Follow Van Owen Boulevard to its western terminus, the bland Castle Peak Estates neighborhood of West Hills. Park outside somebody’s house, then cross the street to the trailhead, and discover this…fantastic place…
El Escorpion Park
A last remnant of the old square-league Rancho El Escorpion de Salinas, the park is just a three-acre postage-stamp, consisting of a secluded canada in the Simi Hills, entered along a creek bed. There is a two-mile loop trail with a steep ascent to the top of the ridge and down again.
The history of El Escorpion Ranch reads like a Garcia-Marquez novel. It was a grazing concession rather than a land-grant, which led to all kinds of later complications with Yankee law. Also, El Escorpion was one of the very few land-reform acts of Gov. Pio Pico (1845) that actually benefitted Indians, in this case a group of three or four Chumash who had been acculturated at Mission San Fernando.
One of their descendants, Espiritu Chujilla, inherited use of the land in 1856. She married a brusque Basque sheepherder in 1871, raising him considerably in the world by allowing him to take possession of El Escorpion. His name was Miguel Leonis, and he was a sonofabitch, who ran almost everybody else off the West Valley, exploited his wife and her Indian relatives, and ruled by a gang of ruffians that was almost a private army. He built his adobe headquarters right down at the crossroads of El Camino Real, possibly to intimidate arriving travelers. That hacienda grew into the town of Calabasas.
An illiterate, litigious louse, Leonis got drunk one night in 1881 returning from the LA Courthouse, and somehow got run over by his own wagon while driving over Cahuenga Pass. His widow, Espirtu, lived on at Calabasas until 1906, fighting spiritedly as over 100 Yankee lawsuits chipped away at her inheritance. Her rights were finally affirmed by a U.S. court when there was no land left and she had months to live.
The stretch of trail leading out of the Valley, which was the ranch road, also happens to be the Juan Baptista de Anza Trail, the pioneer land-route from Arizona to San Francisco, blazed by the Captain of Tubac in 1775. Here, following the Indians’ trail, as did Anza, one can view this lush canada more or less as the Spanish first trooped through it. One can imagine what Chumash eyes, up on the ridge, made of the clanking, glinting, creaky-wheeled, horsey-smelling procession marching through their front hallway, singing the ribald ditties of Old Spain.
A volunteer grove of naturalized fan palms, W. filibusta, making their own mini-Palm Springs.
The park fills in the last mile of the City and County of LA; soon the trail hits the Ventura County line. From there, one can turn right to stay in LA and climb the peak; or continue on with the creek, passing into the vast lands of another old rancho, the former Ahmanson Ranch. This is also now a park, called the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve. Nestled in all this, El Escorpion provides the illusion of being A World Away From LA.
The Anza Trail leads into the Las Virgenes Preserve.
Kas-ele-wu marks the eastern border of the Southern Chumash. The Chumash revere mountains as centers of astronomical observation; Kas-ele-wu, which the Yankees heard as “Castle,” was a resort especially around the winter solstice. There was a rancheria under the peak. I guess it was at the entrada, the sheltered glen where the subdivision now sprawls. The ridge looks over an unparalleled View of the San Fernando Plain.
Looking back toward the Valley 
L to R: San Gabriels, Mt. Cahuenga, and the Malibu Hills
Click to access hssc97-3_jjohnson.pdf
Click above for an article on how the Indians were reduced at Mission San Fernando.
That’s an eighty-foot drop 
Steep, treacherous gullies slice into the slope. Note the old livestock fences.
The ridge is Swiss-cheesey with caves and tunnels: the largest is Munits’s Cave, supposedly inhabited by resident shamans as a meeting place, audience chamber, or sanctuary. Momoy, the sacred plant of the ?antap religion, still grows at the site. Momoy doctors, most likely from here, brought preparations of the psychedelic to the Tongva and Tataviam rancherias on the Valley floor, integrating momoy consumption to the Chinigchinich cult down there. There are no glyphs or rock paintings in or around the caves, so whatever the site meant to the Chumash, it wasn’t a place for artistic expression.
Bats supposedly live here; and certainly a family of huge ravens who were ominously concerned about me, croaking and calling and gliding overhead. There were also big hawks (harriers?) patrolling; the south-facing slope rising from the cool creek bed must produce awesome thermals.
Momoy, the sacred moonflower, blooms around the caves. 
The View from the mouth of Munits’s Cave, looking southwest over Las Virgenes.
[This sounds like a fishing story, but indulge me. As I was climbing up the chute to the cave, clinging to handholds and worrying about scorpions, I felt a large bird soar out of a cleft, maybe fifty feet overhead. Past the visor of my cap, I swear I saw — felt — a California condor. I later learned it is true that condors do range the Simi Hills. From the corner of my eye it seemed — looked — like a i$%ng huge turkey vulture, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of turkey vultures, and probably it was. But — again I swear — I believe — I felt the air cool about my head for a second or two, as the shadow, or downdraft, of its huge wings glided over me. I shivered and craned my neck to try to grasp a wingspan so immense, but my optics failed to click, failed to correlate how big it seemed, with how close it seemed — coordinates my brain could only add up as One Scary Bird. It wheeled off on a thermal and was out of sight over the ridge before I could breathe again. I was too awed to continue on with the dangerous work of scrambling up into the cave, so I took some quick snaps and levered myself back down the cliff. Maybe I just got some momoy juice on my hands.]
The ravens kept a close eye on me. 
The place is pregnant with Big Medicine. The only other places in the Valley that I’ve “felt” the buzz of human pre-history this strongly, are in the Pacoima Hills, where the Tataviam had their crow’s nest Viewpoint; and the Cahuenga Pass, where the Tongva had their overlook of the Valley to the north. But those other places are developed to Hell; this one is close to how the Chumash themselves would have experienced it.
The Valley Village View 