This is the title chapter from The Short Trip to Nowhere, an unpublished collection of travel narratives by Ret Talbot. Photography by Ret Talbot and illustrations by Karen Talbot.
Escaping Los Angeles on the I-5 headed north into the mountains is a study in contrasts. The proximity of wilderness to city is a virtual impossibility—an impossibility that somehow Angelinos have managed to reconcile (or at least convince themselves they have). This is, after all, the only major American city bisected by a mountain range, and the inevitable result is that it is quite possible to be killed by a mountain lion, have your dog bit by a rattlesnake or see your house burned to the ground by wildfire all within the city limits. And yet despite this (or maybe because of it?), this city—most of Southern California even—remains iconic for all the hopes and dreams of a nation. Sprawling out beneath a paradisiacal and oft-marketed sun, the sandy beaches and smell of orange blossoms dappling the dawn somehow make the detritus appear innocent and hopeful enough, although always with a little David Lynch mixed in. Dissimilarity and disparity merge in a myth intrinsically rooted in the psyche of the American Dream. An obdurate belief in the inextricable possibility of reinventing oneself fueling the Dream and feeding a city without an observable past. The City of Angels. A set, continually re-constructed like a Hollywood backlot. And yet it is never far from an inescapable prehistory—a landscape that periodically pokes through the veneer in the shifting of the earth, only to be hastily spackled over and blissfully forgotten. This is Los Angeles—a place worth escaping.
Thirty miles up the I-5, along a creek sheltered by the Angeles and Los Padres National Forests, there is just such an escape. While it has been used as the backdrop for celluloid dreams, this river is no set—just raw landscape appearing, perhaps, much as it did to the Chumash Indians 5000 years ago. The soaring rock walls, deep canyons, open chaparral, and thickets of dark pinyon juniper are a sort of foil for the urbanity below. When walking here, along this creek, it’s hard to believe you are under an hour from the center of one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the country.
Piru Creek is named because of an indigenous people known as the Tataviam. They lived here after the Chumash, and Piru is the word the first Europeans recorded as being used by the Tataviam in relation to the river’s reed-lined banks. While primitive archeological and historical sites abound—there are more than 2500 in the Los Padres National Forest alone—it is the geologic pre-history that first renders the traveler speechless. It is the way one might be overwhelmed by Europe’s greatest cathedrals. Here, at the toe of the San Gabriel Fault, your footsteps traverse rock that is millions of years old—rock rooted in the earth deeper than Mount Everest is tall.
The Piru is born in a remote portion of the Sepse Wilderness—the largest designated Wilderness in Los Padres National Forest. Rising from a valley hemmed in by San Guillermo Mountain to the northeast and Reyes Peak and Pine Mountain to the southwest and south, Piru Creek gathers its form and character from intermittent drainages until, at still over 5,000 feet, its hydronamic intent becomes unmistakable. The creek begins to cut its course downhill. For more than fifty miles it flows year-round through the rugged chaos of east-west trending mountains—the Transverse Ranges of Southern California. In the winter and spring, it surges down through this geologic anomaly that twists wildly around a bend in the San Andreas Fault creating the only transeptal mountain architecture in the entirety of California’s coastal ranges. One needn’t be a geologist to appreciate the immensity of what happened here, but the geologic lexicon conjures up exotic imagery. The Tertiary sedimentary rocks—Matilija Sandstone and Juncal Formation with its interbedded sandstones and shales—give way to Precambrian basement rocks—hard granite and gneiss. Thrust faults juxtapose Precambrian over Tertiary with its erosive terrestrial sandstones guarding broad alluvial sub-basins before again plunging into harsh gorges screaming with unlikely vertiginy. “[H]ere is an area rivaling many National Parks and monuments in both uniqueness and beauty,” mused the author of an environmental impact survey report, circa 1972. Quite an escape indeed.
***
For many, the term “vacation” is comparable to an escape. For some, especially for Angelinos of means, vacation also connotes high thread counts and exquisite, artful gastronomy. For those looking for a luxurious escape from the City’s hum, there is a steady stream of air traffic embarking from LAX that can put one in Cuernavaca, Cabo San Lucas, Guadalajara, or Punta Mita for dinner. No habla, Espanol? The anglophile can also choose to stay north of the border. Napa and the Bay area are, after all, easily weekendable, and Hawaii is temptingly close and warmer.
With so many accessible options, why opt for a place like Piru Creek? Why vacation where the choice of accommodation is limited to “developed campground” or “primitive camp”? Why visit a place where poison oak replaces rose petals scattered artistically haphazard as a part of a mint-accoutered turn-down service? Why subject oneself to bears and rattlesnakes instead of conscientious wait-staff and other like-minded leisure travelers? Heck, on the Piru the cell service is unreliable at best.
