SWCAMBORNE

This one appeared at the top of the horse trail where it intersects the Mount Wilson Toll Road:

it was cleverly situated to make the clump of grass work as hair. The ancients are a mysterious people. The other documented dirtogylph.

One of the threads I have developed that is gaining some readership is about re-opening the Mount Wilson Toll Road.  To better serve that group I have started a new site called:

The Mount Wilson Toll Road Informer

It is now three years since the slide that closed the trail and it does not appear that there is any progress toward reopening it.   I’ll be inserting links to this new site on all the Mt Wilson Trail posts on Swcamborne and posting new stories about the Toll Road on the MWTRI.  (I love new acronyms, pronounced “moo-tree”)

In the hills near Pasadena the ancient ones rise early and following in the footsteps of their ancestors scratch their art onto the trails. I was lucky enough to find and photograph this perfect example early one morning last week.

What does it mean? Does the water bottle have any significance? Are they violating any ordinances? Is it pornography? And most importantly: Are grants available to study this phenomenon?

We will continue to research and photograph the dirtoglyphs as they appear.

In October I received a few email answers to my inquiries about progress on repairing the trail. It seems that the city is waiting for the county and the federal government. Roumiana at the Pasadena Department of Water and Power sent me this email on October 11, 2007:
“The repair of Mount Wilson Toll Road is postponed until FEMA approves the construction plan and City of Pasadena (City) and Los Angeles County (County) sign the repair contract. As a primary user of the Toll Road, County will complete the repairs.
Staff tentatively scheduled the work to start in September - October and to end by December 07.
Currently FEMA is approving the repairs; County is reviewing the contract drafted by the City. As soon as the contract is signed and the work approved by FEMA, the repair schedule will be finalized.”

I asked how much money we were asking for and when the application was filed and Roumiana immediately replied: “In 2005 FEMA approved 2 grants for $1.48 million. In April 2007 staff sent the repair plan to FEMA for approval.”

This will not surprise anybody who is following this story but I walked up the trail on Thursday morning to the big slide and the work has not started.

However the county park did get the magician with the bobcat to regrade the Horse Trail. Many kudos to the Eaton Canyon County Park run by Helen Wong. They are the only ones who appear capable of cutting the bureaucratic red tape and keeping the mountains in this area open. They got it done just before the rain and as a result the trail held up well. Without the regrading it was in danger of washing out in several places.

They also have a much larger bulldozer working in the Nature Center area rebuilding the lower trails.

In the past week I received two pieces of mail from elected officials talking about how much they cared about the environment, global warming and our mountains. One was from our State assemblyman and the other was from Congressman Adam Schiff. Putting aside the irony of destroying trees and using energy mailing things about saving the environment I would like to point out that talk is cheap. The Mount Wilson Toll Road has now been closed for three years and everybody in the governments involved talks about fixing it but nothing is being done. And there is talk that we should put the government in charge of our health care system.

Next step send an email to Adam Schiff with a copy to all of the other players and hike on the Horse Trail.

Why the Mount Wilson Toll Road needs to be opened.

This picture of the slide on the lower part of the Eaton Canyon Toll Road was taken on September 25th, 2007. As you can see no work has started to re-open the road. People are however traversing the slide as you can see from the faint line across the photo connecting the two areas where the slide crosses the remains of the road.

In the bottom of the photo you can see the new barbed wire installed by the City of Pasadena to keep people from entering the National Forest. In an email dated June 2007 Gary T from the City of Pasadena wrote: “The tentative schedule for completion is December 2007.”  I suspect that the “tentative” schedule will not be met. In defense of Pasadena’s engineers this is a very difficult problem to solve but some evidence of progress other than more barbed wire would be welcome.