Every walk tells a story
Bad planning, road closures and curiosity landed me at the Forsee trailhead, late but just in time to set off for John’s meadow to the sound of nearby gunfire, followed by the roar of children from the summer camp just north of the trail. After that, along the way, I found nothing but peace, beauty, a polite pack of campers and quiet, untarnished summer mountain splendor.
Summer meadow blooms
red, yellow, white, blue
windswept voices, children, guns
Fleeing the oppressive temperatures of a typical southland summer day, the hiker trudged through an old growth alpine forest dense with large white firs and jeffrey pines. A slim drizzle, released by dark clouds looming over the San Emigdio mountains, barely filtered through the canopy. With a little luck, he thought, they’ll burst and I’ll get a good soaking. For now, he could count the droplets hitting his cap visor at irregular intervals, and evaporating within minutes.
A mile in, he came across a man sporting a bright orange, long sleeve shirt like the ones road cleaning crews wear, a sun-bleached baseball cap and underneath the cap, a blue bandana that neatly kept his shoulder-length gray hair behind his ears. His stride was agile, he didn’t kick up dirt like most hikers, even though he was pulled vigorously by a leashed, slate gray medium-sized part pit bull, part boxer, part urban survivalist mutt. Another dog trotted freely at his side.
“Hey. How are you doing?” The man said with a smile, and an expression that demanded a reply, not the robotic, meaningless but customary greeting. Then he added, before the hiker could reply, “Have you seen a bear?”
“Good morn..? Hum…No. No I haven’t.”
“Ah. Good. I heard they spotted one earlier, at the campground”, the man pointed in the direction the hiker was heading.
“Really?” the hiker said, “a big one?”
“About your size.” The man grinned. “I was told. I didn’t see it.” The hiker smiled in return but asked no more about the bear sighting, not wanting to appear nervous. “I ask because I gotta be on my toes with these guys. Especially him, he’ll dart at the whiff of a fart in Gorman.”
On cue, the beast’s body tightened and leaped towards a clump of bushes. “Ho. Ho. Here he goes!” With both hands on the leash, and digging his heals into the dirt, the man fought to keep his balance. The dog let the resistance lift his torso and front legs in the air while maintaining his own equilibrium on his hind legs. “There’s so many smells out here.” The man exclaimed over his shoulder as he shortened the leash. “Stay!” He commanded. The dog responded, reluctantly, letting his tensed body rest on all fours, keeping his gaze fixed on the bushes. Meanwhile, the other dog had quietly laid down next to the hiker’s feet.
“You think he smelled that bear you were talking about?” the hiker asked.
“Nah! He would’ve barked. She’s the one tells me when there’s a real threat. He’s just a nervous pup.” The man went on to tell the tale of how he’d rescued the nervous pup from the forest where he’d been abandoned by an abusive owner, not far from where they were standing. It was a good story that included encounters with a hummingbird, second amendment people and a visit to the center of the world, but by the time he was done telling it the pup was pulling on the leash again like a child who’s got far better things to do than wait patiently for adults to finish a boring conversation. They parted ways and the hiker too was glad to be moving again.
The trail flattened as it emerged from the alpine forest onto a meadow that climbed gently to Mount Pinos, first destination of the day. Dark, moisture-laden clouds lingered high above softening the light over the landscape but not the visibility. From the summit, the trail guide said, you get three-hundred-sixty degree views of the Los Padres National Forest and beyond, including the Chumash wilderness to the West, where the hiker was ultimately headed. Shortly before reaching the peak, he noticed a hat on the ground, a few feet off the trail, under the shade of an ageless limber pine with a trunk it would take two or three humans to hug, and limbs like tentacles that reached out and threatened to coil themselves around you to feed you into the jagged mouth of a sea monster, the kind you only find in the perpetually dark depths of the deepest ocean. A brightly multicolored hummingbird was embroidered on the rim of the hat, which was clean, as if it had been dropped just moments ago. The hiker thought about picking it up at the same time as he tried to remember what part a hummingbird had played in the dog rescue story he’d just heard.
“I’ve been looking for four days already”, the old man’s recounted, “getting frustrated, and a little sad, because I couldn’t imagine how this young city pup could’ve survived out here. Plus, it’s getting cold, you know, it’s mid March, four thirty in the afternoon, and there’s still snow on the ground. When all of a sudden, I get knocked on the side of the head. I was so surprised I nearly fell over. Then I look up and right in front of my eyes, looking as stunned as me, is this silver blue hummingbird, the size of a tiny pine cone, hovering and staring back at me. It was like a slow motion movie, although for real it probably only lasted a second or so. Then it shook its little head and zipped away.” The man swiftly looked away, he was a lively storyteller, punctuating every action with gestures that recreated the scene. “And what do you know, as I follow the flight of the bird, I spot this fool.” He leans over the gray dog and pets him. The dog shakes his head and lets out a snort. “He’s hiding in the bushes, checking me out.”