For some of us the answer to these questions is easy. While it might have something to do with money—the Piru could be considered a “staycation”—I do not choose it simply to save money. For some of us, the best vacations are escapes that are blissfully antidotal to the moderninity and uber-convenience of daily life lived throughout much of Southern California’s coastal strip. We look for escapes that remind us that living comfortably isn’t a foregone conclusion but a luxury with which we are fortunate to be blessed. We opt for trips that remind us that when we wonder about the weather, we should look at the sky instead of at the television. We see value in going places where nothing tastes so good as a drink of water and sleep is a necessity to rejuvenate tired muscles rather than a short, pill-induced flight from too much stimuli.
Personally, I have backpacked the remotest mountain ranges of the Yukon, traversed isolated Arctic glaciers, climbed to over 20,000 feet in the Tropics, and fly fished some rivers accessible only through convolutions of increasing smaller winged craft. I have been fortunate to have these experiences, and, if my luck holds, I will have many more of them, but these trips take resources that, for most of us, limit their frequency to a couple times a year at best. The danger is, however, that the appeal of such travel—the experiences gained in such far-flung locales and then indelibly inscribed on our memories—sometimes this, in and of itself, predisposes us to overlook that which is right under our nose.
Enter Piru Creek.
For me, as I drive to the Piru in the predawn of a Saturday morning, the anticipation evidenced by the steady drum in the hollow of my neck is percussed by myriad forces. There is the vivid account of Juan Crespi, for example. This Franciscan monk was the official diarist of the Portola Expedition—the first overland expedition into California by Europeans in 1769. I remember reading his journal when I first moved to Southern California—how an unseen landscape was revealed to me through Crespi’s detailed and, at times, poetic descriptions. This is that landscape, I think, as my truck climbs the Golden State Highway. My expectations are like those of Arturo Bandini, Fante’s character, who also yearns for something beyond his City of Angels. An escape as simple as the arid dust. The desert scrub along the highway is not quite Mailer’s “cactus wild of southern California,” but, to me, it is every part the escape of, as the bold, young author of The Deer Park puts it, “a town built out of no other obvious motive than commercial profit.”
Eventually I turn off the Highway and pass through the entrance to the National Forest, and it all comes flooding in at me like a wall of water—a torrential, yet welcome, downpour. It is the possibility of regaining the nerve to run Class V rapids in a remote canyon or even just to camp beside a languorous loop of river beneath cottonwoods and enjoy an unobstructed night sky. This is a place of promise connecting wistful memories of youth to evocative dreams of what might come. Of what is possible. Anything seems possible here.
Rarely, if ever, have I been disappointed by the Piru. Even after hiking several miles into Piru Creek’s broad Hardluck valley with fly rod in hand in search of the shimmer-light silver flash of a landlocked steelhead; even after being unable to elicit a single rise; even with the long, dry climb ahead of me with the late afternoon shadows lengthening—even then, I am not disappointed. How could I be when every step I take and every new vista I see reveals another side of myself to me. If you open yourself to it, every visit to the Piru can be a journey of self-revelation—a journey of self deciphered against the backdrop of wilderness splendor. The trick is, however, to, like an impressionistic figure in a William McTaggart painting, allow the self to merge with scenery and become one in the rich tapestry of landscape. To transcend anthropomorphic boundaries and connect with the landscape from which we are so frequently divorced—that’s the trick.
***
There are several places where one can easily access the Piru River along its run through the mountains before it joins the Santa Clara River amidst citrus groves. I sometimes visit the Piru at its end, thirteen miles downstream of Interstate-5, in the town of Piru. This is not the wild Piru Creek that usually draws me, but it is, nonetheless, a curious anecdote to story of Southern California. Urban legend has it that the reason we pronounce the Piru as “Pie-roo” instead of “Pee-Roo” is a result of the early days of the railroad. The town was founded in 1887, and (so the story goes), as the trains approached the station, the conductor would shout out the mispronunciation. Was the regularity of the train schedule and the clockwork call of “Pie-roo” stronger than tradition? Or was it the result of a local baker marketing his wares with the catchy slogan: “We Put The Pie in Piru" that gave us the contemporary pronunciation? Perhaps we’ll never know.
