In the Flintridge Hills Looking Toward Pasadena

In the Flintridge hills looking toward Pasadena this grass really is close to being as high as an elephant’s eye (Photo – Reg Green)

Spring is in spectacular bloom, as if you hadn’t noticed, the product of those heavy winter rains and now the abundant sunshine.

By Reg Green

New life is bursting out even on city streets but in the nearby mountains it is more dramatic than I can remember since I came to live in Southern California. Since that was only fifteen years ago, I can imagine grey-haired heads heads being shaken all over Pasadena at this puny claim. “You should have been here in1983,” I hear them chide. “Now, that was a winter to remember!”

Still, for a latecomer this one will do: trails lined with flowering bushes, grass greener and taller than anything in recent memory, banks of flowers. even at the 3,000 ft level.
But go up another 1,000 ft. and you step back in time, just a week or two maybe but still enough that the delicate flowers of the California lilac are still white, waiting impatiently to turn purple. In some places that moment is so close that half the bush is colored, the less sunny side a gossamer white.

But, despite Southern California’s worldwide reputation for endless sunshine, every day in the San Gabriels is different. One day the clouds low enough that Pasadena is invisible from the Mt. Lukens fire road half a dozen miles away, another day clear enough to see Catalina Island. A few days ago the winds were so powerful that opening the driver’s door at the trailhead took all my strength (I’m a little old man, I should confess) but when I stopped at an overlook facing the other way it was ripped out of my hand; warm enough one day to wear shorts (not a pretty sight, in fact downright ugly) the next day huddled inside an anorak.

That’s what I love about the climate in these foothills: everything about it is positive. When it rains Gene Kelly would feel at home here, when it’s hot you can have breakfast, dinner and a midnight read outside, when it’s windy you are fighting it all the way until you turn one of the dozens of hairpin turns and you are suddenly in a calm so deep that it’s ominous.
“Don’t you get bored with all that sunshine?” an English friend once asked. No way.