After having not picked up the hat but simply nudged it closer to the trail so it would be visible to anyone passing by, the hiker forged on. He’d gone less than a hundred steps when he came across another dog walker.
“Have you seen a hat by any chance?” She shouted, still a fair distance away. She carried a fancy retractable hiking pole in one hand, holding the leash with the other. At the end of the leash, swerving back and forth, snout to the ground, was neon orange harness strapped to a fine and slim dog of a breed the hiker couldn’t identify.
“As a matter of fact I have.” The hiker replied.
“Ha. Great!” The woman smiled. She was middle-aged, short dark hair with a gray streak that was a bit too bright to be natural, and wore quality hiker gear from top to bottom. “Hate to lose a good hat.” She slowed down but didn’t stop. The hiker noted the bear spray canister holstered on the side of her backpack. “I figured I lost it around here. When she took off after a squirrel or something…” Or a bear, the hiker thought. “I had to run after her. Not like her at all. Normally, she’s too scared.”
“Did you see what it was?” The hiker asked. She hadn’t, she said as she passed by. “Your hat is over there, under that big pine tree. You can’t miss it.”
“I see it. Thanks!” She yelled back.
(To be continued)
When you’re paying visit to a fifteen hundred year old pine tree, it’s polite, inevitable even, to greet its many relatives and friends along the way.
The lord of the underworld, lucifer, the prince of darkness, shaitan, the devil himself may or may not have parked his posterior on the large mass of white rock that dominates the southern edge of the geological formation known as the Devil’s Punchbowl. In fact, that fiery pesky horned mythological figure must have been extremely active in these parts, judging by the number of valleys, backbones, rims, chairs named after it. And if I were to rate those devil-named attractions in sheer spectaculareness, this narrow bright white rocky promontory that juts out of the north slopes of the San Gabriels, with sheer cliffs dropping hundreds of feet on three sides would take the cake. Thus, I braved the heat, and embraced the solitude–the only humans I encountered were two campers packing out at the trailhead–to claim the spot for a quiet sit-down lunch with stellar panoramic views of the Antelope Valley. You can’t beat that. I even got in a short nap, thanks to a constant breeze that made the unavoidable sun exposure tolerable. It was a profound, dreamless, restful sleep leaning against a fence that kept me from sliding to a certain death. Rejuvenated, I made my way back, occasionally glancing at the site, thinking my imagination wasn’t vivid enough to picture the devil sitting up there. Instead my mind flashed back to the bighorn sheep I’d encountered near Bighorn peak, a couple of weeks ago. It had laid down on a smaller, less spectacular, but similar rock formation–with sheer cliffs on all but one side–and remained cool as a jazz drummer when I appeared. We exchanged a look and it returned to its meditation. I want that life, I thought, and moved on.
Eventually, I ducked into the east-facing slopes of South Fork, losing sight of the “chair”. The breeze couldn’t reach me, the afternoon heat reflected off of a scrubby landscape that offered little shade. It wasn’t quite ‘hotter than the devil’s ass’, but getting there–felt like. But then all signs of having been anywhere near purgatory dissolved rapidly into the very cold and abundant snow melt that still feeds the South Fork, where I may or may not have skinny dipped, parking my own ass on the sandy bottom until it stung from the cold.
I stop for folded metamorphic rock, faces and limbs of beasts encrusted in tree trunks, butterflies, black lizzards amused at selfie-posing hikers, a cup of icy spring water from Columbine, often to catch my breath, occasionally to sketch an alpine landscape or a gnarly limber pine, for flowers I don’t know the names of and for those I do, for moments of silence and solace to not think about anything, and for a staring contest with bighorn sheep near Bighorn peak.
I was thinking about Leonard Cohen sipping expensive scotch with Roshi at the Mount Baldy Zen Center, writing:
After listening to Mozart
(which I often did)
I would always
Carry a piano
Up and down
Mt Baldy
And I don't mean
A keyboard
I mean a full-sized
Grand piano
Made of cement
...
from "His Master's Voice"
And imagined that that was why I had trouble breathing, why my thighs and calves were screaming, why my hat was soaked with salty perspiration, why another thought crept into my strained consciousness: why am I doing this exactly? Why does it feel like I am lugging a grand piano up Register Ridge, the steepest trail to the summit of Mount Baldy? Like the sage in the poem, I don’t regret a single step, but I did feel every stride.
I was paying the price for the naive excitement with which I’d pushed all four cylinders of the Prius up the windy road to Manker Flats, feeling welcomed by row after row of Spanish broom lining the roadside, like cycling fans at the Tour de France all dressed in yellow; and the eagerness with which I’d opted out of the steep-but-not-as-steep ski hut trail. It was my first visit of the year to heights above six thousand feet and I couldn’t wait to dive in the deep end.