Regardless of pronunciation, Piru is but one of a string of towns along the Santa Clarita Valley scraping out an existence, although Piru, in many ways, is in worse shape than most. There is a shadow of grandeur barely discernable in this town that once aspired to be no less than a second Garden of Eden. David C. Cook, the town’s founder, was yet another of the late nineteenth century Midwesterners with the capacity to envisage a California dream. Cook intended to build his dream from his personal fortune amassed through the publishing and peddling of Sunday School tracts. He would, he determined, cultivate the fruits of the Bible where the Piru meets the Santa Clara. Perhaps his ultimate failure should be viewed as a cautionary tale for those who expect too much of Southern California. As state historian Kevin Starr puts it, California “has always been a figment of its own imagination.” One of Cook’s homes—today the Heritage Valley Inn—remains a cenotaph to what once was, but there is little else here along the last run of the Piru River.
***
Instead of exiting Interstate-5 at Castaic Junction and heading downstream to the town of Piru, I usually prefer to continue north up into the mountains and access the Piru further up its reach. As I climb, I remember that automobile passage through these twisted mountains was not possible until 1915 along the historic Ridge Route, which lies to the east of present day I-5 (and has been closed since storm damage in 2005). A three-lane “Ridge Alternate Highway” or Highway 99 was built in 1933. A remnant of this road south of Pyramid Lake and accessed via Templin Highway provides unprecedented access to a length of Piru Creek, but today, I bypass this in favor of the River’s upper reaches.
The Piru is dammed in two places—once just above the town of Piru and again in the heart of the mountains at Pyramid Lake. Above Pyramid Lake, however, the river is free to run its course unobstructed and, largely, ignored by much of the weekend warrior traffic. The National Forest has closed the most popular access—the road to the Hardluck Campground—to vehicular traffic in an effort to save the endangered arroyo toad. To access much of the Upper Piru, you have to put some effort into it, which, perhaps not surprisingly, has greatly reduced the number of people one sees on its banks.
I take the almost laughable “Smokey the Bear” exit (really, that’s its name) beyond Pyramid Lake. Turning under the Interstate, I merge left on Pyramid Lake Road which parallels the I-5 on one side and the West Branch of the California Aqueduct on the other. Just before the powerhouse, a bridge on the right gives way to Lower Hungry Valley Road, which turns into Alamos Campground Road and passes the smattering of campsites at the Alamos Campground. There is a locked gate soon thereafter near the Alamos Fire Station. This is the Hardluck Canyon trailhead, sometimes called Buck Creek Road for the creek that joins the Piru a few miles above Pyramid Lake. The confluence of these two creeks is today’s destination.
Sitting on the tailgate of my truck, a light wind rushes through the autumnal foliage of dried scrub as a group of swallows wheel northward. I tighten my shoes, pack my water bottle and a couple granola bars and head off around the locked gate on the old paved road that used to give instant gratification vehicular access to the Piru in Hardluck Canyon. The road twists around a rise and then climbs steadily to an obvious scar in the ridge above. Through this cut, in a rather clichéd and dramatic fashion, the Los Padres Forest is gained beside the large Forest Service road sign which is too hulking and official-looking for the solitary foot traffic (and sporadic bicycle) that passes this way now. Bear Mountain, Gold Hill and Snowy Peak dominate the horizon as the road descends down into the open valley below. The Piru wanders here amongst boulders and cottonwood trees, a respite from early constrictions which force the water into what can be, at times, a violent flow. The old road crosses the creek and turns downstream toward the deserted campground. The land is once again regaining the topography here, but the vestiges of development lend a spectral quality to the landscape. Like Poe’s description of first approaching the House of Usher—old vault toilets like mausoleums amidst the lesser headstones of abandoned picnic tables, cracked fire pits and the occasional weathered Forest Service sign. In my mind’s eye, I see it all giving way one day. I imagine it all returned to the earth as the ethereal residence of the Ushers, along with those that personified it, descended so dramatically into the landscape.
The Buck Creek Road is really not a road at all. It is a track that is also reverting to its original character, although the occasional shotgun shell or piece of cryptic metal alludes to its intersection at various points with human histories. A trail, easy to follow, starts at the end of the old Hardluck Campground and traces a downstream course along the southwest edge of the valley. The sun is high, but the autumnal temperatures are pleasant—enough to yield a sweat while hiking but cool enough for a windbreaker while at rest. Suddenly a crashing sound in a stand of cottonwoods draws my attention; I make out the hind quarters of a mule deer making its way through the tangle of Riparian woodland stretched out across the breadth of the braded river channels. Out of site now in the dense thickets, I follow the deer’s path by way of the shaking crowns of willow coppices and the rifle-clean snap of alder branches. Thule reeds in the foreground wave gently. The sky screams above.
