“You can still find woodpeckers, wild cats, bighorn sheep — even black bears.
ALL JUST A FEW MILES FROM DOWN- TOWN PASADENA.”
L
ike Brenda Kyle, I also grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. Home to a fifth of the population of Los An- geles County, it’s a spectacularly diverse place—both demographically and geographically. Here, 45 percent of the 2 million residents identify as Latino and 28 percent identify as Asian; in many of the region’s cities, more than half of residents are foreign born. Towering above them all is the San Gabriel mountain range, as varied and idiosyncratic as the neighborhoods below. A vast and wild collection of streams, waterfalls, old mines, steep gorges, and rolling peaks—the highest, Mount Baldy, topping out at 10,069 feet—the San Gabriels represent more than 70 percent of Los Angeles County’s public open space and supply a third of the region’s fresh water.
For 20 years, The Trust for Public Land has worked to conserve key sites throughout the San Gabriels and the sur- rounding Angeles and San Bernardino national forests. “The naturalist John Muir once described these mountains as ‘pure and untamable … ruggedly, thornily savage,’” says Trust for Public Land Project Manager Paulo Perrone. “A lot has changed since Muir’s day, but you can still find woodpeckers, wild cats, bighorn sheep—even black bears. All just a few miles from downtown Pasadena.”
Angeles National Forest welcomes more than three million people each year—more visitors than icons like Mount Rush- more or the Grand Tetons. But local advocates saw its poten- tial to play an even greater role. “Some 17 million people live within a 90-minute drive of the San Gabriels. That makes it one of America’s most important open spaces,” says Trust for Public Land Program Director Tori Kjer. “With the right invest- ment—improved facilities, better programming and public- transit connections, more extensive community outreach—it could easily become one of the nation’s most well used.” But, Kjer says, that investment doesn’t happen just because it’s a good idea. It happens when people come together and push for it.
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