THE ANGELES: FIRST 100 YEARS : Comments on the Forest : This is a national forest that could very easily be enjoyed and loved to death. All of the unique values that visitors seek could be lost through overuse and abuse.

What is my forecast for the forest outlook in the future? Sometimes it is easier to look ahead by looking back. As an example, during the Great Depression, the Angeles National Forest put more unemployed people to work than did any other National Forest in the entire country.

Following the April riots, we put 650 unemployed people from the Los Angeles area to work on the four national forests in Southern California, with the majority of them, approximately 580 people, assigned on the Angeles National Forest. The Angeles National Forest has and will continue to have an important role as a full member of the greater metropolitan community in putting people to work, providing meaningful jobs, job training and education.

There is a responsibility and obligation to future generations to help current forest visitors obtain the knowledge and appreciation required to take care of and respect this unique resource.

Our future lies in an ecosystem management approach, that is, managing soils, vegetation, wildlife, watersheds and people as components that all must work together. The forest has a limit on what kinds and types of impacts it can repeatedly endure. Use has definitely grown over the years. In some instances we will need to develop strategies to shift people from heavily used, or overused, areas to lightly used areas. In other instances we need to set limits on the number of users at any one time and when the limit is reached that’s it, no more.

This is a national forest that could very easily be enjoyed and loved to death. All of the unique values that visitors seek such as cool trees, shaded streams, solitude, beautiful vistas, watchable wildlife, fresh pine-scented air could all be lost through overuse and abuse.

During our next 100 years we must do a better job of involving the public in our decision making. Our ability to work with the public in our decision making has grown since 1969. However, we still have a long way to go.

Fire will always be a part of this very complex ecosystem. Present and future managers must develop a greater ability to use prescribed fire in the management of this forest resource. In addition to working together with the public, we need to continue to develop partnerships with our research community in the untangling of the numerous ecosystem relationships that we don’t yet comprehend or even know about.

Although we will continue to experience setbacks and disappointments as we did during our first 100 years, I have every reason to believe that the Angeles National Forest will be in excellent shape as it prepares for the celebration of its second 100 years on Dec. 10, 2092.

There are tremendous sanitary problems: people leaving food from picnics, people leaving junk and defecating in the riparian areas.

Fred Hoeptner is chair of the Sierra Club’s Angeles National Forest Committee.

There are three basic categories of big issues: vegetation management, the handling of recreation pressures and law enforcement problems.

In vegetation management, we favor prescribed burning. We support the Forest Service’s use of prescribed fires. But no Angeles district has the staffing or budget to adequately carry it out.

There is a big conflict between the wilderness and recreational mining. The Sierra Club opposes any kind of mining that involves mechanical equipment (except panning) in a designated wilderness area.

The Forest Service’s plan for the Angeles provides for expansion of some ski areas. The Sierra Club opposes this. There are big trees there, and the forest has few areas that are truly forested.

Another recreation problem is bicycle use on hiking trails. There are a number of trails where bicycles should not be allowed. Bicycles tend to break down . . . the trails, frighten horses and come up behind hikers and frighten them as well. We don’t totally oppose bicycles. But some kind of regulations are needed to curb the resource damage that can occur.

There are tremendous sanitary problems: people leaving food from picnics, people leaving junk and defecating and such in the riparian areas. There is heavy overuse on weekends. A large percentage of the people going there are . . . not educated in conservation and how to act in a natural area.

I don’t think we have a club position on what the solution should be. Certainly the addition of sanitary toilets would be a start.

There still is the problem of off-road vehicle use illegally on the hiking trails, namely Pacific Crest Trail.

The shooting areas have become junkyards. We are not opposed to legitimate hunting. But there either has to be management of the shooting areas or they should be closed.

The forest has become a problem area for various kinds of illegal activities. More needs to be done to address this. Otherwise, no one can feel safe up there.

