Part 59: A New Year’s Day Angeles Crest Highway Story – Should the Racetrack Be Saved?

January 3, 2024

Photo of the San Gabriel Mountains from Jarvi Memorial Vista by author (GoPro Hero 11 Black).

By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

The Los Angeles Times ran the most beautiful story on Wrightwood on New Year’s Day 2024 by journalist Grace Toohey entitled “Wrightwood youth connect with elderly neighbors facing extreme weather, dangerous loneliness.” The piece described in detail the new Golden Raccoon program launched by Wrightwood Elementary School to keep lonely seniors company including one retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy with some new youthful, lifelong friends.

Wrightwood sits at the eastern end of the Angeles Crest Highway, Highway 2 by the State of California’s numeration under Caltrans. We salute the Golden Raccoon’s and even the housebound retired Sheriff’s deputy, but grandma wasn’t out on the Highway this New Year’s Day along with just about everyone else not at the Rose Parade. The San Gabriel Mountains can indeed by a place of “extreme weather” and “dangerous loneliness” and not only for senior citizens, but also for hikers stranded just as Rene Compean several years ago in a then closed section of the forest.

Compean was rescued after sending a final picture from near Triplet Rocks past the Twin Peaks, which is in turn past Devil’s Canyon and over from Mount Waterman where the ACH winds its way behind the crumbling, pine forested rocky granite. Thanks to the satellite photo analysis of internet sleuth Ben Kuo who was able to identify the area. The prominent Rocks are among the most difficult destinations for even experienced climbers in the San Gabriel’s Mountain National Monument through which the Highway makes it passage along 66 miles from La Cañada Flintridge to Wrightwood.

This route has been impassable in two sections since winter storms in late 2022 and early 2023, but for those who have driven its entire length the prized traverse is among the most ultimate experiences in all of driving, much less hiking to far sections away from the Racetrack as I called it the first take of this overview. Now some have disputed this characterization, but if you’re ever lost in the Angeles National Forest and you can hear the cars whether its on ACH, San Gabriel Canyon Road, or even the two Tujunga’s that’s your best bet for making it back to civilization.

Rescues in the Forest and Monument are conducted by Search and Rescue Teams, SAR in the parlance, staffed by volunteers who are reserve LASD deputies and whom are also assisted by others including the Special Enforcement Bureau, SEB which is the most elite force in the County’s Department. Compean was rescued after just over a day in the wilderness. For even the most experienced, a single night unplanned out can be a psychologically daunting experience testing an individual’s survival skills at navigation as well as nourishment.

The godfather of canyoneering, and adventure hiking as he termed it at first in the San Gabriel’s is Christopher Earls Brennan, an Irishman who for many years was a professor at the California Institute for Technology in Pasadena. Brennan and his climbing students would be among the first to traverse some of the most remote canyons in the mountains that even the local Tongva had struggled to penetrate with settlements. There are few known archeological sites to be found in the rugged landscape, with among the greatest legacies being simply the routes they used particularly for gathering acorns in the deep cut canyons.

Would you believe that the likes of even a champion of the Angeles Crest Highway like Chris Brennan could get lost in the wilderness too? Now of course not without doing something a bit rogue, but it did happen as those who landmark 2014 book Adventure Hikes and Canyoneering in the San Gabriel’s recounts how he set out to traverse the East Fork of the San Gabriel River with his bicycle only to find himself too far a flung: “I found it very difficult psychologically to resign myself to a night in the mountains and to stop in time to gather firewood and make a fire and a bed for the night,” he would later write about the experience.

This is not the only psychologically pending threat though that haunts those who live and venture into these mountains. From the Wrightwood side, Highway 138 veers off from the Cajon Pass and the San Bernardino Mountains opposite before Angeles Crest Highway splits off from the approach to the High Desert of the Mojave towards Wrightwood. 138 is now named after Abiel Barron, an Los Angeles Police Department detective while out on an investigation with his partner in 2003 and died in a head-on collision that forms the most dangerous vehicular accident scenario even more so than going “over the side.” Please watch the head-on always!

Today the landscape here is scarred by the Sheep Fire, which started June 11, 2022. That night I was in the mountains, and even more than perhaps getting lost, or having no one to keep me company ever, the one thing I fear most is wildfire. More than bears, lions or snakes, it’s fire, and especially the human caused one that causes great fear. That day my girlfriend and I had hiked the High Desert Trail, which originates from Vincent Gap where the hike down the East Fork begins as well as the ascent to 9,407 foot Mount Baden Powell named for the imperialist founder of the Boy Scouts.

