Mountains of History : Grandeur of Angeles National Forest Lures Generations of Hikers, Miners

On a 1923 visit to a fishing camp in 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 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, whose family was among early settlers of the San Fernando Valley, 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 the 693,000-acre mountain preserve--which stretches from Gorman to Wrightwood and separates the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys from the Mojave Desert. They leave no trace.

But others leave traces, sometimes 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 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 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 1/2 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 most powerful telescopes were eventually housed. In order to get the first of these--a 60-inch telescope--up the mountain, 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 construction in the forest was as grand as the Mt. Wilson Observatory. Some of it was as simple as modest cabins or 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 until the mid-1930s, the “Great Hiking Era” occurred in the Angeles. Author Robinson, who started hiking in the San Gabriels as a boy in the late 1930s, says 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 Angeles Crest Highway, begun in 1929 and 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 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 goes round and round, even as more roads have been built in the forest to give access to firefighters.

Those same roads give access to people, who end up starting fires.

Among the significant fires in the Angeles were the 1900 blaze, which burned for 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’ destruction have been the floods, even though creation of the Los Angeles County Flood Control Department was designed to minimize the effect on foothill communities.

For example, in the Great Flood of 1938, 88 people died and 127 others were never found. And years of flooding and mudslides from the mountains into Hansen Dam in Lake View Terrace caused closure of the dam’s swimming lake in the 1970s. Through the years, the mountains have become known for the furious rainstorms that run off the severe slopes with a vengeance.

The 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 in Newhall, 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. Even today, gold panners wade into the East Fork and the streams near Santa Clarita Valley with minimal success.

Folklore about the mines and the adventures of hunters, hikers, astronomers, builders and mountain men and women--abounds 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 100 years, Robinson believes another amazing century of history is yet to be made in the Angeles.

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