Nature Seekers Bring Problems of Urban Life to Angeles Forest

Rich Aranda holds the big .44 Magnum loosely in one hand and swigs deeply from a king-sized can of beer with the other. “See that big rock up there?” he says, gesturing broadly with the gun barrel toward a pockmarked boulder perched on the shoulder of the hill in front of him. “When I got divorced, I used to come up here. That rock was my ex-wife. I put a lot of chips in that thing.”

Then, with the beer still cradled in his left hand, Aranda, a used-car dealer from Maywood, zings six quick ones down the line. Like Kirk Douglas mowing down a gang of trail thugs, he barely aims the gun, holding it low, sending up spurts of dirt around an old fire extinguisher that someone has propped up 50 yards away.

This is Pigeon Ridge, one of 14 designated shooting areas in the Angeles National Forest. Like many other spots in the mountainous 1,000-square-mile forest, it is a place of excess.

The gullies are ankle-deep in shell casings and ammunition cartons, trees are shattered from the impact of illegal armor-piercing bullets and dumdums and the air resounds with the thunderclaps of sophisticated weaponry.

“You have freedom here to have a gun, right?” says one of the hundreds of “plinkers” who hike up to Pigeon Ridge every weekend and stand shoulder-to-shoulder, pumping hot lead into the hills. “You have to use it.”

Law enforcement agencies and the U.S. Forest Service, which administers the Angeles forest, are gearing up this weekend for the onslaught of summer, when increasing numbers of city dwellers shuck their inhibitions and do their thing in the wild. Authorities are beefing up patrols, clamping down on rule breakers and putting up heavy steel gates at some entry points to head off nighttime rowdiness.

The Angeles, second in popularity among all the national forests to Tonto National Forest in Arizona, has become the prime escape for millions of Los Angeles area residents. “You can think of the Angeles as a giant urban park,” said George Roby, the forest’s supervisor.

Have the Problems of City Folk

That means that it has become both a place for Southern Californians to engage in their notoriously unrestrained recreational activities and a setting for transported urban customs, including crime, traffic and vandalism. Use of the park has increased about 20% in the last four years, officials said.

“We have all the problems that you have in the city,” said Don Stikkers, supervising ranger in the Mt. Baldy District, the forest’s most heavily used area that includes San Gabriel Canyon and the heavily traveled California 39.

About 27 million visitors a year jam into the forest, almost two-thirds of them entering along the southern face of the San Gabriel Mountains overlooking the San Gabriel Valley. The Forest Service is putting the finishing touches on a two-year project to set management priorities for the busy forest.

Here are some of the busiest stretches of forest in the nation. On a hot day, as many as 4,000 cars will drive up the narrow, two-lane highway to the Crystal Lake Recreation Area at the top of the canyon 28 miles from downtown Azusa, according to the concessionaire who runs the campground there. Up to 30,000 people will spend some time in the canyon. On holiday weekends such as this one, heavy traffic often forces the Forest Service to close the lower entrance to California 39, which has been blocked above Crystal Lake for the past eight years by landslides

“This is L.A.’s backyard,” said a beleaguered Ranger Rita Nolan last Sunday, handing a picnicker a citation for lighting an illegal campfire (the forest is already under Stage I fire restrictions because of drought conditions) and waving accusingly at a pair of skateboarders schussing down the middle of California 39.

For many park users, the forest is apparently a kind of frontier where they can escape society’s petty restrictions.

“I can come out here and drive like I want,” said Ron Romero, a trails-biker from Alhambra, taking a break in the dry lake bed that has been designated for off-road vehicle use in the San Gabriel Canyon. “I won’t get a ticket. I can get away from things here, relax, take out my aggressions on my bike. You can’t drive like this on the street.”

Another shooter on Pigeon Ridge suggested to Aranda, a short man with a red bandanna tied jauntily around his head, that there should be more supervision in the shooting area (where, according to one Sierra Club official, so much buckshot has been fired already that “when the streams flood and then recede, they leave little shoals of shotgun shells instead of sand and gravel”).

“You want to charge money to come up here?” Aranda demanded, handing the big “Dirty Harry gun” to his wife and picking up his rifle. “This is already a police state.”

Plinking--outdoor shooting without the restrictions or discipline of formal target practice--is just one of the heated activities that recreation-minded visitors, bristling with equipment, practice in the forest. They race down hiking trails on rugged little mountain bicycles. They slosh through streams on fat-wheeled all-terrain vehicles or climb canyon walls on “trails bikes,” high-slung motorcycles designed to go through obstacle courses with enough space under the chassis to hop boulders. They careen along Angeles Crest Highway on “superbikes,” light but powerful motorcycles that can reach speeds of 150 m.p.h.

