Hiker’s Missed Turn Leads to Insight on Verdugos

Part of the lure of the Verdugos is a chance to lose yourself in the isolation of the mountain range. That happened to me on my second trip up, when I got lost at sunset.

My first hike was a time-stopping discovery of wildlife, though I was startled by the mountain lion tracks. Biologists laugh at urbanites who worry about mountain lion attacks, because those incidents are rare. But on my next hike I went armed with my son’s aluminum baseball bat.

From the Verdugo summit it’s a brisk 80-minute hike down the north-side La Tuna Canyon trail, so two hours before sunset I began my descent. After an hour I reached a wet band that spread across the trail from a recent rain, and it clearly recorded all that day’s passersby, including mountain bike tires and animal tracks. But I didn’t spot any of my shoe prints from my ascent. It suddenly hit me: I’ve missed my cutoff. It will be dark in an hour. And I’m lost.

By now the winds whipped at 30 mph, and the forecast that night was for temperatures in the high 30s. I had no compass, no flashlight, no cell phone. So I decided to stay on the fire road, head south, and hope it wouldn’t leave me stuck up on the mountain all night, staring at the Big Dipper.

After nearly an hour, the fire road began a meandering descent, and finally the trail dumped me in a residential development in the Burbank hills, about 12 miles and on the other side of the mountain from where I had started that morning.

I needed to call a cab. The first resident I saw was an elderly man in his garage--but it’s hard to look casual with a baseball bat sticking out of your knapsack. As I walked onto his driveway, he quickly shut the door. I flagged a passing sedan, but the driver looked me over and said there was no room. I rang a few doorbells. One woman peeked at me through a living-room blind and refused to answer.

By now it was dark. I walked down the hilly streets for 40 minutes until I found a pay phone.

As I waited for my cab and looked up at the dark summit, the moral hit me: 200 years after Corporal Verdugo took possession of these mountains, an exhausted man coming down at sunset armed with a baseball bat is still far more out of place here than is a mountain lion.