And then, after an hour of relentless climbing, dogs barked above me. Yes, dogs; two, maybe three of them further up the trail, from the sound of it. Dogs are not uncommon on backcountry mountain trails, but they are typically of the chill, well trained kind, and not barking, territorially at approaching hikers, and they are usually accompanied by humans. Not these guys. There was no one in sight, or within earshot. The barking eventually stopped; at the speed I was going, and from their vantage point, I couldn’t possibly present a threat. I spotted them, or at least two of them and a furry four-legged shape scurrying uphill as I approached. The two were posted under the shade of a solid jeffrey pine, one seated, the other on his belly, occupying a flat area blanketed with pine needles, just wide enough for them, right on the edge of a five hundred foot drop. Had they decided, or been ordered to, prevent my passage they couldn’t have picked a better spot. I got close enough to take note of their collars, which reassured me but also reinforced a daunting thought. What if the owner had slipped down that cliff they were perched on and was laying in the canyon floor below, injured, immobilized and unconscious? I’ve heard too many stories from rangers and search and rescue volunteers about hikers who get hurt or lost, generally because they do something stupid, to dismiss the possibility. Yet, I observed my canine ridge buddies and found them far too relaxed and weary of my presence to substantiate the accident theory. I now had a good look at them. They were of similar, average size, and similar features, they could have been brothers, but one was gray with wolf-like steel-blue eyes and the other a more generic sand color. Gray, or White Fang, got up and trotted down the ridge, between the trail, where I stood, and the precipice. He passed me as if I wasn’t there and parked himself some thirty feet below, on a rock, to gaze at, not me, but the stunning views of Baldy Notch, the three T’s and Ontario peak.
I wasn’t going to disturb such a zen moment so I put my hand out and took a couple of steps towards Sandy. That drew a growl and a warning show of teeth. I got the message: keep your distance. You stink. Or, I don’t know you, and how dare you disrupt our peaceful morning sortie? Go away! Fine. Be that way, I thought. See if I care, and I sidestepped up the trail keeping my eyes fully focused on Sandy’s stance. Not aggressive, but alert, like me just way quicker and with a more menacing jaw. And so we agreed to not become buddies after all. I trudged on and Sandy lazily joined White Fang in a quiet tableau of alpine harmony.
The plan was simple, straightforward. Up Tanoble to link up with the Altadena Crest Trail (ACT), go east then ascend the ridge, the one that looks like it might connect with the abandoned Gooseberry Motorway–a dirt road carved into the mountain when the power lines were installed but abandoned since, leaving barely a walkable trail that dead ends above Eaton canyon and that you “enter at your own risk of serious injury or death”. I’d cased the area from above a couple of years ago, and while I wasn’t then able to trace a continuous visible path, no section of the ridge appeared impassable and I promised myself that I would one day attempt to pass it. Many of the outings documented in this blog are first inspired by a similar desire to find new paths, trails I haven’t treaded, and then fueled by the discoveries, large and small, made along the way. Put another way: I am curious, to the point of being stubborn, and walking enhances that particular character trait. Why hike ‘out and back’ if you can loop it? Seeing more is living more, right?
The black dotted track on the Alltrails app confirmed what I suspected; the ridge was passable. More accurately, it had been walked by somebody at some point in time. A bit of bushwhacking is a plus on any hike, a minor adrenaline rush, but I tend to follow existing trails. I’m no kamikaze; in the face of granite cliffs, snow storms, exhaustion, I’m quite happy to turn around, accept defeat and return home for a warm shower and a beer. As I veered north from the ACT onto the steep firebreak it was instantly clear that I would have to earn the shower and beer with at least a fair dose of sweat. The mid-afternoon sun was baking the hillside, with little to no sign of a breeze for relief, and for shade, nothing. Until, about three quarters of the way up the first incline, I found an improvised awning. Someone–the Alltrails tracker?–had tied an elephant-themed blanket–a republican?–to a laurel bush overhanging the trail, leaving just enough room for a weary, sun-struck passer-by to hide under. Things were looking good, even though the views of the sprawling San Gabriel Valley below were hazy and uninteresting. I caught my breath and trudged on.
Shortly thereafter, I reached the first plateau, approximately the halfway mark, and, to my surprise, the first of many dead ends; a wall of thick chaparral covered the backside of the promontory and the small saddle connecting it to the continuation of the ridge. For the next fifteen minutes, I followed every possible insinuation of a previous track to no avail. Do not underestimate the ability of thorny, rugged, Yucca infested brushes to deter human passage. A machete would have made the task easy, but I typically don’t carry one, and besides, I wasn’t looking to blaze a trail, finding one would be more than fun enough. Go back? It seemed inevitable. What a shame though. The saddle was a mere fifty meters long, if that. After that the ridge climbed steeply towards the electrical towers, and the vegetation thinned; from there there had to be a way to reach the ‘Motorway’. What if I advance thirty, forty meters and can’t go any further, or worse, disrupt a cougar or a bear during a midday nap, step on a rattler, slice a wrist on a manzanita branch? I chased these pleasant thoughts away with a smile and dove into the least obstructed opening I could find.
