Tag Archives: San Fernando Valley

Taking a Long View — Santa Susana Pass

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The Santa Monica Mountains, viewed from Santa Susana Pass. The notch in the Malibu Hills, center-right, is Topanga Canyon. Mt. Cahuenga is at the far-distant left, shrouded in haze.

After 30 years in Los Angeles, and umpteen of hiking the mountains that ring the San Fernando Valley, I finally made my first visit to the western rim, the Santa Susana Mountains. Here you can take the View down the length of the SFV, alias Sprawlsville USA, dba Home Sweet Home. This plain holds almost two million people, and is the main trunk watershed of Los Angeles.

I am a camera, and the camera is a water drop. This is what a water drop sees, landing atop the “Devil’s Slide”. Rejecting the fate of instantaneous evaporation in the scorched hills, it faces Plan B, percolating through the rocks, flirting with the lichens, rubbing against the oaks’ shady roots, then mingling with millions of other water drops, all squeezed up tight in a concrete straitjacket, taking the long slide down to Chatsworth, speeding on through Reseda, Van Nuys, Valley Glen, Valley Village, Studio City, Universal City and finally, forced through the Glendale Narrows in the hazy distance, to wherever that place “Los Angeles” is, that now claims it owns you and all your buddies.

Carey McWilliams famously called Southern California an “island in the land,” hemmed in as it is on all sides by rocky cliffs, abysmal chasms, anvil-like deserts, and a deep ocean with treacherous currents. Getting in or out of here, was historically extremely difficult. Santa Susana Pass Stagecoach Road, useable since 1861, was a breakthrough engineering feat that sped travel and commerce between the isolated southern and northern parts of California.

The famous Devil’s Slide was the last hurdle travelers from San Francisco or Santa Barbara had to face to get down into the Valley. Horses and mules were blinded, heavy wagons were winched and hoisted, ladies and gentlemen got out, tightened their bootlaces, and hiked, scrambled or fanny-slid down the scree slope to re-board the coach down in Chatsworth. This was how people got to Los Angeles for 22 years, until the Southern Pacific came in. The park is laced with faint stretches (unmarked) of this almost forgotten late Western horse-trail, or early California “freeway.”

These hills were the territory of the southern Chumash, and the rocky outcrops are reputed to shelter one of the largest and most artistically developed complexes of cave and rock paintings in North America. They are closed off and their locations are kept secret to all but the tribal members. They rue this state of affairs, and you don’t have to dig deep for the irony: Chumash culture can’t be understood or appreciated without people having access to it, but if they do, without very expensive security apparatus, they would almost certainly be defaced and plundered in short order. For now, we must let our imaginations run all around the rocks to find them.

They say one sign of incipient madness, is to see figures of gods, heroes, and mythic lovers suddenly appearing in the landscape. (For instance, envisioning in the boulders the mummified head of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III.) With an entrance gateway like Santa Susana Pass, it’s no wonder Southern California became known as the “Land of Fruits and Nuts.”

As beautiful as the landscape is, the Cal. Flor. Prov. at this park seems quite diminished; only a couple of interesting plants, amid a whole lot of ungrazed Spanish fodder. It makes sense, given the site’s history as a travel corridor (weeds weeds weeds) and the heavy grazing of the hills by herds under the Rancho Simi, Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando, and Rancho El Escorpion brands. Not to mention the years and years and YEARS of the Pass being used to shoot Westerns; much of this land was the old Spahn Movie Ranch.

But it also may reflect finances: this is a young park (1990s), and it was immediately threatened with closure by the Schwarzenegger administration under the ridiculous pretense that state parks were breaking the budget. The sword of Damocles is still officially over the park, which has no main entrance, signage, visitor’s center, water fountain, or historic / archaeological / ecological interpretation. Park on the road shoulder and hack across the chaparral, is the general access plan. Trail markers are unreliable and few. As with the Chumash Sistine Ceiling, I don’t whether, or which of, these fascinating road cuts are the Butterfield Stage Road; I don’t know where the Devil’s Slide was. I don’t know where the posse of Los Angeles Rangers circled the hideout of Juan Flores, capturing the notorious killer outlaw and his desperadoes. I don’t know where John Ford built and shot “Fort Apache”. But it was all in here, somewhere. It’s a fun place to let your imagination scamper.

Kagel Canyon

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https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/8208/1/Howell%2C%20Jr%2C%20BF%201949.pdf

Marvel of nature, Kagel Canyon. Underneath, a sharp V-shaped terrain. But at some point in the Pleistecene, or, gulp, even more recently, a sudden Uplift Event pushed the Valley up hard against the San Gabriels, which were squeezed up 2,000 to 3,000 feet essentially “overnight”, cracking through the sedimentary crust, which then flopped back down again, broken up and tilted every which way. All this caused a lot of rock and dust and sand, both from the Valley’s seafloor side, and the mountains’ cruystalline rock side. Much of it tumbled down into Kagel Canyon and filled it with this “fanglomerate”, rocks and gravel mixed with flood alluvium. This forces the creek into a deep, confined channel. During the recent rains, it cut at least three feet deeper than it had been last fall. View, and read what Benjamin F. Howell has to say about Uplift in the Kagel Canyon formation.

“An Early Map of the San Fernando Valley”

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This map (undated: 1910?) makes clear how the “Old Spanish Grants” in the San Fernando Valley got broken down into subdivisions. The names “Lankershim” and “MacLay” and “Porter” ignore the fact that the original Castillian grant, of lands (but not waters) to be controlled (but not owned) by the Mission, was on behalf of the Tongva and Tataviam people of the Valley. This map shows how the Californios skipped over the Indians, but asserted Mission land rights for themselves, only to sell them to various Yankees at bankruptcy prices.

N.B.: The land that became Valley Village lies between the deathly fingers of the pre-concretized Tujunga Wash, and the hungry snake of the pre-concretized Los Angeles River. The confluence explains why there was no development here, except for orchards, until 1949. This part of North Hollywood was just too flood-prone. until after construction of Hansen Dam.

(Valley Village, by the way, was the district that put the peaches in the City of Lankershim’s epithet, “Land of the Peach.” Before 1940, the orchards here were frequently inundated by Tujunga floods.)

Don Antonio Maria Osio, in “The History of Alta California”, writes about the Monterey coup d’etat of 1836. A Southern California, or Sureno, rebellion against Alvarado threatened to split Alta California in half. The Southern forces were mustering at San Fernando Mission, and Osio had been sent on an embassy of peace. Alvarado’s haughty reception enraged him: 

“Pena [The governor’s secretary] wanted to spare Senor Alvarado the trouble of speaking and proceeded to reply. He stated that [we], the Senores Comisionados, had yet to comply with the formalities of our duty by presenting our credentials. Therefore, Senor Gobernador had decided to press on and would not give even the slightest indication of how he felt about the matter.  If a treaty were to be negotiated, it would be in Sepulveda’s presence.  Pena’s cunning arrogance was merely intended to terrify. [I made] the following reply: Sepulveda was aware of the distance between San Fernando and Cayeguas; he had not sent us to a foreign country. Therefore he did not think someone could be so ridiculous as to demand credentials, and go into the formalities of exchanging them…

[We] wished to negotiate before a war broke out pitting brother against brother or even worse. Since there were fathers and sons on opposite sides, the consequences would be disastrous. Fathers and sons would be stripped of their natural bonds. One would inevitably grieve when he found the bloody remains of the other, but if that were the goal, the vast San Fernando plain would lend itself well.”