Schad - 101 Hikes in Southern California: Exploring Mountains, Seashore, and Desert

S outhern California sits astride one of the earths most significant structural featuresthe San Andreas Fault. For more than 10 million years, earth movements along the San Andreas and neighboring faults have shaped the dramatic topography evident throughout the region today. The very complexity of the shape of the land has spawned a variety of localized climates. In turn, the varied climates, along with the diverse topography and geology, have resulted in a remarkably plentiful and diverse array of plant and animal life.

Living on the active edge of a continent has advantages and disadvantages that cannot be untangled. Like the proverbial silver lining in a dark cloud, the rumpled beauty of our youthful, ever-changing coastline, mountains, and desert redresses the ever-present threat of earthquakes, fires, and floods. Because much of Southern California is physically rugged, not all of it has succumbed to the plow or the bulldozer. When youve had the pleasure of hiking beside a crystal-clear mountain stream minutes from downtown L.A., or cooling off in the spray of a cottonwood-fringed waterfall just beyond suburban San Diego, youll realize that not many regions in the world offer so great a variety of natural pleasures to a population of many millions.

Let us, in the next couple of pages, briefly explore the principal wild and semiwild natural areas bordering Southern Californias coastal plain. When linked together, these natural areas form a broad, curving crescent around Southern Californias urban populationnow more than 20 million strong. About 90 percent of the hikes found in this book fall into this unpopulated or sparsely populated crescent.

Los Angeles on a clear day from the Sam Merrill Trail ()

The Santa Monica Mountains

We start with the Santa Monica Mountains, which rise abruptly from the Pacific shoreline west of (or up the coast from) Los Angeles. They, along with the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains, are part of the Transverse Ranges, so named because they trend east-west and stand crosswise to the usual northwest-southeast grain of nearly every other major mountain range in California. This anomaly, it is thought, is largely due to compression along the San Andreas Fault. There is a kink in the San Andreas Fault north of Los Angeles where the fault, running southeast from the San Francisco Bay Area, jogs east for a while before resuming its course toward the southeast. Compression against this kink has caused the land south of it to crumple and wrinkle upward. The devastating January 1994 Northridge earthquake was just one small episode in the slow but fitful uplift of the Transverse Ranges.