ISOLATION POINT
Sunset on CA 2 photo: Kristin Miller
This spring I flew from Los Angeles to New York for the first time in three strange years. Looking east from the tarmac at LAX I could see the San Gabriel Mountains massing behind LA: the mountains’ expanse reduced downtown’s towers to a featureless brown smudge. Seen from the air, LA’s mountains triggered a landslide of memories of days and weeks among those peaks when they provided solace and a means to survive the rupture of the pandemic. The view from my window seat was like looking backwards through a telescope: the LA basin zoomed out after an extended period fixed in one place and focused on all its particularities. At the other end of the flight, I landed in daylight at JFK where the city skyline was the only vertical topology for miles, the Palisades a nearly imperceptible shadow on the horizon.
Los Angeles is, confoundingly, a mountain town that’s forgotten its mountains. The San Gabriels encompass dozens of peaks with elevations ranging 5,000-10,000 feet, two National Forests, a National Monument, five wilderness areas, three ski hills, and countless trailheads and campgrounds. Despite all this, they are largely absent from the public image of the vast sprawl that is Los Angeles.
Growing up, mountain going wasn’t unknown to me; a chunk of every summer passed visiting my father’s parents at their retirement cabin in the northern Adirondacks. I first backpacked on a trip with my all-girls summer camp in the Berkshires at 13. Occasionally, my family hiked in the Keene Valley — home to New York’s highest mountains, which top out just under 6,000 ’— and we made forays into the Catskills and Greens. As an adult, though, I mostly thought of myself as an urban hiker, walking miles through the city, exploring its parks and hidden corners. The hardwood-forested lowlands closest to New York with their endless miles of tree tunnels didn’t speak to me. It was only in the boreal regions from the High Peaks north, where the granite-flanked summits broke through into alpine bogs and panoramic views of the Adirondacks, that I caught hold of some ineffable thing that made me want to hike higher, farther.
Towns where such mountains were accessible, however, were on the far side of battlements of suburbs, hours away from the boroughs by a car I didn’t own. In the early Web era, when communities still formed primarily through proximity, I found mountain towns and the worlds of their associated sports extremely white, exclusionary, and rife with disquieting politics about the “purity” of unpeopled “wilderness.” [NB: this has still not changed enough, though it is changing]. “Mountain people,” I learned, were a distinct physical and social type: lean, rangy, humorlessly earnest, full of a WASPy puritan zeal that valued physical difficulty for its own sake—hiking as self-flagellation. I embodied virtually none of these qualities: I was too thick, too loud, too irreverent, too interested in books, movies, and cities. While I felt deeply at home in the pine bogs and high lookouts of my Adirondack summers, could happily spend hours running barefoot over the squelching moss, foraging blueberries, swimming in the glacier-scoured lakes, this did not qualify me as a “mountain person.” It wasn’t rigorous and self-denying enough. I was, perhaps, a little too hedonistic. And yet, while living in one of the largest US cities, most renowned for its contributions to media and car culture, I have become a person who spends days and weeks in the mountains.
Los Angeles, in fact, might be the most under-the-radar mountain town. Many outside of Southern California disdain this region as a flat, dry, waste of freeways and strip malls, but the reality is far from this. The Transverse Ranges march out of the Pacific in ranks from the coastal Santa Monicas that end in the Hollywood Hills, to the Verdugos, San Gabriels, and San Bernadinos. There is hardly a place in LA County where sizable hills or mountains aren’t visible some of the time. In its eastern portions, the city drapes around green ridges laddered with cantilevered houses and stair streets, which recall other vertical cities like San Francisco or Hong Kong. Cross those hills and you might confront a view of snow-capped Mount Baldy rearing 10,000 feet up from the valley floor, just 40 miles away. John McPhee writes compellingly of how the San Gabriels, as prominent as the Rockies and among the fastest rising mountain ranges, are constantly crumbling into the LA Basin. Mostly, the San Gabes slump gradually, but occasionally they unleash dramatic torrents of rocks and mud capable of wiping out entire subdivisions. The city’s outer limits are punctuated by a monumental system of earthworks and debris catchment basins designed to control this too-porous border between city and mountains.