Another big issue is getting the budget to run this forest, which is right in the middle of the heaviest urban area anywhere next to a national forest. The Angeles Forest managers don’t have the budget or personnel to do what should be done.

It’s a fallacy that the Forest Service doesn’t have enough money. They don’t spend their money well.

Ray Hensley is the owner of Kratka Ridge Ski Area.

As a small ski area operator and a lifetime resident of the Angeles National Forest, I have acquired a very biased view from firsthand, daily association with the Forest Service in a public service business.

I fear the Forest Service is not capable of managing the people’s land for the next 100 years. It’s a fallacy that the Forest Service doesn’t have enough money. They don’t spend their money well. All the money appears to be spent within the bureaucracy itself, leaving little for the forest, infrastructure or visitors. I heard one person’s idea that the new slogan should read “100 years of self-service and public nuisance.”

I also remember some old-timers saying about the Forest Service’s Pasadena Hilton office (during the 1970s), “They can’t see the trees because the smog is in the way.”

This ski area opened to the public in 1947 and enjoyed carefully planned growth of successful public service that came to a screeching halt as bureaucratic rhetoric took hold.

I’ve been trying to get permission to install snow-making machines. I started seven years ago on the environmental assessment. I probably rewrote the document four times. Then I brought in a consultant. He spent three years on it. We’ve probably had 10 or 12 different methodologies they wanted us to follow. And we’re still stopped dead in our tracks.

It’s extremely difficult to move forward as “partners” when the Forest Service has time on its side.

This ski area has been serving the people who visit this forest for over 40 years--and has just recently found its voice to speak out. However, the Forest Service does not tolerate or listen to people who stand up for their rights and for what is right.

It’s hard for me to even imagine another 100 years of U.S. Forest Service unless the agency wakes up and smells the pine trees.

There is almost no place left within the forest where you cannot taste the city, hear the city and see the city.

David Allen James Sr. is chairman of the Forest Preservation Society of Southern California.

We need to stop thinking in terms of visitor days and numbers of visitors. Impacts from human visitors on the Angeles National Forest are transitory and non-cumulative. The reason for this is the simple fact that 95% of the Angeles is inaccessible by the average visitor and never impacted. Visitors travel within the forest by motor vehicle and confine their activities to areas within a mile of major access roads. There is one visitor, however, who is not transitory, and that is the developer. The developer leaves impacts which are permanent, irreversible and cumulative. These impacts affect the entire forest, imposing changes in wildlife, trees, watershed and the quality of air, sound, light and the human experience.

Development proceeds at a pace which leaves little time to assess its real impacts or to plan adequate mitigation measures. For example, virtually all riparian areas in the County of Los Angeles have been destroyed by development. Neither the Board of Supervisors, Regional Planning nor the Forest Service has taken effective action to halt these losses. The few acres which remain are adjacent to or within the Angeles National Forest and almost all are subject to destruction by development.

There is almost no place left within the forest where you cannot taste the city, hear the city and see the city. Public officials pander to the quick buck of a developer-driven economy and care little or nothing for the future of our children. The next 100 years looks bleak indeed. Few are willing to risk political and personal fortunes to stave off disaster say, in the year 2025. Many have given up and assume the battle is lost. Not true.

In order to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of forest inhabitants, particularly mankind, it is imperative that we improve the quality of our planning. We must be willing to make substantial investments in well-funded and politically independent planning agencies. We must empower these agencies to make planning decisions free of undue influence. We must do this at a federal, state and local level. The return to the people will be a healthy forest, healthy environment and healthy children, all essential to the growth of a strong and virile nation.

The officials look at the Angeles as an open space where they can run up all the (people) in their communities that want recreation.

Dentist Loren L. Lutz is president of the Society for the Protection and Care of Wildlife and a founder of the Society for the Conservation of Bighorn Sheep.

There has been no legal hunting of bighorn sheep in Angeles National Forest for 100 years because of past over-hunting. Since the 1960s, hunting organizations have been working to bring back the sheep.

