Mt. Wilson, Magic Mountain

November 22, 2010
Filed Under California, Enviornment, History, John Muir, Nature | Leave a Comment

A few days ago Oliver in Los Angeles sent me the photo (below) of a cowboy that he took while hiking on the Mt. Wilson Toll Road. Built in 1891 by The Pasadena and Mount Wilson Toll Road Company, the trail winds slowly up to the top of its namesake mountain, terminating at a 106 year-old observatory. Located in the San Gabriel Range, to northeast of Los Angeles, Mt. Wilson lies at an elevation of 5715 ft. (1742 meters). From the cities of Pasadena, Altadena, Sierra Madre, and Arcadia, you can look up and see the forest of antennae that border the observatory blinking at night like a far off space station or alien settlement which is funny, since it’s populated by mostly scientists.

I first visited Mt. Wilson in August of 1996. It was more a “why not” than a planned expedition. I was out west for the summer, drifting from Nevada to Southern California and then north up the Pacific coast with some friends. I had stopped in Pasadena to see my sister and her family and to catch up on sleep. After two days on the couch, I was getting restless and spent the morning driving around, seeing how close I could get to the mountains. Along with the evening pulse of the TV towers, Mt. Wilson lured me with its martian landscape and brutal indifference. Los Angeles was raised from an arid country whose hostility had been tamed by the efforts of civil engineers and real estate interests, but while the desert could be transformed into an oasis, the San Gabriels to the northeast were inhospitable. “In the mountains of San Gabriel, overlooking the lowland vines and fruit groves, Mother Nature is most ruggedly, thornily savage,” wrote John Muir. “Not even in the Sierra have I ever made the acquaintance of mountains more rigidly inaccessible.”

There was an access point by Eaton Canyon on a quiet street in the foothills of Altedena. I parked the car and walked down an unmarked trail. Mt. Wilson is not the tallest peak in the San Gabriel Range but it could be the strangest. In addition to the Star Wars appearance of its summit, there is also a general feeling of otherness on the lower section of the mountain. Perhaps this is due to its proximity to Los Angeles, as well as the sense of contrast its landscape affords. It doesn’t seem to belong there but there it is, and because it is, there is the possibility that it might as well be anywhere. The same way spaghetti westerns were filmed in Italy and Spain but portrayed the American southwest, the randomness of Mt. Wilson is a blank canvas onto which its haphazard urban visitors could project shaky narratives of their own.

It was hot, and I was wearing jeans and thrift store cowboy boots that I picked up in Las Vegas a week before. Twenty dollars and half a pack of Winston Lights was all I had. Although ill-dressed and unprepared, I did not stand out in the assortment of strangers I met on the way. My casual approach, I found, was common; I saw a few hiking boots and running shoes, but also checkered Vans, penny loafers,  flipflops, cuban heels and shredded espadrils. I exhanged formalities with a dusty bearded man who was carrying a loaded garbage bag, two stoned teenagers with a styrofoam cooler, a middle-aged women who wore a tie-dye dress and a large crystal on her neck, and a short elderly gentleman dressed in what I would consider an antiquated Sicilian fashion. It was as much a carnival atmosphere as there could be for the foothills.

Via the Toll Road, it’s about eight miles from Eaton Canyon to Mt. Wilson Observatory. It looked like it couldn’t be more than four, but the antennae on the summit continued to recede into the distance. The carnival adventure gave way to a sober solitude and then there was only wind and the distant roar of the city below. About a third of the way up, at Henninger Flats, I managed to get red ants in one of my boots and was riddled with existentialist visions of dying alone in the sun. The Flats were a foreboding place, home to giant water tanks and an abandoned fire camp for convicts. I found a shady grove of pines and collected my thoughts. Shelter from the sun is a rarity in the San Gabriels. Aside from Big Cone Douglas Firs, Canyon Live Oak and various Pines, the vegetation is mostly charparal, or brush cover composed of species that readily sprout after fire or have seeds that require a heat treatment before they will germinate. Many brush species which cause the fires to burn rapidly and with high intensity contain volatile oils. Fire is common in the San Gabriels. Every 30 to 50 years a massive conflagration will make its way across at least some portion of the range. The latest to occur was the Station Fire which lasted for 20 days and burned 160,577 acres (251 square miles) of land. The inferno came close to destroying the observatory and antennae but was reigned in at the last minute.

Time lapse photography from the 2009 Station Fire on Mt. Wilson. Flames appear around 28 seconds.

