Newport Beach man fulfills goal of riding Santiago Peak, ropes friends into ‘worst skiing of my entire life’
Spencer Buchanan had been dragging his friends Julian Doyle and Charlie Beek up the Santa Ana mountains for the past five winters, through rain and bitter cold, in pursuit of an unlikely achievement: a ride through fresh powder down Santiago Peak.
His friends think he’s an idiot for it. But their patience and his perseverance paid off after a storm left just enough snow to dip their skis into last week.
“It felt like making a little boy’s dream come true,” Doyle, 26, said of 27-year-old Buchanan during an interview Thursday.
They and 26-year-old Beek have been skiing their entire lives, even though they live in Newport Beach, which is about 60 miles away from Mt. Baldy and about 100 miles from Big Bear. The three of them often travel to Colorado and the Midwest in the winter, or drive into the San Bernardino Mountains to find snow.
“I’ve just never heard of anyone skiing Saddleback before,” Buchanan said. “All our friends go out to Aspen and Switzerland and stuff, but nobody does it in their backyard. It’s just [for] bragging rights.”
Darryl Lombardi owns OC Snowsports in Costa Mesa, has been selling winter gear since the ’70s, and said he’s never had a customer walk in with plans to go to Saddleback Mountain.
“Maybe in the ’80s?” one of his employees was heard replying in the background of a phone call Wednesday when asked if anyone else had heard of skiers headed to Santiago Peak.
It’s not uncommon for the Santa Ana Mountains to receive a dusting of snow, and a few inches may accumulate on its slopes for brief periods of time, National Weather Service meteorologist James Brotherton said. But they rise to just under 5,700 feet at their tallest elevation, which typically isn’t high enough to form piles of fresh powder. And the range often receives warm winds coming from the south, unlike the San Bernardino Mountains, which soar to 11,500 feet and are frequently buffeted by cold gusts from the north.
Santiago Peak received about 5 inches of snowfall on Monday, Dec. 12, the day Buchanan, Doyle and Beek trekked to its summit, Brotherton said. The last time it got that much was in February 2019.
The three Orange County skiers camped Sunday at a cabin in the foothills that belonged to a friend who, for obvious reasons, did not join them.
“When we left the night before, all of our dads were like ‘Yeah, you could do that, but why?’” Buchanan said.
Rain and cold temperatures persisted through the night. They only managed to get about an hour of sleep before beginning their expedition at about 6 a.m. Monday.
Low clouds and fog blanketed the mountainside. It was impossible for them to see if there was any snow at the peak from where they began their hike.
“We were just hoping when we set off first thing in the morning,” Buchanan said. “And me being the one who dragged everyone into it, I was like, ‘Oh no. We’re already up here, we’re just gonna go hiking in the rain for hours and nobody is ever going to hang out with me again.’ I just kept saying, ‘Let’s go check around this corner,’ for about five hours.’”
Despite his outward show of optimism, Doyle said he and Beek weren’t expecting to find much on their trip. But they wanted to see their friend happy and had gone too far to turn back if they wanted to. Anyway, this wasn’t the first time they’d gone into the Santa Ana mountains to entertain Buchanan’s quirky aspiration.
“We’ve been hiking up in the rain in the middle of the night,” Buchanan said. “And we’re hoping that it’s going to start snowing, and it doesn’t, just keeps raining on us all night. We’ve been sitting there at 5 a.m. like, ‘Ummm, this is the worst thing we could possibly imagine.”
But this time, after slogging miles uphill on muddy paths, they reached the top of Santiago Peak and found the mountainside covered with fresh powder. They managed to ski cross-country style for about a mile, occasionally hopping over streams of quickly melting snow and often dragging their equipment on gravel as they went over thinner patches of white. Their skis were ruined afterward.
“It sucked,” Buchanan said. “ I can’t imagine anyone would have fun doing this at all. It was horrible. It was like the worst skiing of my entire life. It was really stupid, but we did it. We did it!”
Lombardi noted that the three of them likely weren’t the first to ever ski up there.
“I don’t know why we didn’t just go to Big Bear,” Doyle said.
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