I think there will be hunting of bighorn in the San Gabriels eventually. I’m a hunter. But that doesn’t make any difference. Our sole purpose is to perpetuate sheep.

Our bighorn sheep are thriving now. We should have 10,000 sheep by the year 2000 in California. Our last population count came to 650 in the Angeles, which is a lot of sheep.

We’re filled to the brim. We are transporting bighorn sheep out of the San Gabriels. Wherever sheep were historically, we want to put them back.

Most of us in the conservation groups--and conservation means wise use and that means people get to use the land--believe that the Angeles must not be the dumping ground for the abysmal lack of recreation opportunities afforded by the county of Los Angeles and all of the other city governments.

The officials look at the Angeles as an open space where they can run up all the (people) in their communities that want recreation. There is no way that all the people of Los Angeles County can expect to recreate there.

One of the worst conflicting uses is ski slopes. There is nothing wrong with winter play and downhill skiing when the bighorn aren’t there. Ski slopes are good habitat for them in the summer. But we don’t want those chain lifts or any people-hauling devices used in the summer. That is when the bighorn need that habitat in those areas.

Then there are hiking trails. The more hiking trials, the more people, the less bighorn. We don’t want any riding and hiking trails concentrated near where bighorn sheep lamb.

The sheep don’t just shift to another spot. They just go away forever. That’s the brutal fact. They need rough, inaccessible terrain where predators can’t get at them. Through eons of time, bighorn select their lambing areas. You put a riding or hiking trail through there and you ruin it.

Reducing another person’s recreation is not the heart of the issue but rather that all users of public lands get the same fair and consistent treatment.

Kurt Hathaway, an officer of the California Off Road Vehicle Assn. was not available. The association advocates development of a trail system designated strictly for off-road vehicles. The following is excerpted from his past written comments and interviews.

Reducing another person’s recreation is not the heart of the issue but rather that all users of public lands get the same fair and consistent treatment.

Our membership wishes, as I do, to provide for multiple forms of recreation on public lands. I have a fervent hope that my young children will have varied opportunities to experience the diversity and values embodied in public lands.

(Do not) buy into the misinformation that is put out by the extreme environmental movement. Studies exist to show that hikers impact wildlife more than OHV (off-highway vehicle use) on a trail. OHV use comes in many forms, and what you see at an open area such as the San Gabriel OHV Area is not how an OHV trail system functions.

We do not agree with many of the ways in which our form of outdoor recreation is managed. We must contend with strictly interpreted and enforced guidelines and rules for organized events requiring expensive and exhaustive environmental documentation.

In many of the areas where we have paid for the building, operation and maintenance of trails, we are not allowed to have such events. Further, these routes are inventoried, monitored and maintained with user-generated funds and routinely closed at the first hint of resource damage, misuse, erosion or the newest finding of a . . . threatened and endangered plant or animal.

For the future, what I want to see happen is called environmentalism--man and nature working hand in hand.

Gerald E. Hobbes is vice president of Public Lands for the People, a board member of the Southwestern Chapter of the Western Mining Council .

The mining law of 1872 didn’t distinguish commercial mining from recreational mining.

Today, however, we have many recreational miners who engage in panning, sluicing, dredging and metal detecting for nuggets.

The Forest Service keeps telling us that there can’t be any “ground disturbance” from our mining. But when we ask them what ground disturbance is, they can’t define it. In cooperation with the Forest Service, we are going to try to define what ground disturbance is.

For the future, what I want to see happen is called environmentalism--man and nature working hand in hand. The Forest Service needs volunteers from the public to help them keep the lands up--cleaning up the trash and the graffiti and planting trees. As long as we are at odds with the Forest Service, it is difficult to help them--when they are attacking our mining rights.

The Forest Service, as we know, is understaffed and underfunded. The best way for them to make up for this shorthanded situation is to get the public to help in cleaning up trash and graffiti and to help them plant trees. In order to get this help from the public they must gain the respect of the public.

