I had hard-to-beat views all day on this ramble through the Hacienda Heights/Puente Hills. Panoramic views of the San Gabriels to the north, San Gorgonio and San Jacinto peaks to the east, on the trek uphill, then of downtown LA to the west from the ridge, with a large buddhist temple in the foreground, and later the silhouettes of ships and cranes in the LA harbor to the south, as I descended into Turnbull canyon. The well-trodden trail cut a wide, packed-dirt swath in the hill that was easy to follow, and still soft and moist, especially in the shaded sections. A pack of crows circled overhead for a while, until distracted by a lone hawk they promptly chased away. Sumac and Toyon berries saturated the trailside with raucous red patches in an otherwise grey-green-brown palette. In short, I had little reason to look down, like I would on a Paris sidewalk, to skip around dog doodoo. My eyes, however, could not avoid the bright orange turd that lay in the middle of the path, less than a mile from the trailhead. Now, you see plenty of fecal matter on most trails in any kind of wilderness, it’s the wilderness. There are coyotes, bobcats, deer, squirrels, even the occasional bear or puma who may not follow the same trail etiquette as your average hiker who scoops before they poop, to bury the deed, usually a few yards off the trail. Depending on the offender’s diet, these piles of shit come in a variety of brownish hues, but orange, bright california poppy orange is not one of them. Red, sometimes, filled with hardly digested berries, or green, even white, when it’s been sun baked long enough. Was this the product of a giant rat feeding on nuclear waste? After all, the area was formally the site of a landfill. Might a dog have discovered and devoured their owner’s stash of turmeric root, only to reject it during their morning constitutional? Or a possum followed and ingested, obsessively, every scrap of orange and tangerine peel that inevitably litter heavily-used trails? I certainly don’t mean to make a meal out of this encounter, and will gladly return to admiring the views, if you don’t mind.