I’ve had the good fortune to travel a bit in the Rockies, Alps, and Sierras, to experience high mountains. But I’d never lived with mountains so accessible to me. I’d cashed in a lifetime of cycling and public-transit ridership and purchased a car when I moved to California, primarily to travel to its wilder zones, but I don’t actually need it to be a hiker in LA. It’s possible to take Metro buses right to the base of the San Gabriels and walk up to 5-8,000 feet and back in a day.
Glendale, the Verdugos, and San Gabriels seen from Griffith Park photo: Kristin Miller
When I first moved to Los Feliz and began exploring the trails in Griffith Park, I was charmed and a bit stunned that I could walk to the top of Mount Hollywood—higher than Catskills peaks an hour’s drive from New York—and be home within a two-hour round trip. Gradually, I ventured into the city’s other parks, and then, armed with an Alltrails account, I stumbled into the San Gabriels. I’d intended to begin 2019 with a January 1 hike up Echo Mountain in Altadena, but I arrived to discover a huge crowd of Angelenos with exactly the same idea. It was early enough in the day that I could recalibrate, so I sat in my car poking at the Alltrails map of nearby routes, and saw that there were many. I found one of the right length and elevation gain and loaded the directions. At first I drove through expensive, unremarkable suburbs like many in the LA periphery, but then I turned onto the two-lane mountain portion of California Route 2, the Angeles Crest Highway, and found myself in unknown terrain.
The 2 left Flintridge-La Cañada, and immediately rose through wide-open high desert, covering thousands of feet of elevation in just 14 miles of hairpin turns hugging the flanks of the mountains. By the end of the drive the vegetation had graduated from spiky yuccas and Spanish bayonet to alpine forest, and the temperature had dropped at least 20 degrees. I didn’t have words for this, just inchoate questions, mostly “Howwww??” I arrived at the trailhead, then followed the ruins of a tourist railway to the top of Mount Lowe, a bit breathless from the altitude change. Before long, I was 5,600 feet in the air with a golden-hour view of all of Los Angeles, including my neighborhood, only an hour’s drive away.
I also had this view entirely to myself. It summoned that nebulous feeling — a mountain euphoria, a bewilderment of the senses brought on by distance and scale that the brain can’t process — that I’d brushed up against before in high places. I thought about the first time I’d felt it, in the mist on the summit of Mount Marcy, New York’s highest peak, following an exhausting day-long hike to reach such heights. Mount Lowe, though, is several hundred feet higher. As if on cue, an approaching pair of hikers broke the silence and I recognized the bubbly contour of Quebecois French, so familiar from the Adirondacks. I introduced myself and we chattered and gesticulated about the “HOW” of it all, of mountains like these so close to a city like that.
After this, I ranged farther into the mountains, solo and with friends, tentatively at first, but with growing confidence. I learned the Joshua Tree-like boulders of Chilao, and the Sierran remoteness of Cooper Canyon, its trail switchbacking down rocky cliffs to the waterfall-lined floor. All of this is within an alpine ridge that is sometimes only one mountain wide: from many of the San Gabriel peaks you can see the Mojave Desert on one side and the Pacific on the other, while standing thousands of feet above either in the midst of towering pines. I closed that first year with the San Gabes and began 2020 in my first mountain-terrain snowshoes, guided by a new love—a backcountry snowboarder, for whom the mountains resonated in similar ways. We headed off trail over feet of heavy snow, occasionally finding air pockets. At one point I fell waist-deep into a tangle of bright red and green manzanita branches, and laughed as I attempted to lever myself out with my new trekking poles. We crested the end of the route at sunset, the white peaks ahead of us corona–ed and on fire, and cussed and hooted our way downhill, no real words available for the elation of what felt like an auspicious beginning to the new year.
Sometimes we hiked together, but more often we served as lifelines to each other’s solo mountain ventures. I learned the importance of leaving trail details with someone who could identify my car to rangers if necessary, the limits of last light and how far the temperature would drop come nightfall. I was delighted to get end-of-the-day texts that read “still alive,” followed by pictures from the snowy inner reaches of the range. One of the last things we did in the world before everything stopped was hike Mount Hillyer, looking out over the San Gabriels’ high peaks and valleys before heading back to the car in a deepening twilight. While the news was increasingly precarious, I remember that day feeling full of intimacies and possibilities as we coasted down the 2 under a bright moon.