In order to gain this respect, the Forest Service must do its job by enforcing the laws of the land and the laws that govern their own agency, instead of wasting their time and effort imposing their will upon the people.

The American people are out there to help where help is needed. This is proven all over the world with aid that our people volunteer. If the U.S. Forest Service needs help, then we are out here and available. Working hand in hand even on a short budget, the citizens of the United States will prevail and will rebuild these forests and will maintain these forests for the next 100 years and more.

The next 100 years hold a lot of problems, so we desperately hope that we will see responsible management from all the various agencies that help manage our national forest.

Barret H. Wetherby represents the Pasadena Bait Club.

The Pasadena Bait Club was established in 1890 by a small group of businessmen from Pasadena and Los Angeles who wanted to get away from the big city. They packed in over the Old Mt. Wilson Trail, Monrovia Peak and finally up from Rincon station.

Sometimes it took 2 1/2 days to get into the lower West Fork of the San Gabriel River. They built a cabin out of rocks, timbers and tin, mostly brought in by pack animals. Over the years they planted trout up and down the West Fork, worked with County Flood Control and assisted the Forest Service whenever they could.

On the negative side, we all saw the camping areas slowly destroyed and not renewed; trash piled up and graffiti slowly moved upstream from the gate at Highway 39. Now the gangs and groups of uncaring people are using and abusing the first several miles of the West Fork. Adequate supervision has been sadly lacking, as well as adequate trash pickup and graffiti removal.

To mitigate damage that had been done by careless release of water from Cogswell Dam, we negotiated an agreement with the Los Angeles County Public Works Flood Control Division to establish a certain amount of water for that stream all year long, except during drought. Working together with several agencies, we would re-establish the fish habitat on the stream, put in additional fish if required, deepen pools, add gravel for spawning and remove all the debris that has washed into the stream. This was predicated on having a plan for removal of sediment from Cogswell Reservoir.

Unfortunately, that is not in effect anymore. Don Nichols, assistant deputy director of the Flood Control Division, advised us last March that whatever material flows into Cogswell Reservoir during the rainy season will flow out, regardless of the possible downstream problems that will occur from too much sediment.

The next 100 years hold a lot of problems, so we desperately hope that we will see responsible management from all the various agencies that help manage our national forest. What we hope for is: a proper budget for this canyon as well as for the entire urban forest system in Southern California and a greater respect for the public’s rights to use our public forests.

If the early years of Angeles National Forest were labeled ‘The Great Hiking Era,’ the ‘90s will be remembered as ‘The Great Biking Era.’

Tim Murphy is one of the founders of the Mt. Wilson Bicycling Assn.

Our group was founded eight years ago for the sole purpose of maintaining trails in the Arroyo Seco district of Angeles National Forest. Our seventh annual pancake breakfast at Henninger Flats attracted more than 800 people and raised cash to support our trail-building activities.

The future looks very bright for the mountain bike in Angeles National Forest. After several years of searching for their place as a new user group, mountain bikers have finally been officially recognized and accepted. There has been what the Forest Service calls a “conflict resolution,” and the mountain bike has been accepted into the trail-user family. If the early years of Angeles National Forest were labeled “The Great Hiking Era,” the ‘90s will be remembered as “The Great Biking Era.”

As a new form of non-polluting, self-propelled forest transportation, the mountain bike has brought countless numbers of people of all ages back into the Angeles. It is yet another example of the great adaptability of man and the many ways our forest can be enjoyed.

This acceptance, however, has not come without the hard work and education of the biking community and the open-mindedness of policy-makers within the Forest Service who let us demonstrate our commitment to the well-being of the forest. Our group, the Mt. Wilson Bicycling Assn., under the guidance of the Arroyo Seco District manager, Terry Ellis, and his staff, has logged more than 5,000 hours maintaining the trails that bicyclists, equestrians and hikers use.

