Potato Chip Rock

April 13, 2018 tarannosaurus

Epic Travel → North America → The West Coast → Southern California → San Diego Area → North County → Potato Chip Rock

Location: Poway area, northeast of San Diego

Time Required: 1.5 – 4 hours, depending on route (and wait time at Potato Chip)

Distance: 7 miles round-trip (via the Mt. Woodson Trail from Lake Poway), 4 miles round-trip (via the fire road starting at the Hwy 67 Fire Station, also known as the “Backside Trail”), 7 miles round-trip (via the Fry-Koegel Trail)

Elevation Gain/Loss: 2100 feet (from Lake Poway), 1300 feet (from the fire station), 1600 feet (via Fry-Koegel Trail)

Red Tape/Notes: Open year round, 24 hours a day. Parking at Lake Poway is $10 on weekends, parking during the week and at other trailheads is free. Modern Hiker provides great information on the trail from Lake Poway and Sun Kissed Hiker has good detail on the route from Hwy 67. We prefer the Fry-Koegel Trail.

What’s Nearby?: Lake Poway, Fry-Koegel Trail, Blue Sky Ecological Reserve, Poway Crags, Daley Ranch, Dixon Lake

This is probably the best-known hike in the San Diego area, and it seems to have become a right of passage to take your picture on the rock. There are two popular ways to get here, and the fire road from hwy 67 is the busiest, being the shortest route and paved. On weekends, it resembles a thoroughfare, and is really rather boring, despite some reasonable views. Still, you’re walking on a paved road with loads of other people. You’ll pass the summit of Mt. Woodson on the way to the Potato Chip, but it’s pretty uninspiring, being covered in satellite antennas and the like, and you’ll know you’ve reached the chip when you run smack into a crowd of people. From the other side, you can hike up from Lake Poway (via an extension of the Lake Poway loop hike covered here). This way is more scenic, but is significantly longer, and still sees pretty heavy usage (though not nearly as much as the fire road). From this direction, you see the chip before you hit the crowd of people. Those people are, of course, queued up to take their picture on the rock. It’s a rather depressing “behind the scenes” reality if you’ve only seen the cool pictures of people posing on the chip. Queue up and take your picture if you feel you must; it’s definitely a cool feature and the pictures will look cool to your kids someday. The good news is that it took us under 45 minutes to get to the rock via the fire road, so you can knock it out in a couple of hours and move on with your day if you just want to get the pictures and get it over with. If you’re looking for something more enjoyable, allow us to recommend taking the lesser-known, much less frequented Fry-Koegel Trail, which passes by a pretty cool alternative to the chip.