Marked by the mountains

One AUGUST MORNING in 1877, John Muir went for a walk. Armed with three loaves of bread and some tea, he headed northwest out of Pasadena, soon coming upon a long, dry wash littered with flood boulders and overshadowed by the towering San Gabriel Mountains.

Muir penned his account of his excursion -- ostensibly a survey of the bee colonies in California during a drought year -- in “The Mountains of California,” and it is our first account of the urban wilderness that surrounds Los Angeles, a place

already checkered, as he wrote,

“with brusque little bits of civilization.”

That Muir would deign to spend time in Southern California and its chaparral-studded mountains might surprise us today, but the bearded sage of the Sierra never met a range he didn’t like.

If only it were as easy nowadays, but the mountains of Southern California -- a crescent, really, running from Santa Barbara to Mexico -- are often difficult to love. More nemesis than tonic to our lives, they turn to mud in the winter, bake under the thermal inversions of our summer and ignite in the fall. Nor are they the most spectacular range in the state, and they are easily diminished by the magnetic hold of Los Angeles, our perpetually self-interested city. Accordingly, we drive through them, seldom pausing, on our way to the more regal splendors of the High Sierra.

But their pleasures abound. Of the 4,083 square miles of Los Angeles County, almost half -- 1,875 square miles -- is mountainous, and the trails that run through make up a civic network as grand and as significant to the life of this city as its artistic, cultural and sporting organizations. Privileged to have the Music Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Getty and LACMA, we are no less fortunate for the unpaved world that surrounds us.

After spending his first night in the company of an amiable, perhaps garrulous homesteader who shared his hopes of planting an orange grove and a vineyard not far from the reaches of the canyon, Muir continued the next morning deeper into the canyon, soon coming upon a waterfall “singing like a bird, as it pours from a notch in a short ledge, some thirty-five or forty feet into a round mirror pool

Today that poem can still be found, flowing from the base of Mt. Wilson into Eaton Canyon. Although it is a favored destination for many day hikers walking into this quarter of Altadena, duplicating Muir’s steps this spring will be difficult, as I discovered two weeks ago.

This wilderness, our backyard, has taken a beating of late. Trails are washed out, hillsides are crumbling and streams are swollen beyond recognition and memory.

Stepping outside -- perhaps a month too early for the docent behind the counter at the Eaton Canyon Nature Center -- I stole my way up this great wash. I chose not to cross the river -- it was running too deep and too fast -- and contented myself with skirting its city-side bank, weaving through the rock-strewn mud flats amid sabers of yucca and clumps of white sage and buckwheat, climbing the steep banks around the poison-oak-festooned toyon, laurel sumac and oak, never far from the sometimes roaring, sometimes muted crash of the river itself, knifing its way down this arroyo.

Almost 100 years ago, such a venture was commonplace. During the Great Hiking Era -- the title lent by some historians to the decades from 1900 to the 1930s -- thousands of day hikers took to these mountains on weekends. Perhaps the most popular trail was to Mt. Wilson. In 1911, some 40,000 people passed through Orchard Camp, a trail resort above Sierra Madre.

Fires and floods naturally played a role in diminishing the popularity of such activity, but these mountains and the city were also victims of progress. The automobile opened faster doors of escape for us, and with the completion of the Angeles Crest Highway in 1941 and the road up San Gabriel Canyon in the mid-1930s, destinations once hiked to were now driven to. And somewhere in the development that took place across this flood plain in the wake of World War II, our relationship to this wilderness was compromised.

In an essay that is as full of love for this land as it is full of sadness for the changes that swept over it, Hildegarde Flanner wrote in 1950: “If we have anything here that could be called a tradition it lies in appreciation of the earth.”

Regaining that appreciation is easier than exercising our nostalgia. The present is too demanding.

Forget the freeway traffic, mayoral politics or the potholes in our roads. Here, at Eaton Canyon, the oaks have already taken on two-toned shading as the new growth leafs out from the older, more lustrous foliage. Scrub jays flash blue from the branches of a sycamore tree. The mud at my feet holds the dried, clawed paw print of a raccoon, and up ahead, by the Eaton Canyon bridge, a landslide has wiped out the trail to Henninger Flats. It promises to be closed for at least another year.

Angelenos have always been ambivalent about indigenous pleasures. We briefly dream about the old while reaching out for the new. We build homes on the mountains we love and design them more as confrontations than complements. Green lawns become the aesthetic standard in a climate more suited for chaparral.

Perhaps deeper, though, at the heart of our ambivalence is our own wandering psyche, a reluctance to accept the fact that we might just have roots in this soil. If our history has taught us anything, it is that change is everything and that permanence is an illusion. To believe in anything else is to set us up for loss.

So we choose to live on the surface, and memory is lost in the velocity of our lives. As Carey McWilliams said more than 50 years ago, the only reality today is acceleration -- a comment more true than ever before. And all the more reason to take to the hills and appreciate what this place has to give us.

On this late winter day in Eaton Canyon, the clouds in the sky are fresh from Constable’s palette, and high overhead, the pines of Henninger Flats are silhouetted against the sky. Sure, underfoot are occasional cigarette butts, plastic bags, graffiti, but they don’t steal from the pleasures of being here. The thatched palm trees, the lost shoe, the Gatorade empty are reminders of what lies just over the lip of that high embankment.

Visiting these mountains is a means by which we can understand who we are. Historians, especially of Los Angeles, often puzzle the intersection of imagination and identity. Coming to this land today, to the brutal topography of these mountains as they rise above the pell-mell breadth of the city, we add a new dimension to our identity, a dimension that has always been there but that we have denied, overlooked and disputed at our own loss.

Thomas Curwen is the editor of Outdoors. He can be reached at thomas.curwen@latimes.com.