Tag Archives: Chumash

Fire Down Below?

Last week I finally found the elusive 3rd trailhead into Santa Susana State Park and it was the Gateway to Hell. It’s on something called Larwin Avenue in Chatsworth (which good luck finding) where condos and cul-de-sacs abruptly give way to wild, recently incinerated lands. The park is in the pinch point of the braid of three Transverse Mountain Ranges (the Simi Hills, the Santa Susana Mountains, and the Santa Monica Mountains.)

Google satellite View of the trailhead from what must have been this past spring, 2021. Note the chaparral looks more or less normal, not overgrown…in fact sparse, patchy or dead in spots, where the soil also appears singed. Drought, sure…but, a few rock-hollows show grey ash char. *ROCK-hollows.*

Caves around here are famous; the Chumash and Tongva and Tataviam shamans performed rituals in them, and many have cave paintings. [I’m assured that the few surviving true Chumash medicine caves are well-hidden and protected; and that all the art on the accessible cave walls is punk graffiti.]

It took a week of internet searching (“recent wildfire, Chatsworth, Larwin Street, SSSP, brushfire, Simi Hills…”) before I could find any news reports of the ”Jeffrey Fire,” last month. The capture above is from KTLA 5. There’s clearly some good fuel growing on the back slopes. But of course, that isn’t what’s burning, and its smoke would be black, I think, at least a little.

VITRIOL FALLS?

🤔It appears the scorchiest parts, and the freshest and deepest ash piles, are under rocks, between rocks, and deep inside piles of rocks. 😈Sure, tree roots smolder underground… 🤔 Why aren’t the crowns and limbs burned? And note how everywhere there’s flow of scorch, out of the holes…rivers of incinerated rock and oddly altered soil and, sure, some wood ash, and bounded or banked by badly deformed rocks?

🥺Why aren’t the rocks on top of piles of burned rocks, burned? 😈 Subterranean downdrafts. 🙄 Then why is there scorching in loose soil around seemingly emergent pillow basalts? Why does the pillow basalt appear to have wiggled its way up out of loose earth at all? Why is it that the minerally altered gravels that washed over or splashed on boulders, has become chemically fixed to their surfaces, like emory? Why is the ground under my feet still hot? 😈⚡️Erosion; homeless cookfires; turbidity currents, weathering invasive grasses. Punk kids! Drought! Dogs off leash! 😌This cliff face; there are an awful lot of different kinds of rock here from many different ages, intruded by volcanics and altered. Isn’t that a great recipe for hydrothermals, or gas releases? 😈 I only have Craig Claiborne’s recipe: too much sodium, not enough sulfur.

🤔 You’re sure there are no volcanoes in Los Angeles, right? 😈That’s right, you’re wrong. 🤭Never have been? 😈Well, if you mean the Conejo Volcanics… 🤔Oh right; where were they again, down in Orange County? 😈Maybe there, but also…..maybe, just over the hill. I mean, MILES away, five at least, past Topanga. Anyway, eight, ten million years ago. When all this was underwater! 😏 Right, making these pillow basalts! 😈Fire-fused sandbags buried after an old Western movie shoot. 😏 I wonder if anyone else has reported there are gorgeous volcanics in Santa Susana Pass. 😈It would take you YEARS to find a refrence in the geology literature online! HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. 🙄 So no Miocene pillow basalts intruding the Chatsworth Formation, at all? 😈 It concerns me that this matters so much to you. 😏…nor in the Simi Hills, no hydrothermal flows through all this basalt, no methane seeps near these fault zones, no underground mineral fires, or Vitriol Falls flowing out of those two white- and-yellow steaming mounds? 😈 Did you search for those things? 😌Yes! 😈Find anything? 🥺No. 😈THEN THERE ISN’T! 🥺Then what’s all this stuff here? 😈None of this stuff is here! HA ha ha ha ha ha! 🙄And who believes bloggers, I suppose? 😈 Welcome to the Devil’s Slide, sucker! HA ha ha ha ha ha!

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.

This looks like blueschist, super-metamorposed from Pre-cambrian Mendenhall gneiss. ”Fancy Rock” from the Limerock Cyn assemblage?

The tan-yellow veins in the schist were dazzling with mineral sparkles in the afternoon sun; but the sparkle never comes out in photos. Gold-bearing ore? Gold Creek is a Tujunga Tributary.,.

