Thoughts from the Wild Edge

“In the mountains of San Gabriel, overlooking the lowland vines and fruit groves, Mother Nature is most ruggedly, thornily savage. Not have I ever made the acquaintance of mountains more rigidly inaccessible. The slopes are exceptionally steep and insecure to the foot of the explorer, and thorny chaparral constitutes its chief defense.”

John Muir, Steep Trails

Muir’s description is a little harsh, but it does paint a good image of how I first encountered these mountains a couple years ago. The trail is steep and until you reach the tree line it is very much a desert landscape. But in the winter after the rains it is green.

I recorded this video a rare sunny day early in February of this year. I changed jobs again this year and I gave myself one day off in between the two jobs and decided to spend the day hiking. I’ve hiked this lower part of the Mt. Wilson Trail several times, but I’d never seen it so green. Water was running in the usually dry canyon and it felt like I was visiting a new place.

I was on the “Mt. Wilson Trail” and the trail as I know it was built in 1864 by Benjamin Wilson to obtain lumber for his ranch. Fun Fact: his ranch was on the land that is now the Huntington Library and Gardens. But the mountain was here before Mr. Wilson started taking the trees for lumber. There are records from 1771 of a path used by the native Tongva people and it’s logical to assume they were hiking here long before that.

But these were not my thoughts on that sunny day in February. The trail is very popular and can be crowded on the weekend, but I mostly had the mountain to myself. It was quiet except for the novel sound of rushing water echoing in Little Santa Anita canyon. I had come up to reflect on my new job (and my old job) but I was enjoying the day and just being out in nature. I started thinking about how this nature that is so close to where we live. I started to think about the Wild Edge.

The Wild Edge. I first read that phrase in Jonathan Lethem’s book The Feral Detective. The book is set in the San Gabriel Valley and a character uses these two words to describe the urban/wildland interface that exists in Los Angeles as people encroach into natural spaces. I don’t remember too much from the book, but those words stuck with me.

I walked to this trail from our house. We live in a small city of about 10,000 people, but we are among the 10 million city dwellers here in LA County. Our town is at the foot of the mountains and living here does feel like the wild edge. Bears, coyotes, and deer are often seen in town, there are warnings about mountain lions, – not that I have ever seen one. The sea of manmade structures ends here and is quickly replaced by cacti and Muir’s “thorny chaparral.” The rampart of mountains creates a stark line between where the people live and where they don’t that maybe doesn’t exist in other places.

So I thought about the wild edge as I was walking through it. I enjoyed seeing the newly re-formed waterfalls and winter greenery, but also I thought about how I will miss these mountains when we move to Minnesota. We will live right next to the Mississippi river and in some ways MN I does “the great outdoors” better than LA but there are no mountains and there is no Wild Edge.