The Splendor of Switzer Land : Waterfall in Angeles Forest Gives Intrepid Hikers Worthwhile Destination

Almost any weekend, the Switzer Falls area of the Angeles National Forest is as crowded as a Southern California beach. Parking lots overflow. Large families picnic under oaks or push baby strollers through the wilderness. Young men exercise their inalienable right to party. And left behind is the usual assortment of litter, with discarded beer cans leading the way.

All this is not a pretty sight, which is why ramblin’ Chuck Shamblin of the U.S. Forest Service likes to visit the falls during the week. Shamblin is the ranger charged with enforcing the law in the vast 700,000-acre forest. It is sometimes such a perilous assignment that he wears a handgun and carries both a pump-action shotgun and an AR-15 assault rifle in the cab of his Forest Service truck.

But during the week at Switzer--which is only 10 minutes off the 210 Freeway in La Canada Flintridge--man is not a problem for Shamblin. “Now is the time to be here,” he says, pulling into the empty parking lot off Angeles Crest Highway. The place is virtually deserted, returned to its natural balance. Even the litter is gone, having been picked up earlier by a crew from a juvenile detention camp.

“I’ve forgotten how beautiful this area can be,” says Shamblin, who has been working in the Angeles forest for 20 years.

During his four-hour hike, Shamblin forgets about his job--his only bust is a young couple who let their sleepy-eyed beagle roam unleashed--and concentrates on hiking one of the Los Angeles area’s most scenic trails. But as he starts into the forest, he knows he isn’t out for a leisurely stroll. His destination, the bottom of the falls, is a tough two hours away. He will have to work hard. And he will have to pay attention.

Switzer Falls, Shamblin points out, is known for punishing the careless and the ignorant. Numerous fatalities and dozens of serious injuries have occurred at the falls, says Shamblin, who puts most of the blame on drugs, alcohol and macho-driven stupidity. Getting lost is also easy, he says, because vandals have destroyed almost all of the trail signs.

And the fact that the bottom of the falls is only two miles from the trail head creates the erroneous impression that anyone can do the hike. Actually, it involves a lot of boulder climbing as well as a strenuous trek up and over a steep mountain.

Shamblin walks through a narrow tree-filled gorge, part of the Arroyo Seco Canyon, which begins near the north slope of Mt. Wilson. The boulder-strewn stream that flows down the arroyo drops over the falls, about a half-mile from where Shamblin is standing. “One morning a few years ago, I saw a bobcat over there,” Shamblin says, motioning to an overgrown gully.

Shamblin is on the Switzer section of the Gabrieleno National Trail. It splits at the site of what used to be Commodore Switzer’s camp--a wilderness resort built by Perry Switzer in the 1920s, now reduced to a few fire pits and broken-down stone walls. By taking the trail at the left, a hiker can reach the top of Switzer Falls in only a few minutes.

Shamblin stays on the Gabrieleno, crossing the stream and following switchbacks up a mountain. He passes a dangerously sheer section shored up with small granite boulders--placed there several years ago by a Shamblin-led work crew. About halfway over the mountain, the trail divides again. The Gabrieleno goes to the right and winds up in Pasadena some nine miles away. Shamblin takes the one on the left, which goes to Bear Canyon.

The trail hugs the side of the mountain and often narrows to an intimidating two or three feet. At high noon, Shamblin makes sure he walks in the shadows of the shrubs above him--for shade and to shelter him from falling rock. Occasionally, he stops to admire the view across the pine-studded peaks.

As soon as he comes down into the arroyo again, Shamblin leaves the trail at a point where it passes a 5-foot-thick dead cedar. He heads upstream into a steep ravine, taking a sometimes-indistinguishable trail that crosses the stream at numerous points and forces Shamblin to climb on and over boulders of all sizes. He finally gets to a small 30-foot-high falls. A lot of hikers stop here, thinking that this is the bottom of Switzer Falls, and are disappointed by the lack of grandeur.

The true falls lies another few hundred yards upstream. First, however, hikers must negotiate a potentially dangerous arched granite shelf about 25 feet above the ground. Shamblin, still athletic at 48 years of age, easily climbs across and hikes the rest of the way to the bottom of Switzer Falls, where the ravine suddenly dead-ends.

The falls is actually multi-level, starting some 200 feet up the mountain and carving a diagonal route through the granite. It culminates with an 80-foot vertical drop into a small lagoon. When the stream swells with rainwater, water cascades over the falls in sheets 10- to 20-feet wide.

But even today, in drought conditions, it’s about two feet wide, well worth the difficult hike to get there.

Shamblin watches the falls splash into the lagoon. He dips a finger into the water and estimates the temperature at 60 degrees. Then he picks up a discarded Styrofoam hamburger container and carries it out with him. On the way back, he runs into a couple of hikers returning from Bear Canyon.

George and Betsy Keliher of Pacific Palisades are longtime hikers. George began hiking in the Angeles forest as a junior high student in the early 1930s, during what is called the “Great Hiking Era.” But he had not hiked the falls area for 15 to 20 years.

“It hasn’t really changed,” he says, looking out at the high-desert vistas. “I don’t think there’s any place in L.A. as accessible as this where you can see so much beauty.”