Fire!

How many times do I have to make this point?  The Santa Monica Mountains burn.  There are major fires in the mountains every few years, and Los Angeles and Ventura counties have to spend millions of dollars defending the homes of the wealthy.  It does not make any sense to allow development in the Santa Monicas.  It's time to preserve them as open space, preferably as California's tenth national park.

In The Angeles National Forest

After, the fires; after the rains; after the mudslides, I finally got into the Angeles National Forest to see some of the damage. I had wanted to drive up Angeles Crest Highway to the paved, gated route down to the Gabrieleno National Recreation Trail at Gould Mesa. This trail is one of my favorites for, among other reasons, it's a long, scenic route that is just above the city. It wasn't my plan to walk the entire route, but I had hoped to walk down to the trail junction to get an idea of how bad things were.
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Unfortunately, the Crest Highway is still closed, so I had to turn around and try Big Tujunga Canyon Road. As I drove into the San Gabriel Mountains, it was clear that from the Sunland/Tujunga area to the Angeles Forest Highway, it's pretty much a complete loss. The canyon sides have burnt down to bare soil, and while the chaparral is growing back, it will probably be a couple of years before things look green and healthy. There are signs all along the road noting that the area is closed to all activities because of fire damage, though the Condor Peak Trail looks like it's still passable, and there was no sign prohibiting its use at the trail head.
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At the Forest Highway junction, I turned right, and headed for the Upper Big Tujunga Canyon Road. The Hidden Springs store is gone. Off of Upper Big Tujunga, I took the narrow paved route towards Camp Colby, a church property. I wanted to see if the trail that goes up the back side of Strawberry Peak was still open. It was signed as closed, but there were two guys in the parking lot and I asked them if they had been on the trail. "Yes," they told me, "And it's not too bad." I asked if they had gone as high as the trail junction going to the peak, but they had not gone that far. There is a lot of fire damage along the creek.
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I then went as far as the Crest Highway. Everything on either side of the road was burned. The chaparral will grow back soon, but the trees will probably not return in my lifetime. The Crest Highway was open in either direction from the Upper Big Tujunga Road junction. There were signs stating that Newcombe's Ranch was open, so it must have come through the fires, if not unharmed, at least in good enough shape to serve food. Looking up the road, I could see that there were areas where the trees were untouched by the fires, and patches that had been burned out. I drove back towards the city as far as the Redbox Ranger Station. It's still in tact, and looking down the Arroyo Seco, things didn't look too bad. The slopes of Mount Wilson don't appear to have been burnt at all. The Redbox Trail is signed, closed, but the trail down to Switzers, was not signed at all.
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I turned around and retraced my route to the Forest Highway and headed toward Mill Creek Summit. Everything along the creek is burned out, including the Monte Cristo Campground. At Mill Creek Summit, the Pacific Crest Trail crosses the road. There were no signs barring entry. I headed down to Aliso Canyon Road, and didn't return to an area unburnt, until I was closing in on the backside of Acton.
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To see my blog on hiking and biking, including a description, with pictures, of a hike from Dawson saddle to Mt. Baden-Powell go to http://www.selfpropelled-wjy.blogspot.com/

It Never Fails

It never fails. Every year the fires come to the mountains of Los Angeles, and when the winter rains come, the denuded hillsides become rivers of mud, sliding down to the houses that we have foolishly allowed to be built in areas prone to fire and mudslide. What is new this year, is that some of the people who have lost homes are demanding to be reimbursed by the federal government because it's federal mud.
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Wow. Not too long ago I had a conversation with a young, twenty something, lady who cursed the greed and short sightedness of the baby boom generation. It was her theory that boomers were so incapable of denying themselves anything they wanted, that they had pretty much destroyed the world around them. As a boomer myself, my first inclination was to defend myself, or at the very least point to that most self mythologizing generation in American history, the sixties generation. But, I gave her complaints some thought, and then reluctantly agreed with her. For all our yammering about how much the boomer generation changed the world, we are, as a group, unable to accept that we might have been more destructive than not.
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So what does this have to do with the natural cycle of fire and avalanche in southern California? It's pretty simple really. The development of the mountains and canyons ramped up to unprecedented levels in the past 40 years so that boomers could live in pretty places with nice views. No thought was given to the environmental damage so long as some artificial sense of living with nature could be indulged. No, the federal government doesn't have a responsibility to recompense people because they made very bad decisions on where they wanted to live. We already spend disproportionate sums of the public treasury to defend homes from the inevitable wild fires and to put up barriers in a futile attempt to save home owners from mud slides. And we should. Once the zoning boards give permission to build in dangerous, though beautiful places, those homes become a joint responsibility for us all. My point is that our own stupidity is at the heart of these problems. An unwillingness to think beyond our own immediate desires.
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Santa Monica Mountains National Park. See my post of 12/23/09. Tejon Ranch National Park, an idea whose time has come.