Old Man of the Mountains

I first met Milt McAuley on a trail that wound through a cool glade leading to a waterfall in Newton Canyon.

The falls cascaded out of the ferns and chaparral to a river 20 feet below, filling the air with a spray of water that gleamed like crystal in the filtered sunlight.

We were only about a mile from a busy highway in the Santa Monica Mountains, but we could have been in a remote section of the Sierra, lost in a wonderland far from the madding crowd.

McAuley was leading the hike. I don’t know how many times he’d seen the waterfall, but he’s been walking the mountains for 33 years and must have been to this place at least a hundred times.

But there was still wonder in his eyes, the expression of awe and delight a child gets when he first sees a squirrel or hears the cry of a crow swooping out of a gray sky on a misty autumn morning.

That’s unusual in a man of 76. When you get older, nothing seems new or shiny anymore, least of all a lot of water plunging down over rocks. I can still see McAuley looking at it with a hesitant smile and saying: “Isn’t that something? Won’t you see that in your dreams?”

He can show you a lot of places like that in the mountains that embrace L.A., because he’s covered thousands of miles in the years he’s been hiking the Santa Monicas, the San Gabriels and the Santa Susanas.

He can tell you about the wildflowers and the animals that inhabit the mountains, and about the Chumash Indians who used to.

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That isn’t to say he jumps up and down every time he sees a sticky monkey plant. McAuley’s not like that. He’s a slow-talking man with a quiet sense of enthusiasm, who delivers information the way Walter Cronkite used to deliver the news.

He even looks a little like Cronkite, with his bristly eyebrows and avuncular demeanor, and eyes so blue they steal a little glory from the sky. That’s only natural, I guess. McAuley is part of the sky and part of the mountains he inhabits, all brambly and sun-warmed.

He was born at the foot of Mt. Shasta and raised in the Cascades, so I guess he comes by his instincts naturally, the way a frog knows he likes the water without knowing exactly why.

McAuley knew how to fish and gather huckleberries and find his way home before he was old enough to start school. He’s been hiking since he was 10 and leading hikes since he was 16.

He went to the Oregon State College School of Forestry and then into the Air Force for 21 years as a fighter pilot tooling through the skies in a P-51, and looking at God’s green earth from a different perspective.

In ’62 he came to L.A. and went to work for the aerospace industry to support a growing family. But always there was the call of the mountains, carried on winds scented with the perfumes of sage and lilac, luring him to their grandeur.

He hiked in the rain and he hiked in the heat, and sometimes he hiked in the snow, not striding but ambling, photographing and sketching the plants he saw, mapping the trails, seeing the waterfalls.

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The result has been seven books about the mountains and their wildflowers, and group hikes every weekend for the Sierra Club and Learning Tree University.

I took the Learning Tree hike into Newton Canyon and later met with McAuley by a pond in Topanga State Park, so we could talk about the lure of the mountains, the spiritual connection between man and nature.

But McAuley lets others wax poetic over that kind of thing and just says he likes the beauty and endurance of flowers. He likes to look at them and smell them and wonder why some of them are where they are and no place else.

There’s no doubt he understands the serenity of the mountains, because he walks in them alone sometimes, especially when a gentle rain is falling and there’s a hush on the land that no other silence can match. Even the small animals that scurry through the underbrush seem to whisper.

At other times, he sits on a slope with a pad and a pencil and works on the books that have contributed to an honor few achieve: three years ago he was named to the national roster of the Sierra Club’s 100 “Environmental Heroes” for his work in promoting and preserving the Santa Monica Mountains.

McAuley smiles and shrugs at it all, and says he’ll just keep on hiking. The day I saw him in Topanga State Park he was helping to clear a path called Dead Horse Trail. He went back to work when our talk was over, blending into the morning, into the greenery and into the rise of the mountains that tumble toward the sea.