ROCK PAPER SCISSOR

Rock: Overlooking Chilao, Bandido and Horse Flats in the San Gabriels is a field of boulders, an ideal lookout for horse thieves and bandidos camping in the forest below. Before them, bands of Tongva indians would come here in the summer to forage for food and materials to sustain them during the cooler months, when they moved to lower elevations. Some of their staples were acorns, pine nuts and manzanita berries which they ground into a meal or juice. This left hollow, spherical bowls on the surfaces of the rocks they used as mortars, still visible today.

ROCK PAPER SCISSOR

Paper: Pine, cedar, fir grow in abundance on the flats, but also amidst the boulders, sometimes so close together they couple. The tree appears to support the giant mass while it thrives on the moisture collected under it. The rock, gentle companion, remains still as a picture, as if aware that any sudden movement would crush the tree into a pulp. The tree must grow, and grow, and grow, until its root structure spreads out widely enough to hold the soil together, prevents erosion, holds the mountain in place. Still, dramas unfold, more often than not unseen, but real. Old  growth trunks that hold up the sky are struck by lightning, burned to their core, or toppled by high winds; boulders the size of trucks split from ice expansion, or slowly but surely erode in the wind and rain.

ROCK PAPER SCISSOR

Scissor: If you’ve ever lost the trail, and scrambled through a chaparral covered hillside you’ll know what I’m talking about. The bright red bark of manzanita bushes doesn’t yield to lost hikers, it shreds their skin and clothes. The same can be said about chamise, sagebrush and especially prickly yuccas. This stuff loves sun-drenched slopes, and blossoms wildly after a wildfires–watch out for poodle dog bush, that one will burn you–smothering charred tree carcasses, climbing all over and around naked boulders, but rarely high enough to provide human shade.

Still, bandits, indians, sheriffs, miners, loggers, surveyors, astrologists, hermits and hikers have perused these parts for centuries, cutting paths through the merciless chaparral, feeding on the nuts and berries, building cabins with the trees they felled, bridges and dams with the cement they extracted from the rock, even dreams on the lure of gold they coveted in the creek beds and mines they dug, sometimes dreams of a better life, but mostly just hopes of surviving the one you got with dignity. It’s like a game of chance; no one likes to lose, but winning too often is weird, like you stacked the deck or something.