California hikin'
Steve King goes for a walk through the Los Angeles hills Los Angeles, they say, has four seasons: fire, flood, earthquake and drought. More than 500,000 acres of southern California went up in flames in the past six weeks. The television news images of burning scrub and woodland put me in mind of a recent visit to LA. Not because I'd wandered into a natural disaster — just a lot of scrub and woodland. It was one of those pleasantly confounding trips when a place you thought you knew fairly well reveals a side of itself you'd somehow failed to notice before.
Walking isn't one of the everyday pleasures commonly associated with LA. The great novelist and drinker William Faulkner was supposedly arrested for walking there. Maybe the precise offence was attempting to operate a pair of legs while hog drunk and whistling 'Dixie'. Still, I'm with him I'd much rather walk than drive in LA. And in fact it's a walker's paradise. There's oodles of wilderness to explore on foot, much of it within a hubcap's roll of the city's notorious freeways.
I had a pleasant introduction to this other LA when I took a midnight ramble around Temescal Canyon, just off the Pacific Coast Highway in the hills between Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. I was there with a bunch of Sierra Club types led by an architect friend of mine, a transplanted German whose aura of sun-kissed contentedness suggests that when it comes to getting ahead in LA, hiking boots and a rucksack are as helpful as a chock-full BlackBerry and the right table at Spago. The timing was not as weird as it sounds, either. The moon was full that night, bright enough to light the way, and setting off after dark meant there wouldn't be much traffic on the trail.
Heading up along the ridge, we climbed almost 1,000 feet in the first mile. Soon there was a very un-LA silence, apart from the crunching of footsteps and the slightly tortured breathing of the less fit among the party (me). At the top of the ridge we detoured to a spot called Skull Rock — actually a pair of big boulders, neither of which looked much like a skull.
People rave about the views you get from Mulholland Drive, the infamously long and winding road that uncoils across the Santa Monica mountains and the Hollywood Hills. To my eye, the views from Temescal Canyon are every bit as good. Perched on Skull Rock, we gazed at the vast, smouldering, electricyellow-and-tangerine panorama that stretches inland from the coast, all the way from Malibu past Pacific Palisades to Santa Monica and Venice, then arcing away to Long Beach and beyond. Moonlight jittered on the Pacific. Later, on the way down, I looked up from the valley floor and glimpsed golden scoops of city light between the sheer canyon walls. It was cool and woodsy-fragrant, dense with oaks and sycamores and, towards the end of the trail, croaky with frogs near a bijou waterfall.
The round trip took about three hours. There are bigger parks and longer trails in LA, but this was perfect for starters. Apart from our group, I didn't see another person. Which was only slightly disappointing — I had been told that, like werewolves, the movie stars who live in neighbouring Topanga Canyon come out and play here when there's a full moon.
Taking a turn around Temescal Canyon, you feel at once completely part of the city — that messy universe of crisscrossing freeways, strip malls, neon, billboards and all the rest — and completely apart from it. The worst of it is what it does to your legs. If you need immediate relief, there's an old Malibu haunt, the Reel Inn, a mile or two down the Pacific Coast Highway, where you can put your weary feet up — and raise a glass to William Faulkner and LAs other dedicated pedestrians.
GETTING THERE From Santa Monica, drive northwest on the Pacific Coast Highway to Temescal Canyon Road. There is a ticketed car park at the intersection with Sunset Boulevard.
For more information, ring the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy on +1 (310) 589 3200 or visit www.lamountains.com.
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