Cambria
  • Stage 5: Pismo Beach – Santa Barbara
  • Stage 6: Santa Clarita – Mountain High
  • Stage 7: Santa Clarita – Pasadena
  • Stage 8: Thousand Oaks – Thousand Oaks

For some of these pairs, potential routes aren’t too hard to figure out. Routes will be announced after the new year.

3 Comments

  1. Unfortunately, you’re clueless. Mt. Baldy is on the western side of the San Gabriel Mountains and Mt. Baldy Road (where the TOC has twice finished) is a dead end at the sky lifts. The 2014 version of the TOC is going to finish at the Mountain High Resort, which is 7,000 vertical on the EASTERN slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains and dozens of miles by road from the Mt. Baldy’s route. Totally new finish area.

  2. Stage 6 will ascend Angeles Crest HIghway, which has recently been freshly chipsealed. The road conditions really suck. The peloton will hate it. That said, it is (or used to be) one of the best climbing routes in Southern California. Blue Ridge Summit is particularly scenic. Here’a link to a State Route 2 (Angeles Crest Hwy) Guide:

    http://tchester.org/sgm/places/sr2_log.html

  3. Incidentally, your humble Streetsblog SF editor grew up in Thousand Oaks, home of Amgen, the tour’s “overall finish” point. Plus, I went to Mountain High to snowboard a few times growing up. Weird for me to see these place names show up on Cyclelicious…

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