Van Nuys — a Viewing

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A new series applying history’s tire-iron to the rusty Hub of the Valley

*Millard Sheets, 1965. HSFC Bank on Van Nuys Boulevard, now Bof*A

PART ONE: ‘WHEN ALL THIS WAS FARMLAND’

In the photo below, the sun-baked middle ground is today’s Van Nuys. Van Nuys is unusual in America in that the historian can’t sanctimoniously intone in the opening paragraph “For time immemorial People of the Ancient Ways called this land home, at one with Nature’s Ways.” Nobody called Van Nuys “Home” until Isaac Newton Van Nuys. And for the Tongva, the Chumash and the Tataviam who lived in the surrounding hills, the way to be at one with Nature’s Ways was to hot-foot it across the Valley as fast as you can in the dry seasons; and avoid it completely during the dangerous wet times when it swamped and Tujunga or Pacoima Wash could rampage. Of the two pleasant spots where natural wells and pools spring up, and the Indians had mixed-tribe rancerias, neither of them is Van Nuys. One was Encino [Siutcanga]; the other of course was San Fernando [Achoicomenga], where the Mission was built. But Van Nuys belonged to the antelopes. When the Indians were almost gone and the Mission was secularized the Valley was heavily ranched. Gen. Andres Pico took his interest in San Fernando and the northern half of the Valley, and his brother Don Pio Pico, the last Californio governor who had signed the original grant in 1846, by the 1850s had somehow come to own the southern half himself — including the cattle-tramped hardpan we call Van Nuys, that nothing in the middle:

Mission San Fernando and the vast San Fernando plain.hoto 1875 by a railroad surveyor; taken from SF Pass looking toward Cahuenga.

Don Pio Pico, executing rights from a complicated chain-of-title victory from the Land Commission, sold his half of Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando to the Yankees because beef prices had collapsed. Around 1865, the 15-year Gold Rush boom waned, then busted. The days were bygone of Valley rancheros driving thousands of cattle up to San Francisco and Sacramento to be slaughtered for twenty-dollar beefsteaks. The problem of a sudden oversupply of lowing stock solved itself, when a searing drought gripped the Southland, leaving the Valley full of cattle bones by 1868. The land sale was pervaded with ironies; Col. Fremont had made the Mission the headquarters for his California Battalion, and across these very plains had ridden in triumph to receive the sword of capitulation from Gen. Andres Pico, who claimed the Mission and its lands for his own. In 1848, Pico capitulated to save the Californios’ ranchos. Now the Picos were selling theirs off to the Yankees. But Pio Pico was the wiliest California land-jobber of them all. Realizing a profit from the switch of allegiances to Norte America, even so land could be liquidated legally, was their triumph. Pio was was certainly shrewd enough to realize a Hotel on the Plaza would bring steadier returns, and more genteel social connections, than running stock on the hoof. It was a brilliant trade for Pico, one of his canniest bets, for it kept him in good credit. It was also a decisive investment in downtown Los Angeles; the first moment when the dusty pueblo earned any notice at all in the world. Pio Pico put the Merced Theatre in back of the Pico House, with a door to the lobby; and put Jules Harder in the hotel kitchen; and made LA a city on the map.

**1880s**: **the combine and twenty-mule team.**

And it was a great deal for Van Nuys, who was the partner responsible for actually running the farm operation. Lankershim had tried dry wheat farming for a couple of seasons but had busted. Van Nuys said he could do it, and he did; with true Yankee luck, the middle of 1870s when he experimented brought some good El Niño rains, and by the 1880s Van Nuys was harvesting boatloads of grain with Lankershim’s capital, and shipping it overseas at a branded premium. Thus it was a great return for the San Franicsco investors, too. Lankershim had found this land destroyed by heavy cattle ranching and failed to work it; it was Van Nuys who made it into a productive monocrop that brought other wheat farmers to make fortunes here too. He was one of the greatest farmers who ever lived.

The Home Ranch was the Van Nuys’ farmhouse, where he and Susannah (Lankershim) raised three kids and a million bushels of wheat.

But who was Isaac Newton Van Nuys? He wasn’t the founder of Van Nuys, but it was named for him when he sold in 1909. (The town was founded in 1911). Speculative towns are usually named after the developer’s signature on the front of the check, not the farmer’s name on the back. Significantly, also, the name ‘Van Nuys’ is practically the only one of the developers’ original town names not to have changed; meaning, Van Nuys never actively voted to change its identity, as did social-climbing Toluca to Lankershim to North Hollywood, or Zelzah to Northridge, or Marian to Reseda, or Owensmouth to (the equally unappealing) Canoga Park. In the next part we’ll take the man, and his name, and his Life, in View, to glean what civics lessons we can.