Just 10 days later, after a cascade of cancellations, closures, and shelter-in-place orders, terrified, unable to sit still, I fled to the mountains, which had recently caught significant snowfall. Below Waterman Mountain, I passed a knot of people ignoring orders and clustered at the base of a shuttered ski run. Just down the road, however, the trail I was aiming for appeared empty. I sped uphill, my breathing ragged under a bandana covering my nose and mouth. The footsteps that pocked the buried trail ahead of me dwindled to few, then none. I shifted my gaze to the snow-loaded trees, icicles dripping from Jurassic-size pinecones. I slowed and uncovered my face as I realized I was well and truly alone. Social distancing, indeed.
I needed this: a muted white world, saturation and noise turned down. I needed escape from the abrupt, painfully acute stress of sharing breathing room with others, from a harsh new vocabulary of contagion, quarantine, R numbers, exponential spread, doomscrolling. I wandered off trail, my steps biting into the freshly set snow. I found my way to an open cirque of Jeffrey pines; a creek I could hear but couldn’t see rustled underneath the powder. I sat on a stump and sobbed. It was March 18, 2020.
Back in cellphone range I texted a snow report to the snowboarder and we joked ruefully about hiking parallel to each other at a safe remove. Then the parks closed.
Before the county shut down, I’d been preparing for the final sprint of my dissertation process. Instead, that energy transmuted into an acute flight response. I found it nearly impossible to fight the urge to scream, to run as far as I could from endless hours stuck in place, poring over writing and research, even more time alone with my thoughts.
Movement also helped release the mounting pressures of sharing an apartment with a housemate and their particular constellation of anxieties and risks. Walking the hills of LA from Cahuenga Pass to Echo Park, there was a sense of space and privacy in the mostly empty streets. Without the trails, I found routes up and down stair streets and through hilltop neighborhoods, breathing, getting perspective, spending hours on the phone, and walking myself to exhaustion. In April and May of 2020, according to my phone, my daily average was between five and seven miles. I counted down the days until the parks and the National Forests were due to reopen.
When we could find space between the panics of our respective households, [ ] joined me on some of these walks—dating reduced to a touch-free, Victorian courtship. The space between brackets is the only fitting pseudonym for him; our connection was, like so many others formed and lost within the pandemic pause, defined more by its absences than its presence. Yet on those walks, the raw fact of company was so powerful. After the first one, I slept deeply through the whole night for the first time in weeks. When Angeles National Forest reopened, we made plans to hike together, masks on—a trust that few were willing to share in those test-free, vaccine-free days. We drove separately up the Crest to the trailhead. [ ] showed up after me and we headed into the woods, making our way to an empty, rocky summit a few miles off. The day was sunny and warm even at high elevation, a blunt jump cut from the deep snow just a few months earlier. Far from any other hikers, we sat at what felt like a safe distance, took off our masks and looked at each other.
The renewed access to the National Forests added literal breathing room to my life, and I started hiking farther, higher whenever possible. In those gougingly lonely months, I hiked not for penitence or penance, but solace, not for rigor, but greater embodiment. As the refusals we were asked to practice extended inexorably, I turned towards something instead of away. I turned towards the mountains. I chose to meet this part of Los Angeles with my eyes, ears, feet and hands. Of course, mountain-going is solitary, but that aloneness is inherent to the practice made it more understandable, easier to keep company with than the echoing quiet of the walls we were expected to stay within, no end date in sight. Here was company of a different kind: new tracks and piles of rock with which to get acquainted, trees, birds, bobcats, deer, snakes, foxes, butterflies, frogs, fish, lichens, fungi. There were orange flashes of California poppies, candy purple lupines, and the strange red torches of snow flowers poking straight out of recently thawed dirt. Blobby granitic boulders, bleached by the high-altitude sun, were perfect for scrambling and reclining alongside blue-bellied western fence lizards doing their characteristic sets of tiny push-ups. I was frequently jarred by moments where a tiny downtown LA would appear in the gap between peaks. An Emerald City-like spike of towers, downtown looked even more like some sort of Hollywood backdrop against the suddenly crystalline skies of LA with no traffic and thus no smog.
