Fish Canyon is open, and the waterfalls are flowing.      I want to write that first line in all BOLD CAPS.      Because that hasn’t been said in 30 years.      Fish Canyon, in the San Gabriel Mountains above Azusa and Duarte, used to be humming with people. Cabins were scattered along the trail […]

      There are three ways to hike to the abandoned Dawn Mine above Altadena: the first is closed, the second is over-grown, but the third, in a metaphorical bear sense, is just right.       John W. Robinson, in his book “Trails of the Angeles: 100 Hikes in the San Gabriels,” says that Dawn Mine is […]

     They went and put the military base in the middle of nowhere, hidden between the low rocky hills and the wide open dry lake beds of the Southern California deserts, probably because they wanted to blow things up in peace and quiet.      I didn’t come to Fort Irwin to visit the military, but […]

     After randomly hearing about a wall built with car parts in Los Angeles, it took me five months to find Hermon’s Car Wall, and, well, it was partly worth it.      After five months of (very intermittent) searching, there were grandiose visions in my head of this wonderful wall stretching into infinity, with thousands […]

Touring the Historic Los Angeles Theatre District      “There’s one million square feet of unused space in downtown Los Angeles,” said Larry, our tour guide, as we walked up and down Broadway, the old heart of the theatre district.      It was Thursday night, and Broadway was relatively quiet, except for the occasional homeless person […]

I thought that the Peterson was the only Los Angeles automotive museum. I was wrong. Hidden away in the San Fernando Valley, in a nondescript building, in a nondescript neighborhood, sits a free museum with some of the most beautiful cars I have ever seen. From Packards to Cadillacs. From a Minerva to a Diana. […]

     The Cabrillo National Monument is beautiful, but the name is deceiving. It’s considered a monument because there is a statue of Cabrillo here, but this area should really be called The Cabrillo State Park, or The Cabrillo Ecological Reserve.      The statue sits on top of a finger of land dangling south from the […]

     I went to San Diego’s Chicano Park to see the beautiful murals. What I found is a park that is beautiful, but not in the way parks are traditionally beautiful. Its beauty is not in huge expanses of rolling hills like Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, or disappear-from-the-city beauty like New York’s Central Park.      […]

Southern Drawl      It seems that warm water is the defining characteristic of New Orleans. Water in the swamps, water in the Mississippi river, water flooding houses, water falling from the sky in bucket loads, and water thickening the air in the form of humidity.      Coming from a childhood in the deserts I was […]

     One afternoon while sitting in a bar in the French Quarter -nursing an Abita Amber- I over-heard a snippet of a conversation that went like this: “…and you can walk through the swamps with the alligators.”      Which was exactly what I had been looking for.      Who says you can’t find everything in […]

     After we found the cherry trees, I had a better understanding of how the map worked, so we decided to backtrack to the Polaroid house.     “So the house was built by Mr. Polaroid?”     “Yea Mr. Polaroid, the guy who made the film, I wonder if Mr. Kodachrome’s house is around here?”     We had no […]

     I woke up Saturday morning with itchy feet. I wanted to get out and do something, something outside, in the sun with life around and about. But I was supposed to sit in front of my computer and edit stories.     My computer screen stared back at me, and I thought of the places I […]