Just south of the Santa Monica Mountain range lie Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook and the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area, city gems long hidden in plain sight. Beginning in 1998, our trail crew built the first of what became eight miles of hiking trails snaking across this urban park, casually considered a kind of a hiker’s “warm up” to the Santa Monicas. One of Kenneth Hahn’s especially popular trails, “Ron’s Trail,” was dedicated by County Supervisors to honor the trail crew founder, Ron Webster. Today, the crew continues its trail maintenance at the park, and participates there every January in the Martin Luther King Day of Service.
Several of our trails connect with the Park to Playa Trail, a 13-mile route newly-completed now with the bridge over La Cienega Boulevard that links Kenneth Hahn to the Stoneview Nature Center, Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook and the Ballona Creek bike path. One can now strap on their hiking shoes at the corner of South La Brea Avenue and Don Lorenzo Drive and walk in peace all the way to the ocean.
Thus, we’re happy to report that the Baldwin Hills Conservancy recently granted North East Trees — a program dedicated to “greening up” urbanized areas — over a million dollars to implement what’s known as the Five Points Habitat Restoration Project. In a letter of support to the Baldwin Hills Conservancy, our vice-chair Bill Vanderberg cites, the project will “aim to restore native habitat along the Park to Playa Trail, bolster the ecosystem of the Ballona Creek watershed, improve water quality and storage, provide conservation benefits for people and wildlife, increase climate resiliency, and provide jobs skills training for local at-promise youth through the restoration of native ecosystems.”
Well, this one is simple for me. As the owner of two fairly small dogs, I’m dog-matic (yeah, yeah) about leashing them no matter where we’re walking. A recent case, Wolf v. Weber, put this debate into starker relief for local park culture, where the plaintiff (Wolf) suffered minor injuries as a result of being unexpectedly “bumped” by an off-leash dog while hiking on a trail in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Though Weber tried to argue that hiking in off-leash areas entails certain risks, the court ruled in favor of Wolf. You can read the official court opinion in full here. Consequently, dog-owners from now on can be held liable for incidents involving unleashed or “uncontrolled” dogs.
Leashing your dog might not only save you from a lawsuit; it will keep your beloved canine safer, especially on trails known for rattlesnakes, coyotes and the occasional mountain lion.
Sierra Club hikers in their 60’s and 70’s can often be heard to say, “We want to be like Ernie when we grow up.” It’s easy to see why.
Ernest M. Scheuer made the Los Angeles Westside his home around 25 years ago, after retiring in 1993 from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Before JPL, he taught at Cal State Northridge for more than two decades.
In his search for new places to hike — and new people to hike with — on the Westside, Ernie turned to the latest issue of the Sierra Club Angeles Chapter’s Schedule of Activities, where he learned of the Tuesday Conditioned Hikers (TCH) and subsequently its sister group, the Tuesday Moderate Hikers (TMH). These two groups, both sponsored by the Santa Monica Mountains Task Force, have been leading the public on hikes in the Santa Monica Mountains since the early 1970’s.
And so began his many years of exploring the peaks and trails of the Santa Monica Mountains.
Ernie leading a hike for the Sierra Club | Photo by Bob Cody
Ernie became a Sierra Club outings leader in 2007, and has subsequently been a mentor and provisional evaluator for several others. He is well-known to be a “quietly rock solid leader” who many find to be a calming presence on the trail. He has been described as “selfless” and “stalwart”.
In Ernie you will also find a great conversationalist: thoughtful, knowledgeable on a number of topics, and forever curious — he always takes a great deal of interest in anything his hiking companions share with him. He is also, according to his friend and TCH hiker Jeri Segal, “a bit nerdy (in the very best sense!)”
Ernie has done a great deal to support TMH and TCH off the trails, too, including serving as Outings Chair for TCH, taking the lead in scheduling the weekly hikes and writing them up for the schedule, maintaining the sign-in sheets, and additionally undertaking the role of Safety Chair for both groups. In 2015 he received the Outings Service Award from the Angeles Chapter for his dedication to the program.
To mark his milestone birthday in July, Jeri Segal conspired with his friends in the Club and beyond to surprise him with a “birthday book”, bringing together an astonishing number of heartfelt tributes, special memories, cherished photographs, and entertaining anecdotes.