I reached the summit tired and thirsty and more concerned with getting down than with exploring. The water fountain was broken and I was nonplussed that the coke machine refused to take dollar bills. Some forlorn scientists drove past me in a golf cart, dodging giant pine cones. A chain saw was snorting in the distance. The domed observatory and rocky terrain did indeed endow the place a lunar quality. Had it not been for sparse forest of Jeffrey Pines and Big Cone Douglas Fir, I would not have been surprised to have come upon the Apollo 11 landing module. Such unearthly associations were not new to the place. The observatory has a history serving as a portal to new worlds. Usually, these worlds were defined in scientific or biblical terms, sometimes both. The original Mt. Wilson Observatory opened in 1908 and featured the largest operational telescope of its time. As the findings of astronomers were published and made their way from the purview of scientific journals into the popular press, the public’s fascination with astronomy and the cosmos increased. In the 1920′s and 30′s it reached a fever pitch and Mt. Wilson became a beacon of progress for both professional and amature astronomers and cosmologists. Letters poured in. While most where gracious or laudatory, there were some that were of a more enthusiastic nature. According to the Museum of Jurrasic Technology which hosts some of the latter category on their website:

These letters were communications to the astronomers by individuals who felt, often with a great degree of earnestness, that they were in possession of understandings or information that should be shared with the astronomers. The information contained in this class of letter was typically of astronomical or cosmological concern. These individuals had gleaned the information they wished to communicate either by experimentation, observation or intuition and invariably felt a strong sense of urgency in their need to communicate their observations to the observers at Mount Wilson.

A letter from a man named Edward begins with “This is to certify, That I have found the Key To all Existance,” while others are more modest but no less intriguing. “In the light of Modern science and the intrepretation of the scriptures,” reads a letter from a W. Charles Lamb. “I claim that these forms co-incide with the teachings of the latter an act of the Devine Spirit in His effort to reveal Him-Self to man.”

Letter from W. Charles Lamb. Courtesy of The Museum Of Jurassic Technology.

I made it back to the car just as it was getting dark. On my way down, I had run into a young kid who appeared to have walked out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. I was halfway to Eaton Canyon and he was heading up. He had a blanket, a bottle of Gatorade, a straw hat, and boots just like mine. We talked for a few minutes and smoked the last of my Winstons. He told me he was going up to Mt. Wilson to sleep under the stars and become a man. Then he asked me the purpose of my trip. I told him I didn’t know. I had gone up there looking for something meaningful and found a campus of towers and telescopes manned by a handful of lonely scientists who all looked like my high school chemistry teacher.

I went back to Mt. Wilson a few months ago. This time I wore hiking boots and took the shorter but steeper seven-mile Old Mt. Wilson Trail that starts west of Eaton Canyon in the foothills of Sierra Madre. It was another hot day and the route afforded me little of the human color that I had on the Toll Road. Instead, freakish Our Lord’s Candles stood in for the lack of human presence. Also known as Spanish Bayonet, the plant has a base of elongated sharp rigid leaves out of which protrudes a shoot three to nine feet tall. At the end of the shoot is a cluster of vibrant and edible yellow flowers that cause the plant to pop out in a sea of otherwise mundane chaparral. The sight of them can be unnerving. Their striking height, shape, and bright coloris extraterrestrial. They point towards the sky as if to ape television antennae and satellite dishes, sending secret messages to some far off place.

Five miles up, just past Manzanita Ridge, the old trail merged with the Toll Road and I started to see the ravages of the Station Fire. Aside from a few hearty stands of Pine and Fir, a whole side of the mountain was barren. Yet as I continued to look, I started to notice that clumps of chaparral were making a comeback. There was something uplifting about the unrelenting cycle of the fire and regeneration. The blazes had been burning for millennia and would continue to do so regardless of what humanity did to prevent them. There was a purpose. The charparall was as dependent on fire as fire was on the charparall. “In a sense, chaparral consumes fire no less than fire consumes chaparral,” wrote John McPhee.

The water fountain was working when I reached the summit this time. The scientists were still tooling around and the coke machine was gone. I ate a peanut butter banana sandwich and a chocolate bar. Chatty squirrels were wreaking havoc with the silence. I took a nap anyway. When I awoke, it was well past noon and I was getting hungry again. I would have had a ciggerette but I didn’t have any. I had quit a few years before, and didn’t want to start any fires.