Angeles National Forest: LA's Lung, the San Gabriel Mountains, and the Fires That Will Come Back

Seventeen million people live within an hour's drive of the Angeles National Forest. That makes it the most-visited national forest in the United States by some measures, and by most measures the least understood. Most Angelenos know it exists. Most have never been in it. From the freeway system, the San Gabriel Mountains appear as a brown wall behind the basin smog, dramatic but abstract, a backdrop for the city rather than a place.

The forest is approximately seven hundred thousand acres of chaparral, oak woodland, pine forest, and canyon scrub running along the northern edge of the Los Angeles Basin. The San Gabriel River and the Los Angeles River both originate here. The mountains rise from twenty-five hundred feet at the foothill margin to over ten thousand feet at Mount San Antonio, known as Mount Baldy, in less than fifteen horizontal miles in some places. That gradient produces more ecological zones in a shorter horizontal distance than almost anywhere in California.

The Tongva people, who occupied the Los Angeles Basin and the foothills below the San Gabriels, used the mountains as seasonal hunting and gathering territory. Their name for themselves is Tongva; the Spanish mission system called them Gabrielino, after the mission that claimed their territory. The Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe and the Tongva Nation continue to assert their connection to this landscape and to press for federal recognition.

The forest has burned repeatedly, most catastrophically in the nineteen thirty-three Griffith Park fire that killed twenty-nine federal relief workers hired to clear brush, and in cycles of large wildfires through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including the Station Fire of two thousand nine, the largest in Angeles National Forest history at a hundred sixty thousand acres. The vegetation that grows in chaparral country is fire-adapted. It is not fire-resistant. Every decade or so, the mountains remind the city that the arrangement has always been conditional.