The drive from Vincent Gap where the Highway now stands closed through to Islip Saddle going back to Wrightwood takes only about 15 minutes. As we drove down in the night the glow of the slow burning fire became apparent first as smoke and then as glow before a literal wall of fire could be seen burning upwards from Wrightwood from the desert. It’s not only the weather or even loneliness that should concern us about the senior citizens in Wrightwood. We were worried at first, could we still get through the wooded town.

Things seemed normal at first in Wrightwood, people weren’t evacuating. Highway 2 was closed through to Highway 138, and soon we had to work our way around to the detour down Lone Pine Canyon Road to escape to the safety of San Bernardino. We would return days later after the fire was out to witness the blackened landscape facing down to Phelan in the High Desert. The lost hiker Compean had wandered into the large closed area that followed the September 2020 Bobcat fire that graces much of the backcountry wilderness in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Only the section of forest fronting Arcadia along Santa Anita Canyon and the West Fork of the San Gabriel River now remains closed. To enter this burnt area provides a still stark glimpse at the power of wildfire, both wind-driven and fuel-driven in the San Gabriel’s. Before the Bobcat fire we had the Station Fire of 2009 that burned so hot special firefighting gels were needed to get a handle on the intense flames. Angeles Crest is scary enough, but the highway in the middle of a major fire event is my worst nightmare scenario even more so than rockfall or avalanche.

Still on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles County, there’s no safe place safer to be if you ask me than on the Angeles Crest Highway. So the girlfriend and I set out again to reach the far end of the “upper” section reached now via Angeles Forest Highway and Upper Big Tujunga. I’m pleased to report that there is now more snow on the mountains and that it now extends all the way down from Mount Waterman to the Angeles Crest Highway and not simply on top like a mooncake. It’s not the powdery stuff though, but rather frozen snowpack.

The rocks weren’t bad. I’ve been up there before when they are so dense, that not even by turning on your hazard lights and carefully navigating through can they be traversed. Caltrans always plows the roads in the morning, and then over the course of the day, the rocks keep on coming down forming a constant hazard in the higher elevations than even that perennially present at lower elevation. Those things just come down like hockey pucks, but they didn’t stop the baby blue Corvette driven by a lone man who seemed to young for the car from tearing through as we stopped to look at the snow at Kratka Ridge.

As the Los Angeles Times journalist Toohey described, it’s entirely possible to have too much snowfall as well as many mountain communities experienced last winter, and too much as rain as they experienced last spring. Similarly, landslides and mudslides are significant problem especially for the foothills. The extreme weather problem is very real, but thankfully this Winter so far has been mild. New Year’s Eve was cloudy and as we returned back the last for the time back through the two tunnels past the Jarvi Memorial Picnic area it was quiet and I stood in the tunnels and felt like it was the safest place in the whole of Los Angeles County.

Jarvi was Simeri Jarvi, Sim as they called him, and he was an Angeles National Forest supervisor who died in 1964 from a heart attack while hiking up Mount Waterman, which tops 8,000 feet in elevation. In all honesty, it’s not the mountains that I fear, or even the highway. Nor do I suggest you let the fear of the wilderness hold you back so long as certain precautions are taken regularly and the systematic practice to ensure appropriate supplies, conditions and separation. Truth be told, the city was a dangerous place to be this New Year’s Eve. Along my return route there were shootings in Downtown Los Angeles and in Hawthorne, as the Los Angeles Times headlines we are in the middle of wave of double flu and COVID-19 infections.

When the pandemic hit I had to both laugh and cry. The closure of the outdoor areas that so many found essential for mental health was unnecessary and damaging the communication of a cogent scientific method that is so familiar to us with wilderness experience. One million plus Americans died and we hardly batted an eyelid even as we covered our faces on the trails outside and eyed each other nervously. In the push to return to normalcy, and indeed indoors, we have already forgotten the lessons we learned in those first days about just how badly we need outdoor recreation for health and sanity.

Reading about the old LASD deputy who can’t leave her home made me think of those times where so many of us were essentially locked down. Driving back along with lonely Angeles Crest Highway alone on New Year’s Eve we spotted first the lights on at the residential building at Snowcrest and then finally there it was, a parked White Tesla Model S. The fireworks still weren’t visible at Charlton Flats below and so we headed to Georges Gap where the explosions over the cityscape below became evident. When I finally returned home, news of another disaster arrived.

My sister who lives in Honolulu had gone on a cruise to Japan with our nephew. The 7.5 Richter scale earthquake was on the news, we got her text that she had been on the 60^th floor of a building but was fine. Then the next morning, New Year’s Day I felt the jolt in Lawndale not far from the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which offers similarly superb experiences as the San Gabriel Monutains, a 4.1 magnitude tremor. It’s upon these forces which California has mortgaged much of its future with a bullet train project slated at some point to pass through our San Gabriel Mountains.

