The Allure of Wilderness and the Backbone Trail
Watch the series, "Backbone Trail," available online. A new episode will be released every Friday through September 8.
Four years ago I started something called Seeing Trails Hike Gang as a way to rope in hiking partners to explore the San Gabriel Mountains with me. My background is as a touring and recording musician, so naturally our initial membership was comprised of mostly musicians, artists, and other like-minded people. Most of us had an incredibly strong draw to the wilderness, but really had no business being there for much more than casual day hikes.
As we continued to explore the watersheds that made up the Los Angeles Basin, our appreciation for mountains in general expanded. We learned about the unique plants that thrive in the chaparral ecosystem. We got into trouble by abandoning the well-groomed trails in favor of steep scree slopes that led to steeper cliffs or large patches of some god-forsaken impenetrable brush. Sometimes we did this with nothing to guide us but a full moon; lessons were certainly learned. A very palpable reality made itself felt that the challenges of the natural world present an entirely different discipline from “the arts.”
Combining Aesthetics and Athletics
Miles Davis famously said “There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places" Well, that's all fine and good when you're onstage and a wrong note will only cost you some embarrassment, whereas a mistake in the mountains may just take your life (or perhaps a limb). As twisted as it may sound, this commitment was a big initial attraction for me. As someone who had spent my entire adult life in pursuit of an ephemerally pure aesthetic, what could be better than tracing a proud ridge line with my whole being? If a big mistake is made, the route would not be erased, but perhaps I would!
This type of attraction is often confused with that of the adrenaline junky. I fully believe, however, that the difficulty or hazards of a project is not mutually exclusive with its worthiness. I like to think of my approach to interacting with landscapes as “Aesthletics” --- in other words, a method and style of physical interaction with an environment more beautiful and powerful than our feeble minds could ever hope to create.
Why the Backbone Trail?
A few different ideas were thrown around to make this series, and we ended up picking the Backbone Trail for several reasons:
1) It was local. The trailhead could be accessed by the Sunset Blvd. bus just a block from my house in Los Angeles. If the general public doesn't think of L.A. as a hiking town, they certainly don't think of it as a place with great public transit.
2) The timing was highly relevant. Although people have been hiking different variations of this trail for decades, 2016 was the first year the entire network of trails was recognized as a whole by the National Park Service. It took so long to stitch together primarily because of how much private property the trail weaves through. In fact, the “Governator” Arnold Schwarzenegger and fitness pioneer Betty Weider made the last private land donation to the Parks Service that made the completion of the trail possible.
3) Logistically it couldn't have been easier to bring a film crew on a thru-hike. Although the Backbone Trail traverses surprisingly rugged country, there are quite a few opportunities to meet up with a production crew and get fresh equipment thanks to the handful of roads that cut through the Santa Monica Mountains.
4) It was on my bucket list. I usually avoid hiking in the coastal ranges primarily due to their lack of altitude (the high places of the earth have always held a strong attraction for me.) The time that I had spent in this mountain range, however, held enough beauty to draw me back and piqued my interest to consider traversing the entire range.
Challenges of a New Trail
Other important aspects to the trail became obvious as well. For example, we only encountered one place where there was a stream to treat water. We managed to find a few spigots to refill along the way, but none were obvious or had to be acquired from a private source.
There were quite a few places where the way forward was not very obvious, and being in a somewhat urban area, there are a lot of trail junctions, both sanctioned and home-made. There were not always signs, and despite consulting the map regularly, we managed to get off the route a few times.
The biggest challenge for a thru-hiker however, was the lack of legal campsites along the trail. In fact, as of the time of writing this, there is only one trail camp, and it's just a few hours walk from the eastern trailhead near Will Rogers State Park. The other campsites are a couple miles or more off of the path.
More "Backbone Trail"
Despite the challenges, the Backbone surprised me in the end. I had not expected it to be as wild a landscape as it is. Much of the range meanders through impenetrable chaparral covering windblown sandstone or other types of steep loose soil. The lack of infrastructure presents considerable logistical challenges to the would be thru-hiker that may seem like a non-issue given it’s proximity to L.A.
I still feel conflicted about the aesthetic purity of a wilderness area situated within a dense urban area. The Santa Monica Mountains traverse, however, proved to be a worthy slog -- even with the assistance of a production car bringing us water, or driving us to a legal campsite so our film crew wouldn't have to lug around backpacks full of heavy camera equipment and backpacking gear. Hats off to all of the camera and sound guys who hiked with me on this adventure – my job was a breeze in comparison.
While this trail is considerably more rugged than the celebrity-filled beaches that lay at it’s base, it holds much more appeal for me. True solitude can be found there if you walk deep enough.
Just don’t forget to bring enough water!
