Category Archives: watersheds

La Tuna Canyon Park ReViewed

Off La Tuna Canyon Road in the green Verdugo Hills, lies a slot-canyon dubbed The Grotto, with cascades I dubbed Flow Falls. The View first arrived, gawping in wonder, in early 2019 after fire and storms had rejuvenated the canyon. Afterwards there was re-growth, another eruption of fire, and some vandalism. But in the last three years as a whole, the CFP has blown me away with its resilience.

“The Grotto” – Rejuvenated

The movies I made for the first couple of posts won’t play on Vimeo. When I went to check why they wouldn’t play, I found out nothing was wrong. But they now want me to pay a ridiculous rental fee every month forever for the privilege of having already uploaded my content to their buggy, sluggish, no-frills, tinny free service ad-choked platform. ”Ransomware:” your family photos, homemade videos, galleries of personal projects, after you ”give” them to one of these gonifs. Can a corporation be a gonif? Yes: when they steal. So I deleted those older videos and made a much better one — hosted on my own Google Drive. You really ought to click. The music is Geoffrey Burgon’s ”Rain in Venice” variation on his ”Brideshead Theme.” As Charles Ryder said, ”This was my conversion to the Baroque.”

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J_us3k8FghFovQC7sTh7RpSEwTO3utqh/view?usp=drivesdk

https://valleyvillage.home.blog/tag/la-tuna-canyon-park/

It is not immune to the galloping mineralization regime emerging in other ex-vulcanized hills in our watershed. But it’s clearer to me how the CFP has been, is being, entrained by the harsh regime of natural selection in these geological hot spots. Let’s take a reView of these rocks and rills, woods, and templed hills.

FEBRUARY, 2019

Arroyo willow is barely visible in the long shot just above of the bowl; she’s in the creekbed at the perspective point, the one sign of life in the canyon floor. She started budding out practically before my eyes, the grace of my first visit.

OCTOBER, 2021

She’s a bit thin but doing okay, considering the sulfur flowing down from the hill above. She‘s held her mlittle bar together and now it’s a thriving oblong thicket. The thicket allowed the sycamore to keep the raised bed soil space to grow back, and the raft of sagebrush in bloom was so fragrant I bet you can smell it where you are. However, yes, note that half the bar and a lot of Artemisia is pretty chemically scorched by that porphyry.

Tiny red blossoms of *Artemisia californica, known as **sagebrush**. A primary aromatic of LA hiking.*

ABOVE, TODAY: The poison oak loves the edges of a porphyry. I love its fall colors. The creekbed is sporting deerweed now, a great recovery plant; it fixes nitrogen in the soil. Deerweed in general is very partial to hydrothermal waters. Why?.🤷🏽‍♂️ Back to the past:

MARCH, 2019

**Asclepias erosa —** Ca. Desert Milkweed

As soon as I understood the elusive perfume was coming from the glossy leaves above, I knew that this shrub must be California Bay, Umbellularia californica. The titular ”umbles” are the sweet yellow flowers. It took more visits to realize that Ca. bay isn’t a shrub at all, it’s a proper tree; and that many, if not most, of the huge scorched trunks in the spillway were bay; and that they were alive in the roots, and would try hard to return; and that they had probably been through the cycle several times. This canyon is the most impressive bay grove I have ever seen.

Below, the same View today (as close as the poison oak allowed me to get).

BELOW, APRIL, 2019: The vine with triangle leaves and white whorls is Calystegia macrostegia, [Channel] Island morning glory. Beside it is a fine stand of giant wild rye, presumably evolved in the Pleistocene as mammoth munch.

In the upper canyon the rocks change. There are huge chunks of what looks like compressed Chatsworth Formation, blocks of old undersea sandstone, on top of all the metamorphic rock, and where they met, another staggeringly beautiful lava flow gushed thenceforth. I’m supposing the flow is anorthosite; and I’m supposing the great broken ribs poking through the lower canyon’s walls are the anorthosite ducts (dykes really) that brought it up to this cleft to spill.

This steep notch attracted the mugworts; I noticed because I had just learned about the plant’s ritual use in the Chinigchinich religion. The bright green leaves are Artemisia douglasiana; not in flower yet. The fragrant fuzzy leaves were used to heal skin cuts in the puberty ritual. The cream-flowering beauty is Artemisia ludoviciana, that is, “the mugwort you find in Louisiana.” Also, in Southern California; I also found one growing on the bricks at Fort Sumter, so we can assume they go across the South. The charred bay trunk is so beautiful, I hope it will stand for a long time.

