On the Trail

You just have no sense of the severity of winter rains until you’re hiking someplace in the Santa Monica Mountains and you find an old wooden sabot sailing in the treetops of a narrow canyon.

This particular canyon, located just off Mulholland Highway where the road invisibly crosses from an Agoura Hills zip code into Malibu’s, would be a stunning little place if it ever caught the interest of the National Park Service or other land-acquiring agency involved in stitching together the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

There’s just one problem, and it’s not that boat dangling precariously from the bowed crowns of a grove of California bay trees.

Some people lucky enough to own huge hunks of raw land in the mountains have never felt the need to tote their trash anywhere but to some out-of-the-way spot on their property. Over time, a narrow canyon can accommodate just so many bed springs, derelict cars, pallets, warped wrought iron lawn furniture, irrigation pipes, rusty wire, indestructibly coated coils of cable, a Skid Row collection of cheap liquor bottles and sofas sorry they ever left the showroom, upholstered in a ghastly coating of mud, fungus, bird and bat dung, coyote scat, spider webs and several decades’ worth of naturally composted leaf litter.

As for theories on the airborne sabot, scouring rains either unearthed the long-buried boat, causing the sabot to slide out of its muddy entombment; or, rushing water lifted it from some ancient abandoned storage spot and sent it hurtling like a Frisbee into the treetops. The boat’s most recent skipper reportedly was a wood rat.

In a marine environment, some of these big old items might be submerged to become artificial reefs and ultimately dive sites of interest. I’m not so sure this works as well in the mountains, where most of us would not want to come face-to-face with the native population that might take up residence in an abandoned jalopy: scorpions, rats, rattlers, black widow and brown recluse spiders.

A few years back a man attempting to purchase some canyon acreage adjacent to parkland was required to clean up several dump sites on the land. That poor gent! He’d merely inherited the three tons of crud. Truth be told, my pal and I used to raid these dump sites because they were just so rich and varied. A building contractor previously owned the land. We gleaned a slightly battered jukebox, a somewhat more battered pinball machine, swim fins, a dog house and lots of useful garden equipment. Of course we could only collect during the cool rainy season, before things heated up and rattlers decided to sleep on the shelves of discarded refrigerators or inside bureau drawers.

Truckload after truckload rumbled out with junk we and our neighbors couldn’t use. Two years later an enormous debris flow sparked by heavy rains slithered right down into the old dump site and kept going for quite a ways, taking the road, shrubs, trees and one unlucky vehicle with it. The moral of this story is, when someone gouges out a dump site, fills it, then empties it, somebody better remember that that yawning gap in the earth is pretty unstable once divested of everything including the kitchen sink.

In places where roads are known to wash out, old-timers on big parcels of raw land typically funneled their old farming equipment, tree cuttings and so forth into known weak areas just below the road, so they wouldn’t lose access to their homes in bad weather. In their era, there were no public landfills operating anyway. That seems an almost honorable reason for littering, plus much of their old junk is probably considered antiques by now.

Happily, it seems the canyon off Mulholland will not collapse if de-junkified. However, what a task! I’ve never seen so much non-natural debris invading a canyon before, and this one even has a very picturesque year round stream. That’s if you can find the stream through the mounds of garbage. This is the kind of project that would test the mettle of any Eagle Scout.

Maybe an open call for scavengers would make the task possible. Of course, who knows, the owner may still have a sentimental attachment to some of this stuff and won’t even wish to part with it, even if someone else foots the bill for the clean up. Personally, I’m admiring that treetops-suspended sabot as a great little number to test out on Westlake Lake – wood rat’s nest and the cost of the air-lift to rescue it notwithstanding.