Wilderness Road Rises to New Status : Travel: U.S. Forest Service names Angeles Crest Highway a scenic byway, hoping to lure more sightseers to its natural attractions.

U.S. Forest Service officer Chuck Shamblin rolled down his window as he cruised Angeles Crest Highway, breathing in air filled with the scent of Coulter pine, white fir and incense cedar trees.

“Driving down the Angeles Crest Highway, late in the day, I’m thoroughly at peace,” said Shamblin, 47, whose job as an enforcement and protection officer takes him from end to end of the 65-mile roadway. Under a bird’s-egg-blue sky, he can see vistas from Santa Catalina Island north to the Mojave Desert.

Shamblin is not alone in his appreciation of the winding, two-lane highway that travels above the smoggy San Gabriel Valley along some of the highest mountain landscape in Los Angeles County.

On Friday, at ceremonies held at the road’s southern end near La Canada Flintridge, the highway will be dedicated as a national scenic byway--a first, Forest Service officials say, for a wilderness road so close to a major urban area.

The Crest traverses the county’s largest stretch of undeveloped land. In contrast to the valleys and coastlands below, not one gas station, stoplight, billboard or metered on-ramp clutters the route from La Canada Flintridge to Wrightwood.

“Although known locally as a scenic drive, the highway’s full potential has not been realized,” according to a Forest Service report on the byway status.

With the designation, Forest Service officials hope to attract more sightseers and Sunday visitors to the Crest. Signs at the eastern end of the road will also direct drivers toward a nearby national scenic byway, Rim of the World in San Bernardino National Forest.

The new classification will give the Crest more prominent status on maps and in tour guides. In addition, the Forest Service will upgrade visitor centers and signs to emphasize the highway’s legend and lore and flora and fauna. Officials want to call attention to its rich history, including anecdotes about the Mt. Wilson astronomical observatory. Prohibition-era gangster Al Capone reportedly had a summer home in the area near the observatory, and the rugged terrain served as a hide-out for the notorious 19th-Century bandit Tiburcio Vasquez.

Skirting the ridge tops and ravines from 800 feet to nearly 8,000 feet above sea level, the Crest provides access to the heart of the 650,000-acre Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Last week, Shamblin showed off his favorite highway. Shamblin, who oversees the Arroyo Seco District, which includes portions of the highway, has spent 20 years riding the Crest.

He knows where rocks rise above the landscape as if they were rough-hewn cathedral walls, where the copper-colored earth is dotted with red and yellow wildflowers, where the gray fox, mountain quail and Nelson bighorn sheep roam.

The road is remote, and, as Shamblin points out, its proximity to Los Angeles is a blessing and a curse. It puts hiking trails within easy reach of millions of people. It is a delight to ride through picnic grounds, Shamblin said, and smell barbecues cooking food that represents the ethnic panoply of Los Angeles.

The natural world, with its rattlesnakes and bears, can pose difficulties for humans along the highway. People simply interacting with one another can create just as many problems.

Bodies are dumped along the isolated highway, stolen vehicles are stripped, illegal drugs are grown. It is a place of rendezvous and liaisons. Cars careen off the road. The unaware can slip and fall into ravines at scenic overlooks.

Barely a 30-minute drive from downtown Los Angeles, the Crest accommodates diverse dramas. To illustrate the range, Shamblin cited two of his Labor Day weekend encounters.

Not far up the road from La Canada Flintridge, he found a garbage bag. Inside were the remains of a goat, five chickens, a lamb with its heart removed and a homemade stuffed doll. All the animals were decapitated; red and black fabric enveloped them.

“This wasn’t a teen-age prank,” he said, explaining that the bag probably contained the remnants of occult activity. This sort of uncommon occurrence, he said, is difficult to police. In this case, he was not sure if the ritual practices had occurred in the forest or elsewhere.

In an unrelated event, Shamblin discovered a woman, in tears and alone. She said her husband, riding a motorcycle, had abandoned her because she had complained of saddle soreness on the ride from Long Beach.

Soon the husband reappeared on the motorcycle. A Pasadena taxicab followed. The husband hugged his wife, gave her a bouquet of roses and helped her into the cab, which he had summoned to carry her home.

Because the forest is principally a weekend playground, little weekday traffic appears on the Crest, save for some commuters, a few bicyclists and motorcyclists, an occasional sightseer or hiker, and workers for the state highway system or Forest Service.

As Shamblin scanned the steep hills near Kratka Ridge the other day, he said: “This is wall-to-wall people on a winter weekend.” The highway, which is subject to closures during the snowy season, provides access to four ski resorts and a number of other recreation areas. On an average winter weekend, 6,000 visitors come to ski; another 42,000 frolic in the snow on the roadside.

By the time it was completed in 1956, California Route 2--built in part by convicts from San Quentin and Chino--had been nearly half a century in the making.

Shortly after the turn of the century, the Automobile Club of Southern California, Pasadena officials wanting more business and the Forest Service had pushed for a road from Arroyo Seco in Pasadena to Cajon Pass in the high desert of San Bernardino County.

Access to the forest in those days came via burros on steep trails, a cog railway, horse-drawn stages on dirt roads, or foot. Naturalist John Muir, who visited the forest in 1877, said: “The San Gabriel range is more rigidly inaccessible in the ordinary meaning of the word than any other that I ever attempted to penetrate.”

In 1919, Forest Service officials complained that it had taken firefighters days to get to several fires in the Angeles National Forest region. In the end, more than 151,000 acres had burned, showering ash over Pasadena and darkening the skies from San Gabriel Canyon to Pacoima Canyon.

Fires such as these eventually provided the momentum for construction to begin in 1929. Because of the rugged terrain, the highway was built “in fits and starts,” said John W. Robinson, author of several books on the San Gabriels. “But everything changed with the construction of the Angeles Crest--the backcountry of the San Gabriel Mountains was all of the sudden accessible.”

Today, the highway also provides access for commuters from Palmdale and Lancaster, who use and sometimes clog the Crest south and west of its intersection with Angeles Forest Highway.

Traffic volume on the road’s lower end reflects the commuter growth. Last year, the average daily count--factoring in high weekend rates and lower weekday ones--was 3,400 vehicles, up from 2,100 in 1979. Yet at more remote portions of the Crest, such as Chilao, the count has stayed constant at 1,000 vehicles daily during the same 10 years.

On a recent weekday at Dawson Saddle, the highest point on the Crest, there was only one car parked. Melrose Avenue hairdresser Charles Smirnoff sipped a soft drink as he sat in his 1969 red Karmann Ghia convertible.

Once a month, Smirnoff said, he travels the Crest to relax. “I come here, as the old saying goes, to commune with nature.”

Angeles Crest Highway The Angeles Crest Highway, more than 40 years in the making when it was completed in 1956, will be dedicated in early October as a National Scenic Byway, a first for a wilderness road so close to a major urban area.