Our trail patrols have also proven that the mountain bike can be a valuable tool in the forest. Just as metropolitan police departments have utilized the versatility of the mountain bike, our patrolling of the trails and fire roads of the Angeles has made the cyclists the eyes and ears of the forest.

The only cloud on the horizon for bicyclists and all the other trail users in the Angeles is who is going to maintain its vast trail system? With a yearly budget of about $20,000 to maintain the 164 miles of trails, the Forest Service is underfinanced and understaffed. The solution lies in finding new volunteers to help keep our trails open for all to enjoy.

As our business card says, “be a part of the solution, not a cause of the problem.”

We can ‘manage’ the forest and maybe undo some of the damage we have already done.

Rick Fisher is conservation chairman of the California Native Plant Society’s San Gabriel Mountains Chapter.

As a leader of a group devoted to the preservation of California’s native flora, I have long been interested in the management of the Angeles National Forest. It is a truly “urban forest” because of its proximity to urban Southern California.

One of the great opportunities--and at the same time one of the great cures--of the Angeles is its accessibility to people. Lots of people. We can take advantage of this accessibility by fostering and preserving its benefits as a natural classroom and recreation area. We must use it for all its worth but at the same time protect it from ourselves and save it for future generations. We must evaluate all proposed and existing uses on the basis of what they will take away from the forest (and all of us) and of whether they are truly practices we can sustain for the long term.

Most of all, we need educated, respectful use of the forest. That means at the same time aggressively educating the people and enforcing the rules of use. We must realize that in order to be of benefit as an outdoor classroom and natural recreation area, the forest cannot be managed as a wilderness in total isolation. It is an ecosystem that has been impacted by man’s activities for many years and will continue to be impacted, probably forever.

However, nobody said man’s impacts couldn’t also be beneficial. We can “manage” the forest and maybe undo some of the damage we have already done, such as having introduced foreign plants that crowd out the beneficial native ones, having introduced domestic grazing animals and having altered the fire ecology of the whole forest to suit our needs. Also, we need to take great efforts to preserve the diversity of species and natural communities in the forest to ensure its long-term sustainability and our own experience as well.

We cannot treat the forests as a resource to “consume” until it is gone. We have been taking from the forest for 100 years. It is time to start giving back.

I’m optimistic that Angeles National Forest will remain the rich natural treasure it has been.

Glen Owens is head of Big Santa Anita Historical Society.

Growing up in Los Angeles during the 1940s was special. Our home was located between Echo Park and Silver Lake. Our family would picnic in Griffith Park or Elysian Park. Summers we always visited the beach a few times, and winter snow sent us up Angeles Crest Highway into Angeles National Forest.

I remember vividly a series of days and nights in December, 1953. A huge forest fire raged in the San Gabriel Mountains. Even though the fire was 30 or more miles distant, it appeared very close. Little did I know that, in addition to the forest, the fire was consuming the outhouse of the cabin I would purchase in 10 years. Also, little did I realize how much this event would alter my future.

Living and working in the city and spending weekends in the mountains became a life of drastic contrast. Sort of like living in two time periods, 50 years apart. City life had all the modern conveniences, hot and cold running water, electricity, roads, etc. Mountain life meant that you fetched your own spring water, used oil lamps and existed with outhouses.

The most amazing part of living this life soon became apparent.

Any stress created by urban life always vanished on the two-mile hike to the cabin. For about 30 years this has always been the case. I know this is universal--for almost all the hikers I have encountered in thousands of miles of hiking are a happy and friendly lot.

The No. 1 selling book in and about the Angeles forest is “One Hundred Hiking Trails of the Angeles” by John Robinson. The No. 1 volunteer activity in the forest is trail building and maintenance. For these reasons I’m optimistic that Angeles National Forest will remain the rich natural treasure it has been for the next 100 years and each succeeding 100-year period.