Looking at Downtown Los Angeles from within city limits photo: Kristin Miller
I had unwittingly slipped into a state that Florence Williams has detailed in her work on nature and the human nervous system. By being outside as much as possible, putting my skyrocketing levels of stress to some mechanical use, but above all giving myself new experiences — such experiences as were available — that were moving, expansive, generative, instead of restrictive, heartbreaking, and horrifying, I managed to hack my fight/flight overdrive. I found awe to counter the shock.
As spring segued into summer, and the city began to toy with some outdoor collective spaces being safe-ish, the forests and parks repeopled with friends. Masks on and carefully spaced by our respective blankets, sure, but we felt sharp joy in being present with each other. In between mass protests, nerve-rattling public alerts about curfews, and LAPD helicopters circling at all hours of the night, there were moments that had the feeling of an idyll. My pod of friends, all of us some version of partially employed, joked about our “hot teen summer” of idling in parks, on beaches, in the woods. We had no particular place to go and no timeline for even the next few weeks, let alone months. It was a liminal pause with the indeterminacy of a high-school break. We had barbecues, watched movies outside, surfed, and hiked. [ ] and I traded days in the waves with days in the mountains, and the profile of the San Gabriels became a topography of our relationship.
In a year that brutal, though, nothing good could last: fire season swept in, metaphorically and literally. Multiple friendships were torched by pandemic politics and everyone’s senses of risk, or lack thereof. My housemate left LA to move back in with family due to extended unemployment. My relationship seared to inflexibility and snapped over enervating debates about community care versus “individual liberty” — he was, perhaps, too much of a “mountain person” after all.
I was already reeling, yet more bad news filtered down from Northern California, trailed by dense clouds of smoke. Beloved redwoods had been consumed by a massive complex of fires that brushed the edge of my graduate campus in Santa Cruz and incinerated several friends’ homes. Before I could take a clear breath, small fires began in the San Gabriels and then fused into a massive blaze that climbed from the front country into the alpine. I anxiously refreshed the Forest Service Inciweb maps showing red dots of high heat growing larger and watched as they leapt up slope into the area around Waterman, then jumped Highway 2, moved down into Cooper Canyon and burned out the heart of the Crest. For weeks on end, the sky was a pantone card of shades from raw ochre to burnt sienna, the sun an angry red ball that traced a disorienting perpetual sunset across its arc. The air was barely breathable—covid masks put to an additional and unwanted purpose. But masks or no, with every grieving breath, we still inhaled loss.
Fire skies in October 2020 photo: Kristin Miller
For months, the city’s hills and mountains had been a primary refuge, and now I had lost them, too, along with places that were talismans of the best days of a very bad year. I got a phone call one night from a friend who lived closer to the foothills. I hadn’t seen him in months. He was distraught, calling me from inside his shower with air purifiers running full blast after having been stuck inside for days, asking if we shouldn’t just leave this hellscape. But where was there to go and with what money? No one was working. Inland states lacked California’s covid protections and borders were closed everywhere. Hurricane season and the harsh Northeastern winter were coming.
One evening around September 11th, I couldn’t take being boxed and, despite the purple air warnings, I walked uphill towards Mount Hollywood. Outside, fine ash powdered the windshields of the cars on my street and collected on the waxy leaves of the magnolia trees. By the time I approached the Observatory, cinders were landing in my hair and stinging my eyes. Though there were still hours to last light, the familiar view of Crest from Josephine Peak through to Mount Wilson was completely obscured and the sky was a deep charcoal grey; the towers of downtown LA were barely perceptible through the haze and the heavy particulate matter made their lights flicker strangely. I gave up and went home.
Of course, fire is part of the lifecycle of LA’s mountains. Every fall the resinous, highly flammable chaparral meets the flint strike of the dry Santa Ana winds with predictable results. In “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” Mike Davis wrote of how every inch of the western Santa Monicas had burned at least three times over the course of the 20th Century. But the subdividing of the region, along with the “total fire suppression” strategy the park services adopted to preserve property—supplanting indigenous controlled-burn practices and common wildlands—has increased the risk of catastrophic fires for decades. Add to that the intensity of climate crisis-spurred heat and drought, which are estimated to increase burned acres anywhere from two to six fold, and raise the average temperature of wildfires from 1,700ºF to 2100.º Heat that intense melts the silica in soil to glass and scorches roots, removing a layer of refuge and possibilities for regrowth. Where these meet the need of thousands of Angelenos new to the mountains and desperate for any way to be together, you have a recipe for total conflagration.
