Author: chris (Page 3 of 17)

Round yellow blooms
a million strong, brighten
the arid slopes and floor
of Pacoima canyon in late 
winter, they're named bush poppies
(which I didn't know)

The big storm is coming, five consecutive days of rain according to the iphone weather app, and it’s definitely much needed. I am already looking forward to walking in it, and especially after it, when the hills are bursting with scents, the ground is moist, skies dotted with trailing white clouds the sun plays hide and seek with, and the air cleansed. Until then, with dark clouds laden with moisture ready to pounce, a short ramble into Pacoima canyon was in perfect order. Seize the day. And what a day. There was a creek, pretty flowers, a little bit of climbing, total solace, no pesky mozzies, a constant cool breeze, and a great deal of bushwhacking along a largely abandoned trail. It’s number six in the 1999 edition of “Trails of the Angeles”, but I doubt it made the latest edition–note to self, check at the library or bookstore–because it is clearly unmaintained. If this were a guide, this is where I’d warn: map and compass, GPS, mandatory, involves route-finding, and wear long sleeves and pants. On that note, thank you to the considerate souls who erected cairns through the years, without those lovely rockpiles this walk would have been considerably harder. That said, even the cairns were often hidden by rampant vegetation, difficult to spot, and I’m sure I missed a few. However, the trail follows the floor of the canyon, so it’s hard to get lost or make a wrong turn, but it’s considerably easier to follow someone’s previous foray through the dense vegetation that lines the creek, especially in the narrower sections, than to have to carve your own. Whether one is more fun than the other is up for debate. At least, unlike in recent scrambling adventures, I had the presence of mind to capture some of the experience, and even found time to admire the millions of yellow flowers that blanketed the canyon slopes. I learned later they’re called bush poppies or Dendromecon rigida, to be scientific.

The new track of this section of the Pacific Crest Trail is a gently graded, wide cut through the manzanita and chamise fields blanketing the northern slopes of Sierra Pelona, that eventually plunges in and out of an oak grove, before landing on the barren ridge. It’s as good as a trail gets, and very different from some of the bushwhacking I’ve been involved in lately, not necessarily better though, but definitely very pleasant.

A manzanita crown
floats over a chamise sea
red bark, green leaves
silvery in morning sun
bright yellow at magic hour 

The walk along the broad rounded ridge to McDill follows a dirt service road, I’m told often blasted by strong winds from the seemingly endless desert to the north. On this sunny winter day, the persistent breeze was cool and refreshing, though it did blow my hat off a few times.

Wind battered live oaks
line the shaded slope of the
Sierra Pelona
young and ancient survivors
whispering words of wisdom
 

I lunched under the canopy of a big old oak, whose original trunk was hollowed out by fire, giving room for younger limbs to grow around it, and whose leaves danced to the soothing melody of the softening breeze. Under my feet, a carpet of fallen leaves and acorns covered the soil and grass that will soon turn brown. Exposed roots dug into the dirt like the fingers of an ageless hand, anchoring the tree to the mountain floor and giving it structure and stability at the same time.

On a mission to explore new terrain and faced with the daunting multitude of paths on the Alltrails app, my navigational tool of choice, I resorted to John Robinson’s classic “Trails of the Angeles, 100 hikes in the San Gabriels”, for this outing to the northwest corner of the range. As of its 1999 edition, you could drive all the way past Templin Highway, to Cienaga campground, and hike deep into the canyon, as described in Robinson’s hike #3. That is no longer true. The road through the lower reaches of Fish Canyon is eroded, washed out, or covered with large boulders, and you have to walk it. Not a problem. We like walking.

It’s actually comforting to witness nature reclaiming territory over human asphalt ribbons, and other abandoned concrete structures that lace and dot even our reserved wilderness landscapes–the Mueller tunnel, the bridge to nowhere, several ski lifts, the Echo ‘White City’ resort. To read the dusk of the anthropocene into these ruins would be tempting but pessimistic. I’d rather imagine that, whatever lies next in the history of the planet, may not include that much concrete or asphalt or glass or metal or even humans, since we are so hellbent on self-destruction, but Life will march on.

In the canyon, alive, well and merry swarms of mosquitos partied and drank around my warm-blooded ankles, knees and wrists. To escape them, I took an overgrown, largely abandoned trail leading up a slope thickly covered with chaparral. Again, not a problem; a little dose of bushwhacking adds a dose of excitement to any ramble in the woods. It also serves as a reminder that this habitat is not friendly to lonesome, untooled bipeds in shorts, t-shirts and trail runners.

The untrimmed yuccas
rhyme with prickly motherfuckas
spill blood on the trail
which rhymes with breathe climb exhale
beats the mozzie armies below

The northerly was blowing strong again this morning, climbing out of the Deukmejian Wilderness on the trail to Mt Lukens.

A two inch cricket
basking in the winter sun
chirps just once before
hopping away out of sight
due to unsafe conditions

The roar of a child
carried by a winter breeze
floats to the ocean
people smile as it passes
let the inner demons out

By the time I reached the summit it had calmed considerably though it still made a door slam repeatedly on one of the relay tower bases, while another tower whined incessantly. And then the breeze stopped. And I ventured onto a trail that was faint at first, then severely overgrown, and finally disappeared, just late enough in the game that I was committed to not turning back though I probably should have. The next mile or so was a sever bushwhack through some of the densest chaparral I have ever crossed. The effort of finding an acceptable path, without loosing footing, and scraping, pushing, crawling at times, shoving, tripping, through an endless field of branches, thorns, rocks bent on NOT letting me pass, prevented me from recording any of it–so much for my multi-tasking skills.

Lesson: when the Alltrails app fails to guide you to a passable trail, turn around, retrace your steps, or start filming and go ahead, bleed for your fun.

Observations in tanka form from a walk that started in famed Placerita Canyon, traveled through a recently burned landscape in full natural recovery, and ended at the “Oak of the Golden Dream”, where in 1842, Francisco Lopez dreamed of, and then found gold, six years before John Sutter in Northern California (the full story).

(I owe the discovery of the Japanese poetical format to Harryette Mullen’s “Urban Tumbleweed, Notes from a Tanka Diary” ).

Kept moving through
cold, sun, wind on winter day
across a charred landscape
old growth oaks black like charcoal
sycamores stripped white, naked

Historical trail
they found gold near the oak tree
by the creek, blind, fooled
by the winter sun glistening 
on the water like a dream

Historical trail
creekside, by the old oak tree
they planted cross, flag 
and deed to claim land 
they then ravaged with fool's greed