High & Mighty : Grandeur...

On a 1923 visit to a fishing camp in the Angeles National Forest, back when the San Gabriel Mountains were far more removed from city life than they are today, George S. Patton was emotionally struck by the beauty of the wilderness.

In a camp guest book, Patton, father of the famous World War II general, wrote that he was a boy when he first went into that same San Gabriel Canyon and “caught my fill of big fish along the lonely stretches of virgin solitude. That was 55 years ago, and today as I walked alone in the same joyous silence, I experienced a deep sense of gratitude.”

By the 1930s, with the advent of hydroelectric power and flood control on the San Gabriel River, that fishing camp of prominent Los Angeles attorney H. W. O’Melveny was flooded over with the opening of the Morris Dam.

That’s the way it has been for the last 100 years in the Angeles, whose birthday is today. Some people come simply to enjoy it and leave no trace.

Others leave traces, sometime big and sometimes small. They build a dam or railroad or observatory or resort. Or they build a cabin or just a campfire.

Some catch a fish or kill a bear. Others climb a peak or spy a rare bird through binoculars. Some dig for gold and others pan.

Since its creation on Dec. 20, 1892, hunters, farmers, developers, irrigation experts, water-conservation advocates, firefighters, resort owners, mountain bikers, weekend campers, scientists, naturalists, environmentalists, gold miners, horseback riders, motorcyclists, hang-glider enthusiasts, picnickers, politicians and Forest Service officials have staked their varied claims on the Angeles forest land.

“Few mountain ranges anywhere have been so much viewed, swarmed over, dug into, and built upon by the human species,” John Robinson wrote in his book “Trails of the Angeles: 100 Hikes in the San Gabriels.”

Among the earliest attempts to gain access to the rugged peaks occurred just as the Angeles was being created.

Thaddeus Lowe, who had come to Pasadena to retire in 1888, settled in a house that had a magnificent view of the San Gabriels. An inventor who could not stop inventing, Lowe hooked up with an engineer, David J. Macpherson, who had been looking at the same mountains with an eye toward constructing a railway.

Eventually, they joined forces and by 1892 began construction of the world’s first electrically powered incline railway. Blasting through rock and working with burros on the precipitous terrain, workers built the rail line to Echo Mountain.

By July 4, 1893, to the strains of an orchestra playing “Nearer My God To Thee,” the Great Cable Incline opened. Electricity to run the cable cars was generated by piping water to the top of Echo Mountain and then running it through dynamos.

The railroad, which was heralded in newspaper accounts across the country, was extended another 4.5 miles into the mountains. Thousands of people got their first mountaintop views of Los Angeles and were thrilled by the vistas of Santa Catalina Island in the distant Pacific.

Lowe--as many entrepreneurs in the San Gabriel Mountains would eventually do--built resorts with hiking and horseback-riding trails. The Lowe dance halls became the scene of many a Pasadena society event.

After the turn of the century, the railway became part of the Pacific Electric system. But eventually, after 45 years of fires, flood and earthquakes that plagued the resorts and railroad as well, the operation finally was shut down.

On nearby Mt. Wilson, other feats of building took place. First, in the late 1880s, Harvard University scientists built a rough observatory, although it lasted only two years. At the same time, a roadway was being built up the mountain and resorts too.

By the turn of the century, with the help of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, astronomer George Ellery Hale oversaw the erection of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, where some of the world’s greatest telescopes were eventually housed. In order to get the first of these up the mountain--a 60-inch telescope--Japanese workers were brought in to widen the steep Mt. Wilson Toll Road in 1907. They left a scar that is still visible from the valley below.

Carnegie himself came to see the telescope in 1910, his only visit to the mountains that through the years have attracted--for a variety of reasons--the world’s greatest scientists, including Edwin P. Hubble.

Not all the building on the forest was as grand as the Mt. Wilson observatory. Some of it was as simple as the modest cabins built in Santa Anita Canyon above Sierra Madre and Arcadia, or the trail resorts for hikers who visited such camps as Sturdevant’s, Robert’s or Hoegees’. The camps accommodated hikers who would take Pacific Electric Red Cars to mountainside stops and then go for a day, weekend or week.

Beginning in about 1895 and lasting till the mid-1930s, the “Great Hiking Era” occurred in the Angeles. Author Robinson, who as a boy started hiking in the San Gabriels in the late 1930s, says that trails that today are virtually empty even on weekends “vibrated to the busy tramp of boots and the merry singing of hikers” in the early 20th Century.

“For some, hiking was simply a favorite sport,” Robinson says. “For others, it was almost a religion.”

The construction of the Angeles Crest Highway, which began in 1929 and was finished in 1956, gave even better access to all who wanted to visit the forest.

Fires and floods, in effect, ended the hiking fervor by destroying many of the camping resorts, which took years to rebuild and, in some cases, never were rebuilt after the momentum was lost during World War II.

Particularly devastating were the floods of 1934 and 1938.

In the Angeles, the cycle of fire, flood and mudslide still go round and round, even as more roads have been built in the forest to give access to firefighters.

Those same roads, such as Highway 39 leading north into the mountains above Azusa and into San Gabriel Canyon, give access to people, who end up starting fires.

Among the significant fires on the Angeles were those in 1900, which burned three months; 1919, when more than 60,000 acres were destroyed, and 1966, when 12 Forest Service workers, members of the El Cariso Hotshot crew, were killed.

Equal to the fires in destruction have been the floods, even though the creation of the Los Angeles County flood control department was designed to minimize impact on foothill communities.

For example, in the Great Flood of 1938, 88 people died and 127 more were never found. Through the years, the mountains have become notorious for furious rainstorms that run with a vengeance off the severe mountain slopes.

The geology of that same terrain has lured miners for more than a century, even though only a few miners had any more than moderate success and rarely matched the Sierra Nevada claims.

The first gold rush occurred in 1842 in Placerita Canyon, where the discovery became known as the San Fernando Placers. Twelve years later, a strike occurred in the East Fork of the San Gabriel River, where an estimated $2 million in gold eventually was taken out.

These two strikes have inspired many a claim in the San Gabriels. Even today, gold panners wade into the East Fork with minimal success.

And one miner, Billy Joe Bagwell--the last to actually live on a claim in the Angeles--has defended himself in federal court for years to fight off attempts by the Forest Service to oust him from the Angeles.

The Forest Service maintains Bagwell never was engaged in legitimate mining. He says he never could spend enough time mining because he always had to stop work to defend his right to mine.

Folklore about the mines--as well as about the adventures of hunters, hikers, astronomers, builders and mountain men and women--abound in the Angeles, says author Robinson. This creates the aura that continues to captivate the imagination of today’s millions of visitors.

“An amazing amount of human history is locked within these rugged and geologically active mountains,” Robinson says.

Although the mountains are no longer the quiet place they used to be and he is troubled by the crush of humanity that will come in the next hundred years, Robinson believes another amazing century of history is yet to be made in the Angeles.

100 years of use and abuse of Angeles National Forest. Metro, B1