Location, Location, Location

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“Chuck Chaparral — #1 in the West Valley! How can I help you… I see sir…you ‘can’t deal.‘ Perfectly natural. You think humanity is ‘crazy’….you just want to get away? You want a place like on your T-shirt?? [off:] Stella, we’ve got a live one! [into phone] Sure, sir; well, no, I mean yes, of course that makes sense!. Humans stink, you say? And it must be the West Valley? If I may ask — oh, I see: because you’re sick of the East Valley! And Covid…the idiots everywhere? You just want to hibernate until the New Year? Who doesn’t! Yes, sir! I can help you find a cave. That’s my business, and I’m the best. I can help you escape into oblivion, with the most comprehensive listing of caves in the Simi Hills for the grouchy bear. [!] Sorry, I mean, the sentient patriotic American. Don’t eat your phone, sir…”

“Why not start at the top? There’s nothing like Munits’s Cave. The Garden of Allah is under McDonald’s parking lot; and Pickfair is only that crushed rubble in the garden paths of Pia Zadora’s much larger estate. But here, you get a surviving authentic California cave PACKED with bees, crow guano, and local history. Smell the fragrant Chumash shamans? Catch the dust and sweat of our ranching days? How ’bout that breeze redolent of the Malibu coast, just over that hill…? That chilly fog is part of the deal. It’s the “beards of the Elye-wun.” They’re out hunting you see –?? Mythic romance? Priceless. Just look at your View…!

“Of course! it’s top dollar, sir! I understand, sir — you’re no performing bear with a TV series. No, I don’t think you were one of the Gentle Bens, or something. No need to use that tone of growl. If that’s ALL [ahem] YOU CAN AFFORD….there is ONE snug little excavation, still available in the Munits Cave-Adjacent Area…across the street…right…down… there. See it?”

“Small? Whaddaya want, a Great Room? Sorry. Yes…yes. YES, in full View of the looky-loos at Munits’s. Plus the echo of bird calls in the bowl is enchanting. Ravens croaking at 5:30 am? Like Mozart!

“I wouldn’t say the outlook is dreary, sir; I say, it’s spooky and mysterious! [cringes at the roar] But you and I are OF COURSE of one sympathy, sir! I know what you want! [listens; sighs; winds watch] Yes, sir, Covid, Brexit, democracy’s collapse, I get it! (thinks; thinks; thinks). So, I have a couple of ideas yet. Would you go a few miles north? Yes, ‘north of Victory Blvd.’ YOU WANTED RUSTIC, sir! Come on, we just have time before sunset. Don’t growl at me…just, calm down, get in the car, sir….I’ve got some hot chai in a thermos, here…got it? Don’t mind about my suit, it’ll dry, only, the backseat upholstery… [shakes off spilled tea] Thanks, sir. I appreciate it. Yes, I can open the windows. Turn on KUSC…? Zheesh. I mean, sweet!”

“So up here, we’re no longer Malibu-adjacent, but we ARE, out of West HIlls and into Chatsworth [gulp]. Thank God, eh sir? Tee hee. AND, we’re in the Santa Susana Pass State Park! Oh, you like it, sir? Well, this is a very exclusive neighborhood…but undiscovered, if you know what I mean. You do? [kaching!] Well, sir, let’s mosey up the pike. Yes, sure, take your mask off. Nobody comes up here. Why would they? There’s only Chumash cave paintings and California native plants! Ha ha! Ha ha ha ha! Ha…ha…ha… Here’s our first..well not a cave, but really, a modernist luxury canopy. Climb right in.”

“Well, sir, yes, that is graffiti. Those are NOT Chumash cave paintings, you’re right, they are the scribblings of idiotic local children who have no love in their lives, and live in video games, and must deface nature to yawp their pathetic existence. So, you’re right! I agree, it’s no den for a settled, mature bear. I just thought I’d show it to you, and — OK! I don’t like the look in your eye. Let’s move on, sir. This here’s a beauty. Look at the yard! Clamber in.”

“Drafts, you say? Well, these modern caves; all one big space. Sorry, that’s all I have, sir. That one up there? Hmmm, well, I don’t know, it isn’t on my listings… but here it is on CaveFax; and it’s available, sir! And what a fine View of the San Gabriels!”

“Quite a bargain, too. But you can’t want a cramped little cave like that, sir? Cozy? Really? With all your excess [ahem] Covid-lockdown bulk? Well, you’ll have nice rut appeal, and a lovely View if you ever decide to wake up…[thinks] and sir, you realize, it is right on the Old Santa Susana Stagecoach Road? I mean, right on it – you’d have Number One, Old Santa Susana Stagecoach Road as your address!! That’ll give you LA cred! You’ll take it? Well, sir, I’ll get the papers in order! I’m sure nothing at all is going to trouble your long winter’s nap. The gardeners come on Wednesday, wear your earplugs, sir. It’s a pleasure serving you, and remember, Chaparral Covers the West Valley! Happy New Year!”

The Valley Village View

Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.