Sometimes, the activity takes on more of an urban coloration. “There are campers whose only camping equipment is a ghetto blaster and an ice cooler full of beer,” Stikkers said. “The forest can be a place where people think they can live it up and do the things that (authorities) won’t let them do in the city.”

Late-Night Parties

Late-night parties, with teen-agers drinking beer, using drugs and filling the forest with loud rock music, are still a problem in some areas, according to residents of cabins in some of the canyons.

“On a bad weekend, both parking lots (at the Chantry Flat picnic area) would be full and dozens of radios would be blaring,” said Linda Parker, who leases a cabin with her husband in the Santa Anita Canyon. “Sometimes, groups would go past our cabin hooting and hollering, and the next day there’d be fire rings and beer bottles and potato chip bags.”

For Forest Service personnel arriving from some of the more conventional parts of the national forest system, the first contact with the Angeles can be jolting, said Stikkers, who has been on the job for eight years. “You go through a period of culture shock, then you decide there’s a job to do here,” he said.

But too often the anything-goes frontier style can mean bloodshed or a damaged environment, enforcement officials added. Along with hikers and picnickers, there are highway speeders, felons and some of the most determined vandals in the United States, they said.

On the slopes above Azusa last year, there were five rapes, 21 aggravated assaults, 19 auto thefts and a homicide. Sheriff’s deputies arrested 193 people in this heavily used section, including 29 juveniles. No forestwide figures are available, though officials said that, if anything, serious crime appears to have diminished in recent years.

There were also 118 motor vehicle accidents along California 39, involving 165 injuries and one fatality (down from nine fatalities in 1985). Many of the accidents involved driving under the influence of alcohol, according to the California Highway Patrol. So far this year, there have been 43 accidents, 15 of them alcohol related, with 48 injuries and one death.

Nobody keeps track of the shooting accidents on Pigeon Ridge or elsewhere in the forest, but sheriff’s deputies said they happen with relative frequency. “They’re shooting 360 degrees up there,” said one deputy, patrolling the highway. “You can get shot in the back and not know where it came from.”

172 Weapons Violations

There were 172 weapons violations in the San Gabriel Canyon last year, according to the sheriff’s station in San Dimas. Many of those involved trigger-happy law breakers, like the four alleged gang members that sheriff’s deputies arrested in a hollow near some picnickers last Sunday for target practicing with a stolen .25-caliber automatic handgun.

The plinkers, whose activity is legal as long as it is kept in designated areas, tell stories of ducking ricochets from other parts of the area or being “pinned down” by rifle fire along a one-mile trail that connects Pigeon Ridge to the highway.

But the most visible urban presences are litter and vandalism. “There’s a general urban mind-set that thinks there will always be somebody there to pick up after you,” said Stikkers, gazing ruefully at a highway turnout scattered with trash.

Despite some pollution to the lake, the Crystal Lake campground is an idyllic spot, where campers can sleep beneath giant 200-year-old Ponderosa pines while squads of guards patrol the area to keep rowdies out.

The bucolic setting has not deterred local vandals, however, said Dave Denis, manager of the campground. “People bring in big rocks and drop them into the toilets--just for the sheer hell of it,” he said. “We put these 4-by-6 beams up as barriers to keep vehicles out of the campground. But people will bring their trucks in and yank them out and set them on fire. It’s a challenge.”

Even with its litter-strewn slopes and its urban tinge, the Angeles is still a place of natural beauty.

“I laugh when people tell me it’s nothing but Godforsaken brush country,” said Rich Hawkins, fire management officer for the Arroyo Seco District, driving last week along Angeles Crest Highway, which reaches elevations of more than 7,500 feet. “There are times out here when all the computerese and the people problems just vanish and, suddenly, it’s like it was 50 years ago, and you get that warm, fuzzy feeling.”

Magnet on Hot Weekends

The forest, which stretches along the San Gabriel Mountains as far as San Bernardino County and includes a big chunk of the Sierra Pelona north of Saugus, is an especially powerful magnet on hot summer weekends. Visitors can unwind at the edges of the San Gabriel River in the low chaparral country above the San Gabriel Reservoir, or they can traipse along high mountain passes where the thin air seethes through conifer forests and where elusive big horn sheep bound across rocky escarpments.

There are 240 miles of fishable streams in the forest; 220 bird species and 63 mammal species live there, including mountain lions and mule deer. There are designated wilderness areas that are virtually inaccessible to visitors with no hiking or climbing skills.