Fellow hiker Craig Percy said of his friend, “One thing that makes Ernie special for me is his eyes and smile. He always, always, has an impish grin and sparkle. He always looks like he’s ‘up to something.'”
On the morning of September 23rd, 2020, California Highway Patrol discovered a mountain lion sprawled out on the 101 highway in Calabasas. Young and uncollared, the animal had been fatally struck by a car while attempting passage to the other side.
This is just the latest example of the dangers faced by our native big cats in the Santa Monica Mountains — the largest urban national park in the nation — where the arteries of growing human habitation have divided and strangled the natural habitat of the mountain lion.
A 2016 study published by the National Park Service and UCLA biologists found that, if current trends of genetic stagnation continue, the Santa Monica mountain lion population has a real chance of going extinct within 50 years. It came as a troubling surprise when, earlier this year, NPS researchers uncovered the first signs of this lack of genetic diversity.
Images courtesy of National Park Service
P-81: a tell-tail sign
In March, Jeff Sikich, the NPS fieldwork lead tracking our mountain lions, came across subject P-81. The cat had some unfortunate quirks believed to be a manifestation of inbreeding: the tip of his tail kinked at a 90 degree angle, and having only one descended teste (a condition called cryptorchidism). Based on footage from wildlife cameras, it seems there may be at least another mountain lion with a crooked tail in the Santa Monica Mountains, though this cosmetic deformity seems inconsequential to them. The undescended teste, on the other hand, is worrisome as it has been linked to reproductive difficulties.
“This is something we hoped to never see,” Sikich said in a statement. “We knew that genetic diversity was low here, but this is the first time we have actually seen physical evidence of it.”
Los Angeles already has one of the least genetically-diverse mountain lion populations in California and across the West. A cautionary tale lies in what happened to the Florida panther population, where similar birth deformities foreshadowed a breeding depression that almost entirely wiped out the animal from the state.
The Florida panthers were revived when fresh blood was introduced into their decimated population, in the form of eight female panthers translocated from Texas. While our own fragmented mountain lion community is similarly in need of new genetic material, biologists have stressed that relocating cats from outside of the Santa Monica Mountains would provide only a temporary solution — without addressing the issues that brought about the current level of inbreeding, they would be importing new mountain lions indefinitely, and at great cost.
Progress on the Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing
A more permanent solution comes in the form of the Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing, a first-of-its-kind bridge project to reconnect the divided habitat.
During a virtual presentation on September 23rd, Beth Pratt, Regional Executive Director of the National Wildlife Federation revealed some never-before-seen mockups of the project, which has been taken up by landscape architecture firm Living Habitats.
That the project is advancing, if slowly, is a big deal for the activists who have been fighting for it for decades. Once completed, the crossing could provide the model for addressing fragmentation issues all over the West.
Images courtesy of National Park Service
A summer of kittens
Between May and August, thirteen kittens were found across 5 different den sites in the Santa Monicas. Three of these litters are suspected to have been fathered by P-63, an out-of-towner from the Simi Hills. He represents an important injection of new genetic material into the population.
Unfortunately, one of the litters was orphaned at a young age when their mother, P-67, succumbed to the effects of rodent poison. This prompted researchers to attempt a “fostering” of the two orphaned kittens, P-91 and P-92, by another female mountain lion who had also recently given birth.
The fostering didn’t stick, but the kittens now serve as ambassadors for the Santa Monica population at the Southwest Wildlife Conservation Center in Arizona, and researchers continue their attempts to better understand and nurture these apex predators in our collective backyard.
Turning the tide on rodenticide
The mountain lions and their human advocates gained a major victory in September when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law the assembly bill AB 1788.
Put forward by Westside Assemblymember Richard Bloom, it restricts the use of certain anticoagulant rodenticides. These increasingly potent poisons which operate by thinning the blood of their targets, resulting in uncontrollable and fatal bleeding, have been found in 85% of our tested mountain lions, and directly implicated in several of their deaths. They have also been wreaking havoc on state wildlife at large, particularly where larger predators are concerned.
The bill drew widespread support, garnering 10,000 signatories after it was reported that a bobcat and a mountain lion from a nearby population in the Santa Susanas had died from rodenticide poisoning in August.