Halfway down the valley between the old Hardluck Campground and the confluence with Buck Creek, just before the Piru leaves the valley’s expanse and gathers up into a tight canyon again, I stop and rest atop an embankment of loose shale. As I drink from my water bottle, the pine scent of Bigcone Doug Fir wafts down the north-facing slope behind me. The sound of a lizard scurrying through dry sedges draws my eye across a line of ants making dogged headway athwart the uneven rock. I reach down and pick up a strange stone that catches my attention. It falls easily into my open palm, and I turn it carefully. Not a stone at all, I realize that I am holding a fossilized fragment of an ancient snail—rock hard and etched with the detail of a master craftsman. I wonder at this relic of life lived thousands—if not millions—of years before me. This artifact washed down through the ages as, molecule-by-molecule, it was transformed by unimaginable forces into this faithful tribute to itself. While it’s legal to collect invertebrate fossils here, I carefully return it to its place not wanting to disrupt the continuum of the ages any more than is absolutely necessary.
My eyes rise across the valley, across the sycamores and sedges, to where the land rises 400 feet from the valley floor. The Creek here is synonymous with the San Gabriel Fault. A sliver of Tertiary rock where the fault fragments, where side canyons yield intermittent streams that are dry as dust now, but which will undoubtedly bulge under winter rains. I have this feeling that there is an order here unlike that to which I am exposed every day. Unlike the tangle of freeways with its logically ordered exits providing efficient egress to suburbs, residential streets. Everyday life. Here the order is measured in diurnal cycles, seasonal flux or the ebb and flow of geologic time. The structure is omnipresent and inevitable, and there is something reassuring about its certitude. It is a reality (unlike the design of freeways) I can count on. Eventually, I stand up and continue down valley in a state of hyperawareness. My senses attuned to my surroundings and yet I continue almost trancelike. One foot descends before the next. The play of the light changes on the rock. And all at once I have the notion that the cryptic geomorphics of North America’s western seaboard lurk here beneath the chaparral. The secrets of a continent and its evolution laid bare, and there is not a soul here but me.
***
The irony of public land is that it is everyone’s. We all own it. And yet that collective ownership is also the greatest threat to the landscape. How is it possible, as the Forest Service’s mission dictates, to provide for all kinds of recreation today while at the same time preserving the land for future generations? Should all of the natural wonders be accessible by four-wheel drive vehicles? By mountain bike? By horse? Should every remote wonder be handicapped accessible? How do we balance our own personal land use ethics with those of our neighbors when our fundamental principles may be galaxies apart?
Whenever I go to public land, I have these thoughts. They are hard questions and ones with which our society at large rarely grapples in meaningful ways. In this post-September 11th world, the stewards of public land need to speak the language of terrorism—even walk armed amidst the wilds. Politics infringes on data when it comes to land management and special interest groups lobby their individual agendas. The bureaucracy of it all is just the type of thing I came to escape, and yet it is inescapable.
On a Sunday morning I drive across the Hungry Valley Vehicular Recreation Area with the whine of dirt bikes and ATVs. A column of off-road ready jeeps passes in a cloud of dust. Helmeted and suited up like modern knights of armor, they take to their steeds, careening along narrow tracks, climbing impossibly steep sand tracks, becoming airborne over a dry creek bed. I roll up the windows to keep the dust out. The smell of gas and hum of engines offends my wilderness sensibilities. It is easy to be judgmental.
But then again, isn’t this something? Isn’t this their escape? Do they not come to ride amidst the same mountain scenery? Are they not seeking adventure and an antidote to their own suburbia? Do they not have just as much a right to this land as I do?
***
It’s Sunday morning, and I have crossed the Hungry Valley en route to one of the true gems of all public land in Southern California—a place called the Sepse Wilderness where the Piru begins. This is Wilderness with a capital “W.” In September 1964, the 88th Congress signed the Wilderness Act into law with the intent of preserving and protecting land that would forever stand in “contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape.”
Wilderness—defined as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain,”—is, I have always believed, an essential concept to the very existence of humanity. After all, civilizations define themselves—always have—relative to that which is deemed uncivilized. People who have no intent of ever visiting Wilderness are, even if unwittingly, dependent on it. Wildness is a preoccupation of humanity. It is why we seek it out within our own species—why we have a morbid fascination in the feral and violent acts committed by serial killers. It is why New York Times readers were captivated by stories of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park and why they rallied support around peregrine falcons nesting atop New York City skyscrapers. It is, in part, why the Nation’s first designated Wilderness was the San Rafael Wilderness in the Los Padres National Forest.