OCTOBER, 2019

ABOVE: the tree trunks are putting out shoots, laurel sumac doing well on the slopes. Down in the bowl, plenty of those lovely pink asters I cant ID; anonymity doesn’t bother the bee, see. Up in the canyon, Ca. fuchsia dangles red bugles from the walls, a lone scarlet monkey-flower pulls faces, and black nightshade ripens its love-apples to poison black. BELOW: The trees in the syncline, and those flanking the outFlow (sycamore and ash), are working their way back very elegantly. The creek bed had at this point an overgrowth of amaranth, horsetail and tree tobacco, all potentially invasive. (The Nicotiana glauca is invisible in these shots because dealt with by the View). The diagonal pink sill in the curved wall of the slot, so dramatically noticeable when it’s wet, almost disappears into the soil when it’s dry. Fat purple 4-O’Clocks enjoy perching shoulder-high, on the lips of mounds and ridges.

DECEMBER 7, 2019: I noticed there had been another fire episode; a strange one, I thought. The amaranth in the creekbed had all been singed off, as if somebody had torched the tops (a controlled burn to stifle the invasives?) But a big oak on the entrance trail was scorched at the bottom, where bracken was burnt but not consumed. I couldn’t imagine anybody letting a controlled burn get so uncontrolled as to go near that oak. When I look now, I see the scorched patterns in the hillside soil. (They match the spots where mineralization has now emerged.) In particular, the accordion-folded rock in the Grotto that I saw as ”the Syncline” is perhaps better seen as “the Anticline” — and indeed it really should be seen as something like a griffone. Note the nipple-shaped blowhole at the top, and note how everything around it got scorched.

The black circles and parabolas in the hill behind the sycamore may have blasted heat or volatile vapors out over the creekbed, singeing the amaranth and toasting the fringes of the oak in the foreground; see below.

Strange again; the oak boughs were incinerated, the giant wild rye unscathed.

JANUARY, 2021 – I didn’t realize, but I skipped the canyon completely in 2020. So, in the pics below, it’s 13 months later, and the beginning of this year. Most of the fresh growth of the sycamores and ashes is gone, only one sycamore kept its leaves that year. Depressing…? Not with that one tree giving its all in fall colors. But my cheers quickly turned to jeers when I saw what some cretins did to Flow.

I was especially shocked because the area where Bimbo Bernofsky painted one of her idiotic hearts, the one seen here on the right, was a bit of freshly-exposed rock in Feb, 2019 – I think its facing or shell was blown off by intrusions from behind, or heat or gas buildup or both, just before I found it; it revealed all this great fresh pink (pegmatite?) and blue-black (pillow basalt?). The plywood ”love mattress” I tipped up and off to the side. It’s there still; I’d have to strap it to the top of the car to haul it out. I probably will have to, some day. I choose to think the gods punish those who desecrate their sacred spots. There are plenty of winding turns on the canyon roads, and enough roadside crosses and shrines to feed my hope.

The bamboo-like saplings with yellow leaves are Ca. black walnuts, Juglans californica.

ABOVE: In January of this year, the pre-signs of mineralization weren’t obvious, but the fact that the trees had lost most of their skirting-shoots, was. Those have grown back, but BELOW: by October, the signs of hydrothermal venting were unmistakable. Whatever is happening to the upper LA River watershed, can be glimpsed here in all its avatars, within a span of a few hundred yards. Vest-pocket porphyries?

ABOVE: The slopes are undeniably mineralizing. That dark chocolate ore poking out is probably quite rich in copper. The little white extrusion is probably chemically leached — it was like pumice, light as a feather and sharp to the hand. BELOW: First, In the middle canyon, there seems to have been a pretty recent flow of whatever the white mineral fluid is, over the canyton floor. It’s similar to the white mineral fluid that has recently flowed and congealed at Nichols Canyon. Second, at the side of the entrance trail, there’s an unnverving rock risen to the surface. It’s unnerving because it has been bent back upon itself like a hairpin, forcing the white stuff to bulge at the center. It’s a memorial to the fact that this whole canyon is made of boiling rock, frozen in moments.