In a statement, the governor wrote: “My father was a naturalist and a strong advocate for the preservation of mountain lions, and I grew up loving these cats and caring about their well-being. He would be proud to know that California is taking action to protect mountain lion populations and other wildlife from the toxic effects of rodenticides.”
And, of course, you — the public — can also take action to protect our neighbors in nature. Start by checking out P-22’s Wildlife Wonderland on October 23rd, an online festival celebrating Griffith Park’s most eligible bachelor.
Los Angeles is lucky to be home to one of the most incredible species on the planet (we share with Mumbai the distinction of being one of two major cities to harbor big cats), and we can only be enriched in our efforts to learn about and protect them.
As we know, all too well and bitterly, Fire Season is upon us. Although it’s barely begun, catastrophic wildfires have consumed not just California, but huge swaths of the coastal and inter-mountain West. Oregon and Washington just burned, losing many homes. Colorado is on fire, and they say won’t be out of danger until the first snows in October.
Two hundred hikers and campers in the Sierras barely escaped the Creek Fire with their lives, and then only because Chinook helicopters dangerously flew into thick smoke and airlifted them out. As I began writing this on 9/10, the morning’s Los Angeles Times showed the San Francisco skyline as an orange, smoky apocalypse. Although the Santa Monica Mountains have mostly not been stricken (yet), the Bobcat Fire in the San Gabriels, including Mount Wilson and Big Santa Anita Canyon — a hiker’s paradise — has scorched more than 115,000 acres and is still not fully contained. For a time, the thick smoke and poisonous air it dumped into the Los Angeles basin rendered any hiking, trail-running or outdoor exercise hazardous to your health.
For most of my 45 years living in L.A., fire season meant three months or so of the year centered around October. Now it’s 12 months a year. The Thomas Fire, which devastated the Santa Monicas and Los Padres National Forest, started in December of 2017 and took three months to put out, and then only because of the arrival of rains. I’d never heard of fire tornadoes before now, creating their own weather with flames 100 to 200 feet high, exhausting fire-fighters volunteering from all over the world, but welcome to the New Normal. The destruction caused by drought, and beetles, has killed thousands of square miles of California forests, making them tinder for the ravenous fires, especially around Yosemite and Lake Tahoe.
The Santa Monicas are America’s largest and only intra-urban mountain range. As we sit here today, the truly scary Santa Ana “devil winds” are still ahead. Remember the quaint old times when building a fire-break protected against the spread of a wildfire? Already all MRCA trails in the Santa Monicas, and the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, have been closed twice: the first, in April, because of COVID-19 overcrowding and people’s non-compliance with masks and social-distancing protocols; and the second, over Labor Day, because of the lethal heat wave that killed a 41-year-old female hiker in Tapia Park, near Calabasas. That day, Los Angeles County set an all-time record of 121 degrees. Many others had to be rescued and medevacked out. That’s also when the Bobcat Fire started in the San Gabriels.
So what, if anything, is the Sierra Club doing about all this? Your Chair has been busy. In August I spent a full day with a team of City of L.A. engineers, fire department officials and engineers including the Fire Chief, the head Ranger and the Deputy Director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, as well as community and homeowner-association leaders, to scout out locations for a new series of fire cameras throughout the Santa Monica Mountains.
This exciting project — stretching across all of California, not just here — is being funded by public and private charitable money based out of U.C. San Diego. We surveyed a dozen or more locations, such as San Vicente Mountain Peak (Nike missile tracking station), Mountaingate, and the Green Mountain radar navigation station on the Temescal Ridge Fire Road, looking for the most panoramic, unobstructed and long-range views of the mountains. These cameras will be rolling 24/7, in real time, and accessible not just to the fire department but to everyone via the Internet. We know that early detection and extinguishment of these fires, which seem to start in the middle of the night or early morning, is critical. The fire department is enthusiastic, and says these cameras will allow them to detect fires and deploy resources earlier and with greater precision, when the fire can still be knocked down.
