Mountain High, Valley Low

During the rainy seasons of 2018-2019 and 2019-202, I began to explore systematically the mountains, canyons, and seasonal streams that comprise the upper watershed of the Los Angeles River. My goal was to try to deepen my understanding of the complex geology of Southern California, and the communities of native plants that inhabit it. I expected to observe, analyze, and learn when I visited a hiking trail. But during the winter and spring rainstorms, which brought more water to LA than we had had for years, I was awestruck with the solemn beauty of the canyons - especially the ones that had recently been scorched by wildfires. I did not expect to fall in love with these canyons, but that is what happened.

I found myself drawn to certain obscure drainages again and again, finally leaving off geologizing and botanizing in them altogether, instead shooting videos as an act of artistic love.  I was trying, perhaps in vain, to capture the canyons' spirits, their colors, their rainy scents - hoping to convey to others, not merely factoids about individual rocks and plants, but the sublime experience of the place.

 "My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed - if I could have been invisible, all the better - to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could...(happier if it needed no help of mine)...this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned." - John Ruskin

For this exhibition, I have made a cycle of five music videos (click on the links below) that depict the Rainy Season keeping its annual December-April rendezvous with the living slopes and canyons of the upper watershed. All the locations are within a few miles of Descanso Gardens: the Little Tujunga headwaters at Mendenhall Ridge; swank Nichols Canyon in the Hollywood Hills; the Limerock Canyon tributary of Little Tujunga Creek; and what I call Flow Falls in the Verdugos, deep in La Tuna Canyon. 

Mountain High, Valley Low is about the return of the Raincloud, which brings December snow to high Mendenhall Peak, and shadows to caress the low San Gabriel Fault Zone. (The role of the Raincloud is performed by the incomparable Mary Martin.) 

  

Til The Clouds Roll By The Velvet Fog, aka Mel Torme, nervously embraces rugged Nichols Canyon. This spot has been one of Hollywood's favorite view-rich residential enclaves since the 1930s - especially among British ex-pats such as David Hockney, and the lyricist (and inventor of the musical comedy) P.G. Wodehouse. Jerome Kern, of course, wrote the music. 

Ominous rockfalls, spitting rain and slick trails made me cut my hike shorter than I'd have liked. Look among the rocks for the fabled Nichols Diorite, outcrops of which are part of a 4.5 mile-long pluton that underlies the eastern Santa Monica Mountains. Look also among the flora for Sugar Bush, Laurel Sumac, Cliff Aster, and Sacred Datura. (But please, don't ask them for their autographs.)

"Thus we conclude, that the strata both primary and secondary, both those of ancient and more recent origin, have had their materials furnished from the ruins of former continents, from the dissolution of rocks, or the destruction of animal or vegetable bodies, similar, at least in some respects, to those that now occupy the surface of the earth." - Pioneer geologist John Playfair, the patron saint of canyons.

Limerock Canyon - George Gershwin In December of 2017, the ferocious Creek Fire tore through the Little Tujunga watershed, including this canyon and the adjacent hills. When I visited here in Spring, 2019 the canyon had been rejuvenated for the first time in decades by a series of gully-washers. Burned brush and debris that had choked the canyon was washed down, along with much soil and sand. Some of the boulders stood firm, others were tumbled downstream into new configurations. (The deluge also laid bare myriad faults that converge around the creek bed; spot them in the video.) 

What all these rocks could tell you about tectonic convergence, subduction zones, block rotation, rapid uplift, sediment deposition, faulting, suturing, mineral alteration, auriferous ores, rifting, intrusion, erosion, and graphite, is more than I could tell you.

What I can tell you, is some of these rocks are among the oldest on the North American kraton, almost 2 billion years old. Others are much younger, and overall the landscape as it appears today is of extremely recent development. (The "Limerock Assemblage"  of rocks is geologically identical to the Placerita Canyon Assemblage, located 22 miles north west along the San Gabriel Faultline. A few million years ago, these assemblages were all together in the same terrain, which got split apart by movement on the strike-slip border between the Pacific and North American plates.) George Gershwin himself is at the player piano, to uplift you with the novel delights of the waterfalls of Limerock Canyon.

Go With The Flow The last two videos show another freshly rejuvenated canyon, a small side-canyon off La Tuna Canyon, known to hikers as "The Grotto." I have tried to capture the spectacularly Baroque basalt-flow waterfall, which I named "Flow Falls," that was revealed - created, really - by the storms of 2019.  As with Limerock, this narrow slot canyon, too, had been impenetrably overgrown and tangled with debris, battered by years of drought, then seared by the horrific La Tuna Canyon Fire in 2017. (Note the burned sycamores above.) By March of 2019, the torrential rains of the season had just flushed out the deadwood and several tons of ancient geology that had blocked access to the creek beyond the rock-wall seen above. I was able to hike right up the slot, like climbing a staircase. I found all the wonder of a vest-pocket Yosemite, with fresh rock exposures of incredible variety, amid a bewitching fragrance from the singed-but-surviving groves of California bay laurel. Climbing the waterfall, I felt like I was ascending into a place sacred to Apollo, god of clarity, music, and of the returning sun. Geoffrey Burgon's themes from Brideshead Revisited evoke the solemn grandeur.

 "You can never step into the same river twice." - Wendell Berry

The final video shows the same scene, but a month later in April. Flow Falls still flows and falls, but the spotlight here is on the flowers that the showers brought to the glen: woolly-pod milkweed, scarlet monkeyflower, California bluebells, green-spot nightshade, Artemisia ludoviciana...and the California bays in blossom.

My Shining Hour Mabel Mercer sings the music of Harold Arlen, the words of Johnny Mercer, as the maternal voice of this canyon. Rejoice with her in the shining Now that was then, and will never come again.

    "To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection." - Wendell Berry, It All Turns On Affection