chris' walking project

Every walk tells a story

Page 3 of 17

before the rain – dagger flats, Pacoima canyon

March 9, 2020 / / 0 Comments 
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.

blowin’ in the wind III – Bouquet canyon to McDill mountain

February 27, 2020 / / 0 Comments

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.

beached whale – fish canyon narrows

February 21, 2020 / / 0 Comments

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

blowin in the wind II – mt lukens

February 12, 2020 / / 0 Comments

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.

pipes of rubio – rubio canyon

February 8, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Like many of the canyons on the front range of the San Gabriels, Rubio harbors vestiges of past human activity: at the turn of the twentieth century, a train brought travelers from downtown LA into the canyon where they boarded a funicular that climbed the incline to “The White City” resort on Echo Mountain, there was mining too, before that. Abandoned to the inclement elements of this rugged eco-system, human endeavors have not fared well; thankfully, little remains, just enough concrete, wood and metal to remind visitors that while their ancestors may have been crazy, and ingenious enough to build a funicular on this steep, forbidding ridge, their efforts were ultimately futile.

If you follow the creek beyond the site of the funicular base, you’ll notice, clinging to the sidewalls of the canyon, sticking out of the sandy dried out creek bed, mingled in dense networks of dead branches, two networks of pipes. The old cast-iron, rusty, bent, mostly buried, useless, unless you use it as canvas for tagging, or, as I’ve seen done, if you recycle it as trail-building material. And then there is a line of white and blue PVC pipes, evidently still maintained, and still used to harvest the most precious thing the canyon has to offer–besides a cool getaway for hikers–namely water.

The pipes of Rubio
PVC or cast iron still
harvest fresh water
you can hear it flow gently
like the dripping from the falls

Meanwhile, on the Sam Merrill ‘Highway’–the gentler and much-used trail to Echo on the other side of the mountain…

Oh, there are other trails? Yes, many
i'll have to come back for that
Hi, Hi
Hi, hey
Are we almost there? The hotel? one more switchback
thanks man
Are we there yet? close, one more switchback 
great
Hi, hi
It's like you stepped up your game,...Hi...How's it going?
After a while I was like, I can't do this work...Hello...
She's just scared, here, hold on to my arm
thank you
You want to go first, I feel like we're blocking you?
Thank you...

blowin’ in the wind – placerita canyon, los pinetos trail

February 6, 2020 / / 0 Comments

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

2 chairs and a blue balloon – verdugo hills

January 31, 2020 / / 0 Comments

The dirt road that traverses the Verdugo Hills from Burbank to Glendale, or vice-versa, the Verdugo Motorway, offers almost constant views of the entire LA basin and the San Gabriel Mountains. Thankfully, it also features vista resting spots, as well as a number of communication towers, a mountain bike obstacle course, a tree of life, a monument dedicated to the Tongva, and several branching roads or trails descending/ascending into the various canyons on the north and south slopes of the mountain.

Starting at the La Tuna canyon trailhead, heading east, generally speaking, I emerged onto the Motorway, thighs burning, leaning on my walking stick, a short distance before the Keith chair, a gray plastic lounge chair facing south, where I took a well-deserved water break while gazing at dtla in the distance. It was a cloudless day–you could easily discern the shape of Catalina behind the Palos Verdes hump–and ‘el-A’ seemed both endless and small, you could grasp it all, it appeared so close, like a scaled model in a brightly lit museum. By the time I reached the Willie chair, an exact copy of its westerly cousin, I was spent (there is a third cousin in the family, named the Chuck chair on Google, which I would have visited, had I known). Perfect time and place for a more extended rest. On previous visits to this spot, I’ve found it to be busy, as it marks the end of a well-frequented ‘fitness hike’ out of Burbank, the Vital Link Trail, but today I had the spot to myself. I poured a cup of tea and again lounged and gazed at the urban landscape. What are all these people doing? A light southwesterly breeze brought echoes of the city, car horns, trucks backing up, construction, the occasional helicopter, sirens, and the general hum of multiplied, overlapped, accumulated lawnmowers, vehicle motors of all sorts accelerating, braking, idling, some thumping to a west coast beat that makes windows tremble as they drive by, or to high-pitched blare of mariachi trumpets, to heavy metal guitars like the Fedex truck in my neighborhood this morning. The leafblower that lifts a cloud of dust in the neighbor’s backyard as I write this is so loud it drowns the music and the typing, and there are dozens, if not hundreds revving all over the city on any given morning. What ruckus we make as a species. A teeny spider wanders across the desk, silently.

I would like to imagine a quieter world where, lounging on one of the three chairs along the Verdugo Motorway, you can clearly perceive the sounds of children playing in schoolyards, or if school’s out, their laughter and screams at a birthday party in the park, where a clown wearing colorful, oversized overalls, a bright red nose and purple hair strums a silly tune as a shiny blue balloon, one of the balloons attached to his suspenders, floats away towards the mountains.

traces – santa susana pass

January 23, 2020 / / 0 Comments

“Come with me. We may find that home lies in re-membering–in piecing together the fragments left–and in reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory and to be one.”

Lauret Savoy, “trace”

It’s a human thing. We are obsessed with leaving traces of our being in a certain place at a certain time. We leave unintentional footprints, like horseshoes stamped in the dirt, and grooves in the rock from stage coaches, horse carts and wagons, and piles of trash: people are pigs and do not abide by the “Leave No Trace” rule. But mostly we deliberately make marks on our environment, ‘something to remember us by?’: abandoned carcasses of cars, trucks, lawn chairs; dates, names, declarations of love carved in sandstone boulders or, more currently, spray-painted tags nearly everywhere; post-modernist cave paintings on “the edge”, lime green acrylic boulders in caves, swastikas, not surprising; a padlock in an abandoned burrow, token of eternal love or lost object for future archeologists to marvel at?; sparkly dreamcatchers guarding a pond; wood, metal and tile plaques that commemorate, direct, prohibit or warn; railroad tracks and freeways that slice through eco systems; hearts pierced by arrows carved deep into the trunks of oaks, alders and sycamores; tunnels blasted into canyon slopes in search of bonanzas; and let’s not forget, video clips that seem to have no purpose at all, thankfully.

fresh and salty – nicholas flat trail loop

January 18, 2020 / / 0 Comments

In December 2017, I spent two days filming in the Leo Carillo campground. The winds barreling down the dry creek were fierce and carried an ominous threat: a few short miles to the north the Thomas fire was raging. A change of wind direction would have forced us to shut down. We watched the sunset from the bluffs, filtered by clouds of brown smoke drifting miles out over the ocean, beautiful but daunting. A year later, almost to the day, the Woolsey fire burned through that very canyon, and the surrounding hills.

The devastation is still very visible today, but so is the rebirth of a resilient ecosystem you can’t help think has been through this cycle before, since long before there were trails, campgrounds, or even Chumash settlements. It’s an old story in these coastal mountains, for which Man seems to have little respect, intent as he seems to be on changing it forever. And so, with our help, it’s become a story of self-destruction. The zeal we’ve shown in attempting to dominate and control our environment will ultimately make it uninhabitable. Is that also just a phase of a grander cycle? The prickly pear that grows out of its charred carcass, the leaves beginning to fill in the canopies of singed stately oaks, the bright green dandelion that dots the charcoal dust, the vibrant red young laurel leaves, the ducks frolicking in the pond, I’d like to think have a greater story to tell.

don’t step on the orange poop – Hacienda Heights, unedited #06

January 9, 2020 / / 0 Comments

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.

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