This is what the Mt Lukens Fire Road, one of the most popular routes in the Angeles National Forest, looked like last Sunday morning, one of the busiest times of the week (Photo – Reg Green)
On the beautiful fire road that follows the ridge overlooking Descanso Gardens on one side and Montrose on the other, there is a notice advising hikers to stay six feet apart and wear masks, the things we now take for granted in day-to-day living.
By Reg Green
My observation is that the great majority of hikers are in fact keeping apart, and most are wearing masks.
This policy has replaced the complete closure of this trail and the five hundred miles of trails in the Angeles National Forest for weeks. That never made sense to me and no one I have spoken to has been able to provide a sensible explanation. All the bureaucrats could repeat was that it would save lives. It was a good answer: there’s not much you can say to combat it without branding yourself as a selfish oaf. But it, too, never made sense.
Many of those trails are among the loneliest places in the whole of Southern California. Many, many times I have walked on them for hours and not seen another person. On the most frequented ones, hikers — who come here precisely because they are looking for solitude — are typically hundreds of feet apart. When they meet someone coming the other way they almost always move to the side of the trail, make sure they are wearing masks to cover their nose and mouth, and rarely stop to chat. They also try not to sneeze on each other.
The forest service either didn’t have the imagination to see any of that or thought it was just too much trouble to be flexible. Or, more likely, as with bureaucrats everywhere, they said to themselves “If something goes wrong, I’m not going to be blamed.” The result is they are thinking all the time not of what they can encourage us to enjoy, as stewards of some of our most precious resources they are committed to doing, but instead what they can prohibit.
If there is a prolonged recurrence of the virus in the months ahead, is it too much to ask policy-makers and those responsible for enforcing it, not to panic like this again?
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