The fires smoldered for months but eventually abated and I settled into the now-routine waiting game of walking miles through the city and checking for when various public lands would reopen. Accumulating grief added fuel to my compulsion to move, and I spent day after pandemic day pacing Los Feliz, the Verdugos, and San Gabriel foothills, with Davis and McPhee’s words in mind. Sometimes I stayed out past last light and watched the tracery of miles of mostly vacant streets and freeways stretching out below my vantage point. Where I stood, though, there were only the dark masses of the peaks around me, stars overhead, and the soft frequency of crickets.
After dark in the San Gabriel foothills photo: Kristin Miller
By mid October, the least burned parts of Angeles NF had reopened and I returned to Mount Hillyer, where I had last hiked just before the pandemic. There was a surprising amount of green, unscorched forest, but at the summit a firebreak had been bulldozed through grassy clearings, pine stands, and rocky outcrops: an on-the-nose reminder that pre-pandemic life was on the far side of an unignorable divide. Other days in the high mountains followed and I accepted that hiking these trails meant coming home with my legs between shorts and shoes coated with ash. At least I could be outside.
As fall moved in, the election loomed, and covid cases began to spike and then skyrocket, I gave myself the loose goal of hiking six of So Cal’s highest peaks by the end of the year. It was partially a means to mark time that, eight months in, was growing lonelier by the day. Hikes with friends dwindled and then ceased again, and being in public spaces of any kind became increasingly fraught. Moderate hiking was no longer sufficient balm for such immoderate times. At the start of the year, a solo hike to the 8,000-foot summit of Waterman Mountain had been a notable personal achievement. In the first week of November, I hiked four peaks between 8 and 10,000 feet, including a solo ascent of Mount Baldy, and I didn’t even notice until after the fact.
I closed 2020 the same way I began it, by snowshoeing in the San Gabes, only this time I was alone and the snow blanketed a massive burn scar. I drove as far as possible up the 2 and parked before the heavy orange gate barring the road, strapped on my snowshoes and then skirted the closure by following the Pacific Crest Trail as it dipped away from the highway and out of sight. As I made my way towards Cloudburst Summit, the clean snap of the snow and the upwelling of being back in a loved place mingled confusingly with the damp campfire smell of the charred forest. On the Waterman side of the highway still-green pines were dusted with powder like an image on a holiday card. But on the other, dead needles dropped from blackened branches and contorted trunks stabbed through the ground cover. I arrived at the trailhead for Winston Peak to find that a massive felled tree, where I’d rested at the end of a sunny hike back in the spring, had burned clean away.
Nonetheless, the feeling of refuge remained. Or, at the least, the post-inferno woods were more soothing than the bunker of my apartment, where there was only endless news about insurrection, local covid cases in the tens of thousands, hospitals stretched to breaking, or the more than 6,000 Angelenos who died that month, and where I dissociated away weeks without interacting face-to-face with another human. But there were the mountains.
That surge ebbed, and new friends joined me on shared hiking projects, along with new ways of being in the San Gabriels—outside remaining safer than in. I picked up snowboarding again after a long hiatus, my previous attempts having been stymied by many of the same feelings that made me feel unwelcome in hiking, in addition to the cost and difficulty of access. After vaccination, my fondness for scrambling the San Gabriels’ boulders transformed into rock climbing, another sport in which I had previously seen no place for myself. Day hikes extended into overnights and later multi-night backpacking trips in the Eastern Sierra. My car, outfitted with a cozy slab of memory foam, became a rolling overnight base that has carried me from snowboard runs to backcountry snowshoeing to hot springs to boulder fields, and then back downslope to LA—which, still, is not on the map as a mountain town.
As we’ve emerged blinking into our reconfigured social worlds, and become too-familiar with the surge and recede cycle of covid, the flight response that propelled me through shutdown has faded, but the habit of movement and a semi-feral need to be outside has not. The incremental progress of climbing a mountain or a rock face, the head game of “just keep moving, just to the next bend in the path, just make it to the crux” paced me through finishing a book-length dissertation. One more step, and then another, became a mental framework to survive years in which the horizon only extended to the next day, maybe next week if we were lucky.
Backcountry snowshoeing in the Eastern Sierra, 2023 photo: Kristin Miller