It was slow going, and scratchy, and precarious, and fun, I’ll admit. I pushed, dug, crawled, doggedly scrambled my way through the next fifty meters, trying to guess where a trail should be, if it ever existed. I came across a yellow tee shirt, half buried under fallen leaves and dead branches, which helped me feel less alone; it was physical proof that someone had done this before, in the past five years. When I reached the end of the saddle, things got easier, and quite a lot steeper. Carving my own switchbacks in the sandy soil, using abundant sagebrush as a rope to pull myself up the hill, checking my foothold at every step, I eventually reached the electrical towers, and then easily enough the coveted Motorway. I looked down, through a grid of metal power towers at the road I’d traveled and felt like I often felt as a kid after getting away with some forbidden deed, like a million francs. I smiled and carried on.
The great oak tree that reigned over a not insignificant portion of the mouth of Rubio Canyon, on the slopes of the reservoir, has lived there far longer than I’ve known it. It stood tall and wide last time I ambled up the trail that passes under its broad forest green canopy, a month ago, almost to the day. Since then, sadly, it has perished, from the weight of years, illness, struck by lightning, natural causes at any rate, I’ll never know. I do know however that the the sound this stately gnarled trunk emitted, for an instant, up and down the canyon, when it split, was louder than the peacock flock on Maiden Lane, louder than the cock(s) of camp Huntington, and the omnipresent crows, louder too than the saws and shredders that will be dispatched to clear its carcass. That much life cannot does not exhale in silence. A tree falls and the whole world reverberates. It wants us to know, the tree, now is my time to wither, to feed the soil so it does not forget, this is a land where my acorns are currency because these damn gray squirrels spread them all over the hillside, digging holes to bury them and then forget, they’re spreading my seed, which will one day, in the right circumstances, grow into a majestic survivor like me.
It’s an arduous climb from the foothills of La Cañada to Bee Flat. The views from the Teepee overlooking a misty Southland, and the company of a gazillion bees visiting my shaded resting spot made it worth every drop of sweat. The fire road ramble to Mt Lukens is gentler, gradewise, but looong, and exposed pretty much the whole way, which is perfect, and even more so thanks to the abundance of spanish broom perfuming fun, giddy stretches of what could have been a boring walk.
Descending into Haines canyon, via the blue bug I’m happy to note someone has freshly painted, was a welcome breezy, green stroll through a lush canyon that buzzed like a giant beehive, home to at least one rattler who rattled so late and sheepishly I almost stepped on it.
Another great day walking along the northeast edges of Tovaangar, the world originally inhabited by the Tongva we broadly call the LA basin.
“Aweeshkore xaa.” (We are happy, in Tongva, according to an LA Times article).
This was a nostalgic saunter along the Verdugo ridge, poking in and out of a perfectly moody foggy day. Then, just as patches of blue sky appeared in mid afternoon, I was approached, with ‘many a flirt and flutter’, by a raven couple. They circled above and around me on the trail to the fenced-off government compound on Mt Thorn, my last peak for the day, croaking loudly to one another, soaring and plunging to rest briefly on a wooden electric pole and ultimately finishing their dance on a communication tower. Things got quiet. The refrain of a song drifted into my mind as I watched the two dark perched birds slowly narrow the gap between them, “les amoureux qui se bécottent sur les bancs publics, bancs publics…” (lovers who cuddle on public benches, George Brassens). The slightly smaller of the two leaned its head to peck the other on the neck. It emitted a soft appreciative “I like that”, in raven speak of course, and shook from beak to claw from pleasure. I’m no ornithologist but I’ll be damned if this wasn’t exactly what Brassens had in mind, two lovers cuddling on a public antenna, looking cuter than ebony buttons. I walked away quietly, smiled broadly, and finished the refrain in my head,
"les amoureux qui s'bécottent sur les bancs publics
bancs publics
en s'foutant pas mal du r'gard oblique
des passants honnêtes.
Les amoureux qui s'bécottent sur les bancs publics
bancs publics, bancs publics
en s'disant des je t'aime pathétiques
ont des petites gueules bien sympathiques."
lovers who smooch on public benches, public benches, public benches, without a care for the dirty looks of proper passers-by. lovers who smooch on public benches, public benches, public benches, whispering pathetic 'I-love-u's', look so friendly and nice (great example of "lost in translation").
"Les Amoureux des Bancs Publics", George Brassens.
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