Is Forest Being Loved to Death? : Preservation: As Angeles National Forest celebrates its 100th anniversary, its caretakers worry about the threat to its cathedral of trees, canyons of wildflowers and snowcapped vistas.

As a boy in the 1940s, Michael J. Rogers fell under the spell of the forest as he hiked its ridges and fished its streams. Now he fears that his boyhood love has too many other admirers.

“This is a national forest that could very easily be loved to death,” said Rogers, who grew up to become the supervisor in charge of Angeles National Forest.

It was 100 years ago today that President Benjamin Harrison set aside nearly one-fourth of Los Angeles County’s vastness to create the spectacular San Gabriel Timberland Reserve. Today, the Angeles National Forest, as it is now known, is a 693,000-acre wildland isle surrounded by an expanding metropolis, stretching from Gorman to Wrightwood.

Through millennia of fire, flood, rockslide and earthquake, the mountainous playground has endured. But as the forest’s lovers and caretakers celebrate its 100th birthday, they say the biggest threat to its cathedral of trees, canyons of wildflowers and snowcapped vistas comes not from natural calamity but from humans seeking respite from city life.

Annually, Angeles National Forest draws 32 million visitors--a doubling from three decades ago and far more than most other national forests or popular national parks such as Yellowstone or Yosemite.

Forest service policy, known as “multiple use,” dictates that the Angeles National Forest be available for many activities, including biking, hiking, horseback riding, camping, fishing, off-road vehicle cruising, skiing, rifle shooting, hunting and gold mining. There is even a proposal to put a landfill on the forest’s edge at Elsmere Canyon near Santa Clarita.

To some environmentalists, all this suggests that multiple use has become multiple abuse.

A century from now, they say, the forest--created to protect the mountains as a water source for the developing towns and farmland below--will be a very different place if the littering, vandalizing, illegal dumping and jamming of forest roads by commuters looking for shortcuts continue.

“The next 100 years looks bleak indeed,” said David A. James Sr., who heads the Forest Preservation Society of Southern California.

Forest Service supervisor Rogers, who as an Altadena boy hiked and fished in the San Gabriel Mountains, home of Angeles National Forest, said it will require diligent protection for the area to remain a sanctuary suitable for humans, animals and plants alike. “Multiple use doesn’t mean multiple use on every acre,” he said.

The biggest job of the forest service, he said, is getting people to understand the delicate nature of an ecosystem, “to understand that these brush-covered hills are home to hundreds of species of wildlife that can now live nowhere else.”

For many decades after its designation as a national forest, much of the San Gabriel Mountains was inaccessible except by foot, horseback, mule pack train, stagecoach or, above the Pasadena area, by railway, such as the Mt. Lowe electric incline that serviced mountaintop resorts.

Attesting to the ruggedness of the terrain, naturalist John Muir, who in 1877 hiked the canyons and peaks that would become Angeles National Forest, said he had to crawl on all fours because he found “chaparral brush so thick the bears had difficulty getting through.”

To solve the accessibility problem, roads such as scenic Angeles Crest Highway--completed in 1956 after 27 years of work--were carved into the mountains so firefighters could gain access to stop fires from doing what they had been doing for millions of years: burning to the sea.

The challenges of today are not unlike those faced by the first forest rangers, said John W. Robinson, a Fullerton author and retired schoolteacher who has written several popular books on hiking and the history of the San Gabriel Mountains.

“You now face difficult problems, just like you did in 1892,” he said. “They are just a little different. Too many people is the problem now. In 1892, it was too many sheep.”

Yet Robinson and others say today’s pressures bear down harder than at any time before.

A century ago, squatters eked out a living on often-inhospitable public land. Bandits used the forest as a hideaway. And in the period known as the great hiking era, from the late 1800s to the mid-1930s, thousands would go on Pacific Electric Red Cars to the San Gabriel Valley and hike into the mountains. As many as 5,000 hikers signed the guest logs at one resort on the Fourth of July weekend of 1919.

In contrast, it is not uncommon today to find homeless people living along forest roads. Gangbangers shoot weapons and dump bodies and stolen cars there, authorities say. Vandals paint up boulders, while mountain bikers, horseback riders and hikers collide with one another on backwoods trails.

On a peak weekend, as many as 90,000 vehicles bring in forest visitors, few of whom are hiking. Families picnicking in canyons leave behind litter and disposable diapers that find their way into snowmelt streams unsafe for a hiker’s canteen.

“No one canyon has unlimited carrying capacity, no one mountain peak,” said Rogers of the forest service. “We’ve got a demand for quality recreation that impinges on wildlife and habitat quality. We’ve got users impinging on one another. We don’t want to destroy the resource that is attracting the people there in the first place.”

That may mean people cannot always go where they want to go, especially the most popular spots. “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,” Rogers said.

By an act of Congress, 80,000 acres at the eastern end of the Angeles National Forest have been set aside to ensure that this plant and animal world would be “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Environmental groups are pushing to establish other wilderness areas within the forest. But wilderness expansion will likely be opposed by groups such as the California Off-Road Vehicle Assn., which complains that the forest service does not do a good job of managing the wilderness it oversees.

While environmentalists today are at the forefront of calling for better wilderness protection, in the 19th Century it was largely business and agricultural interests advocating the creation of the forest preserve. They saw a need to protect the watershed supplying the irrigation and drinking water needs of the towns and farmland in the basin.

By 1915, Los Angeles County created its flood control department, set up to curb the floodwaters and to conserve water for irrigation and drinking. Mountain dams were built to check the wet-season torrents and to protect foothill towns from tumbling boulders as big as cars.

And the dams in the Angeles National Forest--where it rains as much as 40 inches a year or three times the amount in urban areas--allowed runoff to be conserved for later use. Today, more than 1 million San Gabriel Valley residents obtain close to 90% of their water from the mountains.

Even amid the human intrusions of noise, air and water pollution, there remain isolated spots of wilderness where the natural world dominates, where the bighorn sheep, the coyote, the rattlesnake and the hawk far outnumber the people who traverse isolated streams that rush along narrow canyons where wildflowers abound as they did a century ago.

Although hunters killed off the last of the grizzly bear population by the turn of the century, there are isolated spots in the forest where a wilderness world of mountain lions and owls, yuccas and oaks still dominates.

For half a century, the Angeles National Forest, with its 9,000- and 10,000-foot peaks, has been Glen Owens’ retreat. His father would load the family into their Chevy and head up Angeles Crest Highway to Mt. Wilson in the winter. As an 8-year-old, he peered through icy windows and saw snow for the first time.

Last year, he published a book of photos and essays, giving expression to his lifelong love of the forest.

The Angeles National Forest, he said in the introduction, “is still basically the same forest I knew as a child. True, there are more people in some places, but walk a mile or two . . . and you are alone, a part of the ever changing world of nature.”