Angeles National Forest: Crystal Lake and What the Mountain Roads Opened

Before there was a freeway over the San Gabriels, there was a toll road. The Mount Wilson Toll Road, built in the eighteen nineties, opened the first real auto access to the mountains above Pasadena. By nineteen twenty, a network of paved roads was threading through the canyons, bringing weekend visitors from the expanding basin city to campgrounds and resort hotels that operated in the cooler air above the smog.

Crystal Lake Recreation Area, in the San Gabriel Mountains east of Azusa, holds the only natural lake in Los Angeles County. It sits at roughly forty-five hundred feet in a bowl carved by glaciation, surrounded by pine and fir forest that has been maintained as a campground and recreation area since the national forest's early years. The lake is small and the setting modest, but its existence in a landscape defined by scarcity of standing water makes it genuinely unusual.

The Angeles National Forest road network was built progressively through the nineteen twenties and thirties, partly by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which had work camps in the mountains from the early years of the New Deal. The CCC workers who built the trails, campgrounds, and fire lookouts in this forest were overwhelmingly young men from economically desperate families, sent west by a federal employment program that paid them thirty dollars a month plus room and board. They were not paid enough to live on independently. They were, in most accounts, profoundly grateful.

The fire lookouts they built on the ridgelines are still in use, staffed in fire season by volunteers who watch for smoke over a city of ten million people spreading below them in the basin.