A Season OF Rebirth : Outdoors: Thanks to the March downpour, waterfalls long silenced by the drought and wildflowers have returned. It’s a spring festival well worth seeing.
The sweet, spicy fragrance of sage wafted up around Ana Luisa Espinoza as she crouched next to her daughter Ireri and prayed at the base of the roaring Millard Canyon Falls above Altadena.
The sage, burned in an abalone shell, and the prayers were traditional offerings to the Creator, Espinoza explained later, to mark the coming of spring and “to give thanks for the water we’ve had and . . . to pray for continued water.”
A Mexican Indian originally from the western state of Michoacan, Espinoza and her family commemorate each change of season with a traditional ceremony to teach the children respect and love for nature and its rhythms.
“In spring, the ceremony is in recognition of new life, and the children are the focus of new life,” said Espinoza, a psychiatric social worker who lives in Whittier with her husband, John Taboada, and their two daughters. The aim is to “remind us of the cycle of life” and to teach the children--Ireri, 6, and Erendira, 5--”to take care of the water and trees and plants.”
It is a tradition few of us enjoy or are even aware that we lack. Indeed, since the beginning of the drought five years ago, it’s been possible for spring’s arrival to go unnoticed by most urban Southern Californians. But this year’s record March rains gave the area a spring that’s been impossible to ignore, even for those whose lives out-of-doors are circumscribed largely by the freeways between home and work.
And in no place is that gift more generous than in Southern California’s mountain ranges.
Consider: Seven weeks ago, Millard Canyon Falls, in the front range of the San Gabriel Mountains, merely wetted the rocks. Sturtevant Falls, in Big Santa Anita Canyon above Arcadia, barely filled its rocky pool. And the Arroyo Seco, which, undammed, cut the canyon where the Rose Bowl sits, deserved to be named “dry river.” Now those places have been transformed by flowing water, crashing down on rocks, burbling in streams and flowing out of hillsides.
The rains are already a memory, their statistical impact to be factored into the public policy debate over saving water. But the snow remains deep at higher altitudes and the snowmelt is still with us, giving us a focal point for private reflection and renewal as well as thanksgiving.
Also with us are a bumper crop of wildflowers--California poppies, phlox, penstemon, lupine, paintbrush, long-stalked phacelia and many others--that in the cooler canyons will last long after the summer smog season has descended.
U.S. Forest Service Ranger Terry Ellis, who supervises the Arroyo Seco District of the Angeles National Forest, said part of what makes this a stunning spring in the local mountains is a sense of renewal. “All of us . . . were anticipating this being a dry, dusty, dying spring . . . and it’s not occurring because of the rains, and we are ecstatic,” he said.
Catherine Veach of North Hollywood, who waded in the pool next to the Millard Canyon falls with her daughter, Julianne, 4, while her husband, Bob, watched, would agree. “It’s so pleasant to come up and smell air that has water in it, instead of finding pools of slime being the only thing left,” she said.
To get to the falls, the Veaches had boulder-hopped a half-mile stretch of Millard Stream that flows among alders, canyon oaks and willows. “Today, coming up, I wanted to crouch down and drink out of the stream because it looked so pure,” she said. Somewhat sheepishly, she admitted she had taken a sip.
On the day Espinoza and her family made their offerings, the area near the waterfall began filling up with couples, families bringing picnics and a group of teen-agers. The atmosphere changed from respectful contemplation to hilarity as the teen-agers stood beneath the icy waterfall and screeched.
But that scene too--youths letting themselves go, shaking out the tensions of winter, eschewing the careful masks worn on sometimes-dangerous urban streets--is part of spring as well.
Another face of spring can be seen in El Prieto Canyon, a steep, pretty canyon above the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where crystalline water is flowing in a creek which, during the last two years, has seen only the tiniest of trickles.
Six huge concrete debris basins built by the Los Angeles County Flood Control District and non-native plants that probably spread from homes atop the canyon walls intrude on the otherwise wild splendor of the 2-mile-long glen.
But despite the intrusion of suburbia, the work of spring is readily apparent. Bees swarm over the trail from a hive at the base of a bay tree. Purple stems of lupine poke the air. A few patches of bright red coast paintbrush, more common in higher and hotter places, can be seen.
Delicate ferns unfurl their heads and spread their fronds. Tiny baby blue eyes--a minuscule, five-petaled flower with a perfect, freckled white center--hug the ground. Varieties of yellow monkey flowers shiver in the breeze on their strong stems.
Broad, brown laurel sumac bushes, burned by the frosts last December, can be seen along the canyon, near which Jason and Owen Brown, two sons of abolitionist John Brown, lived during the 1880s.
Mima Parra-Szijj, a forest ecologist in the Angeles National Forest, said many of the laurel sumac will recover. Indeed, some already are sprouting new, green leaves. A clear, cold spring flows out of the hillside beneath one such shrub, which at first glance seems to be a heap of dead brush. But at the base, where the water is flowing, tender green leaves have popped out.
Finding spring in the mountains is not like driving around Los Angeles looking for a single perfect parking spot. “Almost any of the trails you would be hiking at this time would be excellent for seeing wildflowers,” said Parra-Szijj.
Over the next month, she said, all the spring flowers will be blooming in great number. “It’s going to look more dramatic because we haven’t seen it for five years or so,” she said.
And the show will continue, at lower elevations in the canyons and at higher elevations as the snow melts. Gilias flowers, which have needlelike leaves and clusters of blue, white or yellow flowers, will begin blooming in early summer. A bright, orange lily native to the area will bloom in wetter areas. And delphiniums--spiky, brilliant blue, purple and white flowers--will daub the hillsides with color.
Besides canyons, the best places to see wildflowers will be areas that have been burned within the last two years, Parra-Szijj said. There will be “a really spectacular show.”
In places where the winters are bitter, every spring brings transformation. Snow gives way to radiant green grass, and flowers burst into color as if lit by a match. Birds return from their southern sojourns. Many people, too, return to a more childlike part of themselves, more open to the wonderment of the natural changes occurring about them.
Some Southern California residents, like Ana Luisa Espinoza and her family, never fail to notice the usually subtler changes that occur here as the season turns. For the rest of us, however, it sometimes takes a spring such as this one to jerk us out of our routines and to get us out of our cars and into the relatively wild, natural areas that are so close.
“There are actually a lot of places in Southern California like this, but people don’t go out and look for them,” said Espinoza. “You have to make an effort.”