The forest should be maintained as a place of peace and quiet, many visitors say. “But peace and quiet is definitely in the eye of the beholder,” said Roby, who, as supervisor of the forest, must mediate among diverse groups of forest users. “Everybody says, ‘We need someplace where we can get away.’ The ORV (off-road vehicle) people say that they come up here to get away from urban pressures.”

The Forest Service is in the final stages of producing a land management plan for the forest, setting priorities for the next half-century. Though the plan will not be unveiled until mid-summer, officials say it will propose ways to reduce the heavy use of areas like the ORV and shooting tracts.

The Rincon ORV area, which draws 200,000 vehicles a year, continues to be one of the more worrisome problems the plan will address, Forest Service officials said. A 2 1/2-mile strip of dry mud with streams meandering through it, the ORV area extends right down to the edge of the San Gabriel Reservoir, where 4-by-4s gather to test the mud.

It is often a chaotic scene, with growling vehicles careening down the speedway or exploding through mud and water. “Every other weekend or so, we come down to get dirty and have fun,” said Bob Casaburi, an auto mechanic from Glendale, sharing a speedy, low-to-the-ground “desert racer” car with his 17-year-old son, Bob Jr. “You’re civilized all week long. On weekends you want to break loose.”

Concern for Water Quality

But local water officials worry that all the traffic through the water, which feeds into wells supplying water to the San Gabriel Valley, could have long-term consequences.

“So far the only thing we’ve seen in the water is some oil,” said Linn Magoffin, chairman of the water master’s board for Los Angeles County’s Main San Gabriel Basin. “What we’re really concerned about is that somebody will get some engine cleaning materials in there. One quart of PCE (perchloroethylene) or one of the organics they’re using nowadays would be enough to pollute the entire reservoir.”

Stikkers said the Forest Service plans to place obstructions along the area’s streams to “minimize contact between the vehicles and the water.” Last weekend, the agency began closing the area’s parking lot at night in order to prevent use of the ORV area in the dark. “That’ll help the water quality,” Stikkers said. “There’s a higher risk of accidents at night.”

Another knotty problem is motorcycle speeders on Angeles Crest Highway. Last year there were five motorcycle fatalities along the highway, which has become a gathering place for superbikers. “On the weekends, invariably a motorcycle or two goes down,” said Sgt. Santo Marino of the sheriff’s Crescenta Valley station.

“You have inexperienced drivers, going through the mountains with the sun on their face and the wind in their hair,” explained CHP Officer Steve Munday. “It’s exhilarating. They start taking each turn faster, until they’re almost hypnotized. But centrifugal force sends them over the yellow line, and either there’s a head-on collision or they go off the side of the road.”

Forest administrators and public interest groups see little hope of changing the recreational habits of forest users.

“Restricting ORV use is like squeezing a balloon,” said Bob Kanne, vice chairman of the Angles chapter of the Sierra Club. “Stop it in one area, and it pops up somewhere else.”

The long-range plan instead is to cut down on some of the excesses through enforcement, hoping for a few attitude changes along the way, Stikkers said.

“You always hope that once people start to appreciate what they’ve got here,” he said, “they’ll start accepting some responsibility for it.”

Up on Pigeon Ridge, there are already budding signs of good citizenship. Jose Luis Curial laid down his hunting rifle, which he had been using to pump bullets into a tree stump, and told how the plinkers had pitched in last year to put out a would-be wildfire.

“Some of us saw these two guys running down the trail, and we saw smoke in the brush there,” Curial said gravely. “I said, ‘Hey, they started a fire. Let’s put it out.’ Everybody opened their beers and started spraying. It took 10 whole cases of beer to put out that fire.”

ANGELES NATIONAL FOREST 1. Angeles Crest Highway. A mountain road frequented by “super-bikers,” who have frequent accidents speeding around its hairpin turns.

2. Chantry Flat. A picnic area where young people sometimes gather for loud late-night parties.

3. Crystal Lake Recreation Area. A privately run campground beleaguered by litterers and vandals. Because of drought and heavy usage, the lake is too polluted to allow swimming, although fishing is permitted.

4. Pigeon Ridge Shooting Area. Unsupervised shooting section, where gunmen fire armor-piercing bullets at trees and blast away at makeshift targets.

5. Rincon Off-Road Vehicle Area. A chaotic weekend scene, with rock-jumping motorcycles and speeding 4-by-4 vehicles, which is a possible pollution threat to the water supply.