The Valley’s Wild West

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😈 Hallowe’en 2021 Creepy Neighborhood Award: the Weird, Wicked West Valley

This year the Palsied Hand for creepiest, most terrifying 😱 LA Neighborhood goes to [eunuch strikes gong] 🤔🤭😏🙄🤞🏼🙋‍♀️🤷🏽‍♂️🙈

The old Rancho Las Virgenes, once owned by Miguel Leonis, see below. This trailhead, north of the Kobe site at the end of Las Virgenes Road, is a perfection of West Valley despair. Gorgeous but dangerously sick, protected but a firetrap. This is the core habitat of the rare Engelmann Oaks, which you see, are as exquisite dead as alive. I quickly recognized the mineralization patterns roasting the hills. (Drought schmout, it just rained.) But I only got two hundred yards down the trail when I was overwhelmed with putrid, pungent fumes of **natural gas** from the blowholes along the trail;— the unmistakable odor of driving up the Turnpike past Elizabeth, NJ. I took to my heels. More on poison gas later….😈

West San Fernando Valley! Go anywhere west of Van Nuys and you’ll find yourself in LA’s Transylvania. The mountains are creepy, the hills are gray like ghosts, the boulders make obscene mocking faces at you, there are gas fumes in the canyons, and the treacherous slopes hide a thousand Ways to Hell. Its bowls and washes cradle weird gated suburbs where ageless rich people seem to go in (Tesla, Tesla, Mercedes, Audi, Tesla…) but never come out. There are stoplights that are red in all directions and never change. Take this virtual tour of the SFV’s strangely sterile, outlandishly pricey, desperately macabre badlands…Timid Reader, you’ll cringe, gasp and retch at these scary, spookly stories! 😈 HA ha ha ha ha….

‘They Like Me! They REALLY like me!’ — *The West Valley*

LEONIS ADOBE: The snake-like road at the bottom of the map is the Ventura Freeway, aka “the 101,” which follows the route of El Camino Real, which is Ventura Blvd, upon which the Leonis Adobe fronts, and has done since 1844. The town of Calabasas was built around the ranch — location location location. It served in good times as a coaching rest stop. But sometime in the mid-1870s, a brutish Basque bully of a sheepherder named Miguel Leonis got control of Rancho El Escorpion by marrying Espiritu, the legitimate Chumash heiress. Leonis turned her ranch house on the Camino into a center of terror and intimidation for the whole West Valley. If arguments and fistfights and lawsuits didn’t settle it Don Miguel’s way, a gang of hitmen at midnight would. Murders and beatings just happened to people who crossed him. He stole, swindled, and connived; he drove off Yankee squatters with blazing shotguns. He acquired land and wealth and water rights simply, it seems, in order to dispossess other people. When he died, he dispossesed Espiritu; she had to wage a court battle for 20 years against the estate; they finally ruled it did belong to Mrs. Leonis, the by-then octagenarian Indian princess. She lived in her adobe home until she died in 1906, still looking great by the way.

Miguel Leonis, the Devil of Calabasas, died in September 1889, while driving a wagon home from a victorious session in court at downtown LA, and a celebratory booze-up afterwards. As his horse plodded across the silent, moonlit Cahuenga Pass (recently bought by the brand-new village of Hollywood), somehow the drunken miser fell from his buckboard and tumbled under the wheels, which left rut-marks across his face and chest. If such a thing could be an accident, it was natural justice, fittingly ‘Hollywood’ in tone and atmosphere. BUT, the ghosts are all in the West Valley. The adobe is famous as one of the most haunted places in LA. The house is a museum, where people come to see ’em — as they did this afternoon with kiddies in costume, etc.

Bonus creep: John Carradine was the last private resident of the adobe, sometime before 1962. His son Keith recalled him as an abusive alcoholic, and his mother as a dangerous schizophrenic; there were beatings, bars on windows, etc. The boys’ childhood must have been pretty harrowing.

👹 KOBE’S DOOM — January 26, 2020, was a foggy, overcast day in the West Valley, not cheery and picturesque like the photo above. It seems the helicopter pilot became disoriented flying over the hills, tricked by the flat gloomy light. The accident shocked the world and sent basketball fans into mourning. The tragedy was compounded by an ugly legacy of accusations and lawsuits that have yet to run their course. This grim LA story just won’t go to its rest, trailing fetid fetters of money, fame, envy, and that most horrifying of all our dooms, human error. It may haunt us for a long time to come. RIP.

