Tag Archives: Flow Falls

Go With The Flow

2 Replies

CANYON REJUVENATION DEPT.

We’ve had only one and a half inches of rain this season. That’s poor.

In early spring of 2019 I explored what I call Flow Falls above “the Grotto,” which had recently been rejuvenated by heavy rains,15-odd inches. Re-View and be rejuvenated yourself. It may be years before this insignificant, exquisite place gets to put on a show like this. I forgot about this film because I thought I had spoiled all my footage — the glare in the slot-canyon was so intense that day, shot after shot went to white. Yesterday, to cheer myself up I went back over the footage…it was so nice. I thought, maybe Mabel Mercer could make it all work ; she can do anything…Patient Reader, she did! Click and be transported to the ephemeral Eden of a seasonal waterfall through some of the most fascinating geology on God’s green Earth:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YB0IyZ1peE3OvvOvP_ujn-29DYpoS8n3/view?usp=sharing

For years, Clio and I had tried to explore this fascinating little side chamber off La Tuna Canyon in the green Verdugo Hills; but the slender bowl at the bottom had always been overgrown, just a dry rocky “theatre” at the bottom of a 50 foot trail down from the road. Pretty, and romantic, but the ledge sealed the place off from the barricade of brown dead live oak and fiery red poison oak above. I didn’t even notice the syncline, it was so covered with blackberry brambles. Since we were in drought in those years, there was no “flow” at all here, ever. It looked like an old abandoned quarry. I didn’t dream such a picayune place could support a spring, much less a waterfall. Then HUGE fires in 2017 scourged it, choking it even more with thick muddy ashes and debris. Then 2019’s fierce rains flushed it out and rejuvenated the whole drainage. I’ll continue to document this astonishing vest-pocket Yosemite as I visit.

Miss Mabel Mercer

“My Shining Hour” (1943), from The Sky’s the Limit. Music by Harold Arlen, words by Johnny Mercer.

A Boffo New Game for Patient Reader — “ID That Cal. Native Plant!”

2 Replies
High over the grotto, grows this divine weed.

Whee! TGIF folks!

TGIF, everybody’s raring to enjoy a well-earned weekend of drowsy leisure, resting and relaxing.

Why not instead play our new dementia-chasing game, “ID THAT CALIFORNIA NATIVE PLANT!”? Enjoy fascinating hours of online sleuthing and repetitive Googling in service of science. Don’t kill your brain cells this weekend; fill them to bursting with hard-earned KNOWLEDGE that BENEFITS MANKIND!

The fun is, you get to match your wits online in real time, against other readers of the View. For whoever gets the right answer to this brain-teaser first, wins the grand prize. It’s a better depression cure than Sudoku; and it BEATS SOLITAIRE HOLLOW!

PRIZE: the right to name the subject matter of a Valley Village View Blog post.Yes, YOU LUCKY WINNER will get your own personalized VVV article, on any subject thou choosest. Even rotisserie baseball, if I must.

  • The bee approacheth
  • The bee feedeth

All LUCKY WINNER has to to do, is: tell me what the Hell the Linnaean classification (Genus species) is, of this gorgeous native California wildflower. Here are the hints:

I found these growing on the sunny roadway and high canyon walls over the Grotto in the Verdugo Hills; say, 1000 feet above seal level. Riparian foothill chaparral, or fan-plain chaparral, is my best guess for the habitat type. The sage-green stems stretch to about six feet in height, seeking the sun: they reach out horizontally from the canyon walls where they have to. The spindly branches are covered with fragrant pale white-to-pinky-lavender flowers, which attract bees like nothing I’ve ever seen. They have dark magenta pistils. They bloom in October, obviously. I don’t think they are asters, but they might be. Pinnate leaves, it seems.

NOT AFFILIATED WITH “GUESS THAT CAL. NATIVE PLANT.COM”




Holding A Place

2 Replies
My rocks! My precious rocks!

The wise oak, or sycamore, builds his house upon the rock.

Of course, those same smug oaks (and sycamores) are doing everything they can to crush the very rocks they snagged and built upon, into base sand…only…very…very…VERY…slowly. Thus many generations of men pass and die, without anybody spotting what the crafty oaks are doing: creating their own real estate. (Hmmm…very Dutch.)

Below, two sycamores near the top of the canyon are down to bedrock after the latest storms. The first is well-supported, but the second is hanging precariously, all her soil base gone. Enlarge, and you can see, however, that she has a single long tap-root plunging down into the waterfall pool. Sycamores are clambering and long-lived, and the pool is a good water source. I’d bet on the survival of this tree, which now has only a few tiny sprigs of spring life, at right.

  • The oaks and sycamores building a terrace in the slot-canyon known as Limerock. Hang. Onto. The. Rocks.

Let the waste grains slip through their roots — let the other plants find a season or two of riot on the shifting sands of the creek bed. Any tree who wants to be a Big Tree, will hang onto their rocks like Rockefellers. Fires come, floods go. Hang. Onto. The. Rocks.

They build up the terrace behind them — until a season of flood strips away ten vertical feet of canyon soil, down to bedrock, and the buttresses and arches of the oak’s understory are exposed, high and dry. Still — as long as they can clutch a few boulders, they will soon start building up new soil around them, to cover their roots again, with the upgrade of a brand new canyon floor. 400 years of Romanovs, indeed.

“A conservative is a fellow standing athwart history, yelling “Stop!”

William F. Buckley

Flow Falls, Above the Grotto

Leave a reply

We just Viewed “The Grotto,” that newly-rejuvented canyon with the amazing compressed rock formations, and the newly-revealed lava flow waterfall. So now that “daylight and champion” are let in, I hiked up and took a look above “The Grotto,” to discover what was over that Bernini fountain.

https://vimeo.com/322625096
Behold Flow Falls, revealed by recent clearance of a side canyon in La Tuna Canyon Park.

Flow Falls. I name it so, by right of explorer’s discovery. Flow Falls is a geological gem, holding (and held by) a resilient native plant community. It’s the most picturesque cascade in Southern California, an idyll of the Valley’s natural history, and a tabula rasa for the re-introduction of Oak Woodland flora. Parts of it have been scraped almost bare, but this also exposes some of the most awesome geological demonstrations I’ve ever seen, and about which I’d love to know something, anything. Please, student geologists, bring a sandwich and a dog, or better a date, and take the most thrilling hike of your life, Then write us a paper on what’s going on in this canyon!

https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/5445/

I have found no description or reference to these stunning cascades anywhere online. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy don’t seem to know about it. A couple of hiking websites note the trailhead, but stop at The Grotto. Judson’s 1934 geology report on the Verdugos mentions the compressed rocks, and the lava flow, but apparently didn’t go far beyond the Grotto either, and he didn’t mention the cascades. The primeval oak terrace that deterred me from hiking here before, doubtless deterred him, and others. “I’d Toin Back, if I Were You.”

One of the few photographs available, of how the “Grotto” looked until last week.