View from the Mt. Lukens fire road a mile from the trailhead on Angeles Crest Highway (Photo – Reg Green).
It’s another gray, clammy early morning in the Foothills. From the bedroom window nothing more than fifty yards away can be seen and any action other than pulling the bedclothes over your head seems insane. But you’ve seen this before — and anyway you don’t want to die of hardening of the arteries — so you pull on your hiking boots and get into the car.
By Reg Green
“Go west, young man,” won’t do it in this weather. The route to La Crescenta and beyond is just as depressing. But “Go East, go North and go South” are no better.
Today, as on many other June days when mist blankets the LA Basin, the only way to reach that legendary Southern California weather is “Go Up” and the easiest way to do that is to take the Angeles Crest Highway. It always amazes me how short a journey that is. Time and again in three miles or so as you climb from Foothill, the mist suddenly parts and in a few yards you go from black and white to Technicolor.
The first practicable hiking route from there is the fire road to Mt. Lukens, starting at the Angeles National Forest fire station. There you are in a different world. Below is a layer of gray cloud stretching, unbroken, to the ocean. From under it, you can hear the constant swish of traffic, hundreds of cars three or four lengths apart, doing their nerve-testing narrow winding 40-mile journey from Palmdale and beyond. (And they do it every day).
Up here there is no one else, you feel as though you are on top of the world and there is a spring in your step.
You should try it.
A journalist most of his life, Reg Green lives now in La Cañada Flintridge. He can be reached at his website, NicholasGreen.org.
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