FOUNTAIN OF THE WORLD CULT BOMBING SITE

😈 Box Canyon Road is the road the heroine shouldn’t turn onto, in a Shirley Jackson novel. Meandering, narrow, hard to turn around on once inside, it is cut off from the rest of the Valley. This is one of those places that refugees from the new Atomic reality retreated to after the War… land so remote, so uncivilized, so sore to the eye, that nobody else had ever wanted to touch it before. Like many such marginal places in LA, it attracted its own cult; which, like many such cults, attracted its own disgruntled suicide bombers armed with twenty sticks of dynamite.💥 🔥

🛎🛎🛎👺 BONUS POINTS for the Standard Air disaster of 1949, noted in the red box above. The Fountain of Life folks helped rescue the survivors, God bless them all. This ghastly accident followed an eerily similar chain of events to Kobe’s demise; a pilot distracted by passengers, but not badly, flying in morning fog not too bad, descending through a familiar flight path too quickly, but not all that fast… The accident report is fascinating and depressing. It happened right at the Devil’s Slide, by Chatsworth Reservoir. For a chilling View of how the Valley fog can distort our hills for pilots, let lovely 🌋Lopez Canyon be our spokesmodel.👺 Land of Contrasts, indeed!

Top row, see the low hills in fog. Bottom, see the high hills hidden behind the low!

ROCKETDYNE SANTA SUSANA FIELD LABORATORY NUCLEAR REACTOR MELTDOWN SITE / WOOLSEY FIRE RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT 😈 Suck it up, SFV, the wages of sin is dust! 😮‍💨 Lucky that Valley Village is a few blocks out of range of the worst zone. The View has already uncovered the Cold War hubris involved in Rocketdyne’s 1952 sodium-nuclear reactor meltdown and cover-up. Now that we definitively know it’s as bad as we all thought it was, let’s cover it up again.🙈 🕵🏼‍♂️ What about the possibility that the Woolsey Fire was started in the first place by methane or other hydrothermal venting? 🙉

THE DEVIL’S SLIDE, PIONEER CEMETERY, CHATSWORTH PARK SOUTH, VITRIOL FALLS

🤡 Check back issues of the View for the infamous Devil’s Slide. The stagecoach road leads straight down to Oakwood/Pioneer Cemetery, then veers sharply around it at the bottom.

The humid green lawns seem especially eerie in these Latter Days of drought and sprawl. The 20th century fixation on turning the West Valley into the West Country of England, or Westchester West, with green lawn estates and clapboard churches, seems…a bit like folly, eh? 🤡 The tombstones here are great, creative, not somber. Angelenos, RIP.

😈 The gaping mouths of Vitriol Falls must be fresh in your mind from the recent post:

CHATSWORTH PARK SOUTH https://ssmpa.com/chatsworth-park-south-old.php This was the old RR Ranch, home to Roy, and Dale, and Trigger, pictured below. 😈 Part of it was developed as a skeet-shooting range in the 50s; afterwards the City figured to save it for a park, happily (for wildlife) contiguous to other West Valley parks. But in 2008 they found spent shell casings and lead contamination everywhere. They closed the park for YEARS; in 2013, the City renovation plan emerged, which was to tear out all the nature and turn the site into a giant parking lot for…itself. Finally they came up with something green, but without any imagination or uniqueness or sense of site ecology — just swing-sets and brown lawns and picnic tables — but anyway a few years ago it was re-opened. It was a terrible disgrace for the City of LA to take so long. It took dogged community activism to get that park back; the link above is to the website archive of the Santa Susana Mountains Association. It’s worth a Hallowe’en skim to remind yourself how much citizen work it takes to get the right thing done.

JUAN FLORES CAPTURED “Head ’em off at the Pass!” The Santa Susana Pass, fka Simi Pass, and the San Fernando Pass, and the Newhall Pass, fka Fremont Pass, were collectively “the Pass” — and they were all used by bandits and desperadoes as hideouts and get-aways back in the days when the SFV was the Wild West. One of the ~~dreamiest most charismatic~~ worst was ~~revolutionary hero California rights activist~~ murderer and robber Juan Flores. After he shot the sheriff, but did not shoot the deputy, a massive manhunt was coordinated by Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando owner, U.S. Senator, and former Captain General of the California Lancers, Don Andres Pico. Flores was finally forced to surrender in the Pass. His hanging at Fort Hill, as reported by the Star, was so botched and gruesome it invites Hallowe’en perusal:

SPAHN MOVIE RANCH AND THE MANSON FAMILY CAVE

Roy Rogers wasn’t the only one whose Western-themed ranch hit hard times in the 60s. After the Hollywood studio heyday waned, Ed Spahn kept a movie location ranch going on some camera-ready acres in the Santa Susana Pass by booking it for TV Westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. By the late 60s, even this second-wind was fading, and the ranch lacked business. So when Spahn met a nice fellow called Charles Manson who had been beating around the chaparral after leaving the Fountain of Life, Spahn hired him; and he let the youth’s groovy friends move in to do chores on the place, sleeping rough and running around barefoot and letting the sunshine in. 😈 Helter Skelter! On the new freeways, chic Laurel Canyon was just a few minutes away.

Natural gas — methane — can be smelled all over the West Valley but especially in Porter Ranch. (Natural gas is odorless; if you can detect it, it’s man-made. They put the sulfurous odors in so that it can be detected.) I’ve been driven off trails in Las Virgenes and elsewhere in the Wild West by the stench. It’s awful that the State has recently re-committed to pumping tons of methane into the West Valley storage grounds even after the scandalous Aliso Canyon leaks.

https://projects.laist.com/2019/after-aliso/ LAist.com has put together a good discussion of the problem. 😈 Because educated public discussion is always great at solving society’s problems! HA ha ha ha ha ha……

HAPPY HALLOWE’EN FROM THE VIEW!!😈💥🌋🔥👻🎃🧛🙈🙉🙊⚡️⚰️🦦

Fire Down Below?

A Walk, a Wall, a Wash: Tujunga

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Unusually dark, almost black squirrel. Portola seems to point to that squirrel; his gesture is a message for the Indians! Hallo; Portola didn’t explore California in a ship. Nor did he wear a Conquistador’s moro. Hmm..I suppose it’s meant as *Portola, the embodiment of Cortez*, still in the eighteenth century savaging the continent, still seeking Califia and her gold-banded viragoes. Hmm… *the* *art made me think*. So I guess the squrrel was just a McGuffin?

Homeless campfire scorched half the ”greenway.”
Sigh.

I went over to check the the other side — and sort of cheered up…

Mulefat — *Baccharis salicifolia*. *Salicifolia* = ‘leaves like a willow.’ The gorgeous pink flower — somewhat a variation from the usual white — was the last bloom of summer on the Wash. The other blooms had already gone the way of all pretty pink panicles.

Cholla. Sweet and tasty; eat like watermelon. Peel the red skin and spit out the pits.

Growing up and through the arms of a sheltering white sage, I found a saltbush. I had just seen one on Sugarloaf last week, and tried to research the species name by using the usual head-banging method: stabbing words into the search engine, which you think would describe the plant to a botanist, if you were trying to think as botanists think. Chaparral erect shrub; numerous ~~spikes cones~~ inflorescences small yellow flowers; leaves ~~dull~~ green ~~like oak but pointy spiny spiked pike-shaped~~ lobed; September flower. Try! If you pull up saltbush I’m a Dutchman. I finally gave up and went to check the Linnaean for mulefat; and up came a random nature page that said it featured mulefat — but not showing mulefat at ALL. But there was a saltbush in the corner of the shot, and they, mentioned it the caption. So now I know! You too. Check out the fabulous leaves. They’re soft, not sharp at all.

Like almost every plant in the CFP this could easily be a prized garden ornamental. I went to Home Depot today on a yard-redo-job, and in their entire enormous garden wing, they had NOT ONE CFP plant for sale, except the remote possibility that some of the succuulents might be CFP cactus. But they didn’t even carry cholla! (I doubled right back to the Theodore Payne Foundation, nevermind the traffic, and got the right plants for a California garden…) My California Initiative — PLANT YOUR FUTURE! STATEWIDE, NO SALES TAX ON CFP PLANTS! Write your assemblyman. California plants hardly need water and don’t need any fertilizer or soil amendments WHATSOEVER. Every nursery in California should have them on prominent display, instead of their fifteen aisles full of butterfly bushes and pesticides and hi-nitro jump-juice that are poisoning the world. A CFP yard is practically free and brings butterflies and birds and bees TO LIFE and TO YOUR DOOR; a ‘conventional’ garden (lawn; plus your normal hyper-toxed beds-and-borders full of showy exotics) is expensive and KILLS LIFE DEAD. It’s as simple as that.