Short Cut To Sloane’s For Take-Out

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Safer-At-Home, yes, but not Saner-At-Home. Cabin fever is the fever we’ve got. Even a chance to run around the corner to grab lunch, in a driving rain, while wearing a mask, became a welcome change of scene. We can’t eat out, but we can eat out, in. View here, cool old mid-century pedestrian Valley Village, coming through in a coronavirus pinch.

The worst hazard? Being forced occasionally to hop into the gushing gutters, by that new Urban Boor — uggh! — the mid-sidewalk lane hog, who saunters along in the middle, lost in the cell phone, or walking Poopsie, expecting everyone else to do all the social distancing.

Springtime In Tujunga

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ONE YEAR AGO DEPT.

Any respectable View finds it hard being shut in, and the Valley Village View is no exception. Even the cats seem to long for the blooming sage of the San Gabriels, but seeing the peaks are shrouded with fog, they despair.

What with the rain and the coronavirus and all, the locked-in View can only take solace in the hiking memories of yesteryear. (The cats are on their own.)

A year ago, April 10, 2019, things were different. Remember, Patient Reader? You were there…. It was the Superbloom…we drove into the hills, and clambered up Big Tujunga Canyon. You’ve suppressed it; forgotten, but bring it back now, to soothe and heal. Who knows, maybe you’ll remember what we discovered that day about the CFP. Bask in the sunshine, inhale the fragrant spring breeze, feel the scratch of bracken on your itchy shins…

Sages for ages; sagebrush for rage-hush.
  • Filla you lunga
  • …inna Bigga Tujunga
  • The roadcut coming in. Chunks of this chic Art Deco black-and-pink rock
  • …lie all over the Valley floor.
  • I think these formations are what they call “sheeted dikes”
  • Folded up like an umbrella, and uplifted
Eriodictyon californicum, or yerba santa,  cures respiratory ailments so well it’s called “consumptives’ weed.”
  • Black sage, S. mellifera

Below, a sage with flowers that are a vivd dark blue. It has basal leaves, rather than up and down the stalk; and the whole plant is slender and gracile. It took me a while, but I finally reckoned that this is CHIA, which is a true sage, Salvia columbariae. Who knew? Well, J.P. Harrington, for one, who recorded so much Chumash lore about chia as staple food and medicine, that Jan Timbrook of the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum wrote a fascinating paper on it.

https://escholarship.org/content/qt7d33504g/qt7d33504g.pdf

  • Growing with the sage, California bluebells and clarkia
  • Phacelia campanularia

View now, deep into the middle canyon.

  • Penstemon
  • Virbinum dentata, which isn’t native here, but to the Southeast. I haven’t found any references to it in California. There was quite a bit of it in Big Tujunga. Invasive? But beautiful.
  • Ceanothus blooming like wisps of smoke

Ascending the ridge, fire has obviously taken a toll on the oaks. This huge survivor, clinging near the top of the canyon, anchors its own little woodland terrace, with sumac and sagebrush, and the trail itself, as dependents.

Old burnt boles, big as boulders, and massive trunk sections, some broken, some saw-cut, litter the willow-thickets lower down in the canyon.

View of the east wall as you climb the west ridge.
  • Yucca whipplei, ‘Our Lord’s Candle’
  • This mugwort, A. ludoviciana, came up from the Big Easy and got herself a yucca-daddy for protection
The yuccas were as high as I got that day; this is the View back down the canyon. The sunny land behind the mountain is the SFV, which receives all this watershed. The peak is Mt. Eaton, highest point in the city. In fact this entire View is within the City of the Angels. Go ahead and gasp; I did.