I park the truck and start up Grade Valley. It’s cool bordering on cold as I hike toward a portion of the Piru known as the Fishbowls in the very heart of the Sespe Wilderness. While better known for its namesake River, the Sepse Wilderness is also home to the Piru’s source. Designated Wilderness in 1992, this area, perhaps more so than any other place in Southern California, “retains,” as the Wilderness Act extols, “its primeval character and influence.”
I’m on the Cedar Creek Trail now and climbing in earnest after passing through the benevolent shade of the Cedar Creek Campground. Forested switchbacks lead to a trail junction, and I strike out north over the ridge above. Long vistas of the northern Sespe Wilderness come into focus. Peaks like San Guillermo Mountain stand at over 6500 feet where there will soon be snow when moisture laden Pacific storms sweep in from the coast. At last I once again join Piru Creek, and I make my way upstream along rocks and deep pools—the so-called Fishbowls. This area can be busy—almost crowded on a summer weekend, but today, I have it all to myself.
I continue upwards in search of the River’s source in the fourth largest roadless area in the continental United States. The feeling of remoteness is almost suffocating considering my proximity to Los Angeles. The land gives easily of itself now, revealing something new with every step. Geologic history is ubiquitous here, as it is in the Hardluck Valley. Soaring serrated outcroppings and cliffs that reach hundreds of feet above the creek mesmerize me, and the hulking weight of Pine Ridge dominates the experience. Yet even with all this boisterous topography, there is also something else here in this Wilderness. As much as the gastropod fossil I found amongst the detritus of Hardluck shale carried me so easily back in time, the Upper Piru now draws me forward into the future. To borrow a phrase from Wallace Stegner, the Upper Piru represents to me a “geography of hope.” I find it in the fragile resilience of a pale-yellow tidy tip and a Palmer's mariposa lily. I see it clearly in the flight of the diminutive southwestern willow flycatcher and in the icy blackness of a California condor’s wingspan.
The fact that these species are present here in the upper enclosure of the Piru imbues me, perhaps ironically given their endangered status, with a renewed sense of hope about humanity’s ability to reconcile its own existence and proclivity for progress with the community of nature into which we were born. With these thoughts, I am moving swiftly now, following the tracks of a black bear along the sandy bank of the Piru. I feel lighter and at ease, as if maybe I belong here, if only briefly. My eyes are drawn upwards by the screech of a red tail hawk that has just caught the lift off a thermal and is now surfing the sky. What simplicity, I think. Simplicity.
***
In my life I have been fortunate to travel to places more remote than the headwaters of the Piru in the heart of the Sespe Wilderness. I have looked for taipers on the eastern slope of the Andes, woken to herds of Dorcas Gazelle in Morocco, been delighted by the antics of Equatorial penguins in the Galapagos. I have been places where the closest vehicle, much the less person, was hundreds of miles away. Yet here on the Piru, literally within the approach path of one of the World’s largest airports, I feel an overwhelming sense of severance, a beautiful crudeness of spirit that even trumps any antipathy for the built world. Down in the valley, along the streets of the City of Angels, the landscape exists despite the layers of history and development. It is harder to see in Beverly Hills or Disneyland or Watts, but it’s there. Up here, on the banks of the Piru, Beverly Hills or Disneyland or Watts seem an impossibility—like backlot magic. But there and here are both realities, and the fact that they have found a way to coexist in the juxtopisition of Southern California is truly cause for hope.
***
I return to the truck. The shadows are lengthening. The Piru settles within its course. I drive east on an unpaved forest road toward the I-5 which will take me, eventually, to the City below. The windows are down and the expanse of the valley is laid out. The meadows are peppered in yellows and oranges and punctuated by the bare trunks of yuccas which climb a nearby hillside. Suddenly I catch a glimpse of the river, its sheen catching the low angle of the sun just as it dips over the high, dark ridge. It momentarily blinds me and then it is gone. I stop the truck, and turn the engine off allowing the evening sounds to drift about me. I have this strange feeling—like the Piru has somehow stepped out of time and exposed itself to me. If that is even possible. Like an atlas revealing the cartographic features of the earth, the River and the landscape that belongs to it waits to be read. Perhaps it can even be understood—at the very least accepted for what it is, as it is.
The Piru is a story, a parable for those who might have forgotten the land amidst a city life. It breaths the land on cold mornings—mist hovering miraculous over the tumble of stones with its voice funneled and channeled through its canyons, and it absorbs anyone who is willing to give him- or herself over to it, even if only for a day.
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