Now the planners of this project the cost estimates for which head somewhere north of $68 billion promised initially to go over the still very rugged Western end mountains, renderings of trains sailing on concrete bridges hundreds of feet high filled the computer screens of my transportation focused classmates at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. Then when people objected to that idea, they proposed to tunnel under the mountains, water and methane pockets be ignored, much less seismic and fire risks. You can’t just snap your fingers and wish away a winter blizzard storm!

The Los Angeles Times recently bemoaned the lack of progress on this project with journalist Ryan Fonseca writing on December 15, 2023. California got another $3.1 billion for the high speed rail project destined to end somewhere in the Central Valley and another proposed to transit from Hesperia or Apple Valley in the High Desert to Las Vegas. Fonseca writes: “Remember that project? It’s been a while, so you’d be forgiven for forgetting. Back in 2008, after voters approved an initial $9 billion in funding for the project, officials estimated the system would be fully built and running trains by 2020.” He then further quips: “That was *checks watch* nearly four years ago.”

There used to be another Racetrack in Los Angeles. I had searched online before, but it wasn’t until I went there while in the middle of a 13 day search for a man with a Silver Alert on him in the city that I fully appreciated it. Ascot Hills Park in El Sereno used to be the site of dirt and then paved motor vehicle racing, and not unlike Newcomb’s Ranch on ACH which suffered arson in 1976 at the hands of a cook who had been terminated. In 1936, Linden Emerson, a former janitor at the track, burned down the grandstand because he had grown tired of seeing his friends die racing their cars at the old Ascot Park.

Should the keep our beloved Angeles Crest Highway open as a de facto Racetrack for so many? Are additional restrictions needed, cameras and tolls to make it safer much less a guardrail tune-up and expansion program? For a State that can barely keep a mountain highway open against the forces of nature while plunging billions of dollars into bullet trains that critics point out won’t, or simply can’t push through the San Gabriel Mountains, I think we should keep the Angeles Crest Highway fully open as much as possible. While I’ve wondered if nature had benefitted from the closure, it’s loss as a principle artery, much less a Racetrack is a downer.

So up I went on New Year’s Day 2024 along with the rest of the San Gabriel Valley to transit the “lower” section of Angeles Crest Highway with my girlfriend. I stopped at Scenic View #1 with its eroding pavement and burnout, chucked a wheel-popping rock over the side, went and climbed San Gabriel Peak where we encountered an older couple at sunset from Glendale fresh up from spiny Mount Markham and Mount Lowe. After dark the stars came out, and as we exited I went by the burnout again for a final swoop in my Honda Civic only to miss a discarded beer bottle in the dark before my partners quick eye.

There are many Champions to be found yet on ACH, and when they speak I listen closely well into the future. The Angeles Crest Highway can and should be re-opened in full, and it should be patrolled just as diligently, not with car chases from LASD deputies one of whom I saw citing a lowered car driven by a teenager lookalike as usual at Glenola Park in La Cañada Flintridge. If the funding can’t be found amidst other transportation project priorities to make the Crest safer and cleaner, I think we have to start asking where our priorities are as a society, because sometimes it’s about more than just a Highway, it’s about getting closer to one another.

Link: Wrightwood youth connect with elderly neighbors facing extreme weather, dangerous loneliness

Link: High-speed rail projects in California just got billions. Can we finally have nice trains?

Link: LAPD Detectives Shared Career Paths, Friendship -- and Tragedy

Link: Adventure Hikes and Canyoneering in the San Gabriels (full document) and by region courtesy of Dankat Publishing

Please support my work with your subscription or for direct aid use Venmo

Zachary Ellison is an Independent Journalist and Whistleblower in the Los Angeles area. Zach was most recently employed by the University of Southern California, Office of the Provost from October 2015 to August 2022 as an Executive Secretary and Administrative Assistant supporting the Vice Provost for Academic Operations and the Vice Provost and Senior Advisor to the Provost among others. Zach holds a Master’s in Public Administration and a Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Policy and Planning from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. While a student at USC, he worked for the USC Good Neighbors Campaign including on their newsletter distributed university-wide. Zach completed his B.A. in History at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon and was a writer, editor, and photographer for the Pasadena High School Chronicle. He was Barack Obama’s one-millionth online campaign contributor in 2008. Zach is a former AmeriCorps intern for Hawaii State Parks and worked for the City of Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation. He is a trained civil process server, and enjoys weekends in the great outdoors.