We’re also active on the legislative front. Recent legislation in Sacramento aggressively sought to “densify” housing across the state, effectively abolishing single-family zoning (among other companion legislation, SB 1120). Whatever you might think about this on the merits, as regards homelessness and the housing crisis, this legislation — which failed to pass in the closing minutes of the Assembly session — could be disastrous for the mountains. Most of these locations are known as Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones. Attracting developers to buy land here, clear wilderness open-space and build dense and expensive (not affordable) housing, will be a grave and deadly mistake. Many of these new residences could be difficult or impossible to evacuate in a firestorm, as we tragically saw in Northern California.
That is why, on August 22nd, Sierra Club California passed a resolution opposing new building in Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones, except for existing in-fill development, “to respond to increasing intensity and frequency of devastating wildfires on lives, habitat, property, infrastructure, and the environment.”
Stay tuned. This is all “breaking news.”
Eric Edmunds, Chair Santa Monica Mountains Task Force
This report was written for the Santa Monica Mountains Task Force by Sara R. Nichols, a Sullivan Canyon resident and environmental activist involved in the lawsuit against real estate developers who violated state laws in pursuit of erecting mansions on top of the old-growth forest and natural wildlife habitat of a Santa Monica Mountains hillside.
An update on the status of the properties at 1834 and 1838 Old Ranch Road was inevitable. Sadly, the update is not in our favor. As you may have heard, Sullivan Equity Partners (SEP) wants to build an approximately 15,000 square-foot house with horse barn, swimming pool and guest house on each of these lots. They intend to build a 1,000-foot-long retaining wall on the east side of the lots just under Bayliss Road, Eric Drive, Westridge Terrace and Westridge Road. The lots are two thirds of the way up Old Ranch Road in a steep, wooded canyon. The proposed construction would destroy the natural state of these lots, which can be seen from many homes in the area and enjoyed from paths and trails nearby. Our ultimate aim — endorsed by the Santa Monica Mountains Task Force — is to preserve them as a small park to benefit the public. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has expressed interest in assuming ownership should we ever have the good fortune to get the far!
In 2014 SEP removed 56 trees from the property, including three trees (one, a huge legacy sycamore on City property) they had no permit to remove under the Los Angeles Protected Tree Ordinance. As a result, the City, after hearings in 2016 in front of the Bureau of Street Services and the Board of Public Works, asked the Department of Building and Safety to revoke SEP’s building and grading permits for five years, a penalty provided by the Protected Tree Ordinance. SEP sued the City in both state and federal court for damages and to try to force the City to reinstate their permits.
SEP won the state-court case and in late January 2020 a judgment was entered ordering the City to rescind its permit revocations and its decisions that SEP violated the Protected Tree Ordinance. After settlement talks between the City and SEP that were held behind closed doors, the City decided to appeal the Superior Court’s decision favoring SEP. The outcome of that appeal has not been determined. We are hoping that the Bureau of Street Services and the Board of Public Works will decide in the upcoming months to hold new hearings on SEP’s violations.
We are grateful to all of you who spoke up for the environment by taking our poll and contacting City officials to let them know of your opposition to this wildly inappropriate and dangerous development and asking them to hold new hearings.
We are concerned that the Protected Tree Ordinance could become a legal fiction if it can’t be enforced. The court’s overturning of the City’s enforcement makes a mockery of the City’s duty to protect the environment all over the City, never mind just in places like Sullivan Canyon. That said, as Sullivan Canyon is in a high-risk fire zone, this development deserves special scrutiny. Eighteen-feet-wide Old Ranch Road has been on evacuation orders twice in the last two years.
Climate change is making the risk of catastrophic fires all the more likely with each passing year. Imagine a fire truck trying to access a fire in the canyon with even one cement mixer or hauling vehicle on the road, never mind the hundreds this development would necessitate. Moreover, nationwide, there are almost 4,000 construction site fires every year. Who can guarantee that this site will be fire-free? Those homes on the top of the ridge, up-wind from the construction site, would be the most vulnerable.
In the meantime, there are ways to fight to protect 1834 and 1838 Old Ranch Road from this improper, dangerous and hideously disruptive development. We are asking for donations to pay our attorneys to represent us against this potentially terrible environmental assault.
We have managed to hold the line against this development since September 2014 and we still have a good chance to stop any inappropriate development if we muster our resources and voices at this critical point.
