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.

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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…

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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

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View now, deep into the middle canyon.

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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.

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

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