Please give as generously as you can to our law-firm partner in this saga, Advocates for the Environment. (see link for P.O. Box address and option to donate online). Good attorneys are not cheap! It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, so your donations will be tax-deductible. I still hold out hope that we will be able to raise enough money to be able to purchase the land and turn it over to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to forever protect the land from development and our community from the nightmare that an inappropriate development of this magnitude guarantees.
We’re sad to announce the recent passing of Jerome Daniel, originally a Chicago native who moved to Los Angeles and, like so many of us, fell under the enchantment of our local Santa Monica Mountains and its many treasures large and small.
Daniel was a key figure in planning the Mulholland Scenic Parkway (where an overlook above the Hollywood Bowl is named in his honor), and went on to chair the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, where he oversaw the preservation of some 50,000 acres of parkland.
Over a decade in the making, the somewhat garish, land-gobbling “Savannah Oaks” project off Mulholland in Woodland Hills has been stalled, or perhaps stopped altogether. The development of 19 three- and four-bedroom homes was submitted in 2005 and has been met with several fierce obstacles and appeals from the surrounding community as well as the MRCA and the SMMC. Among the environmental casualties — besides the potential fire risks — would be fifteen protected coast live oaks.
Suddenly, COVID masks became handy for another reason: the smoke-tinged air, through which ashes spun like grisly snowfall. While no significant fires have broken out yet this season in the Santa Monicas, those like the Bobcat and El Dorado fires, as well as all the others peppering the state, are but one facet of a general reminder of the dangers of excessive dry heat, and of climate change overall.
Mary Ann Webster’s article in the Summer 2020 newsletter addressed the considerations one should undergo when hiking, or deciding to hike, in such weather. Unfortunately, the recent death of a hiker in Calabasas made her words all the timelier. Trails closed through 5 pm after this incident, and during the heatwave.
The Wildland Urban Wildfire Committee was formed by Sierra Club California in July 2020, in order to address the flammable pitfalls and risks associated with “urban-interface development” — the fancy, bureaucratic name for places such as Malibu: outer crusts of suburbia. Ideally, these efforts will help substantially with our response time, and capacity, to combat any future fires, a problem that today is far less an “if” than a “when”.
I’ve laced up my running shoes and hit the most popular trails, from Escondido Falls in Malibu to Elysian and Griffith Parks downtown. I’ve also run and walked on beaches and popular gathering-places like Palisades Park in Santa Monica.
There’s a LOT of people out on the trails. In part that may be because of folks going stir-crazy in their small apartments, perhaps surrounded by numerous family members. It’s also the onset of summer and warm weather, with the magnetic effect the beaches and outdoors have on Southern Californians at this time of year.
For those of us on foot in the mountains, what are we seeing? For one thing, not many face-masks and little social-distancing, although the more considerate folks cover their mouth and nose as they approach you. I’d say one-third to one-half of people on the trails carry a mask or bandana. With runners breathing hard (I myself carry a bandana), and especially with the younger cohort, unfortunately there is much less compliance. And with mountain bikers, almost no compliance.
It’s certainly a buzz-kill for a hiker on a single-track trail, minding his/her own business, to be suddenly confronted with a shredder bombing straight at you at high speed, with barely time (if you’re lucky) to jump off the trail to save your life as the unmasked rider passes with zero separation distance.
The trails reopened on May 10th. Since then, times have changed at warp speed. Amazingly, face masks and social-distancing are suddenly political issues, red versus blue. Public health officials advocating for caution and conservatism are being harassed, intimidated (in L.A. County), and driven from office (Orange County). Pressure to “reopen” and revert to normalcy is irresistible. Bars and restaurants are tentatively open again.
Sadly, we are now starting to see the results. New cases, hospitalizations and new deaths are surging, especially in aggressive reopening places like Florida, Texas and Arizona. The virus never takes a holiday.
It is true that trails and the outdoors are safer than enclosed bars and restaurants. Fresh air, sunlight, and warm temps inhibit the spread, especially if you are hiking on a wide fire road where you can take evasive action, as opposed to single-track.
The months ahead will tell how all this works out. For me, despite the obstacles and disruptions, it’s a blessing and a privilege to get outdoors and hit the trails.
One final observation: If you see a black stick on the trail, don’t step on it. There’re a lot of rattlesnakes this season.
Eric Edmunds, Chair Santa Monica Mountains Task Force
