Gazing Out Over the Edge

A new Santa Monica Mountains book explores the juxtaposition of the range’s natural and urban environments

Photos by TOM GAMACHE We Los Angelenos have been fooling ourselves for far too long. We thought we were popular because we are “home to the stars.” Because Ronald Reagan used to lived in the house down the street, Tom Hanks lives next door, and Jaime Lee Curtis goes to our gym. But thankfully, writer Matthew Jaffe and photographer Tom Gamache have set the record straight: Our claim to fame is that we are home to the Santa Monica Mountains. And if it weren’t for them (the mountains), the stars might not even be here. In a new book entitled “The Santa Monica Mountains: Range on the Edge” (Angel City Press), Jaffe and Gamache explore the natural and cultural history of this 46-mile-long range–the only mountain range in North America that bisects a major metropolitan city–with a fresh focus on the interaction between the natural and urbanized environments. In some parts of Pacific Palisades, it’s almost as if residents are living on the back of a whale that is the Santa Monica Mountains (Jaffe actually describes the range as whale-shaped). They can literally say they are at “home on the range,” though not everyone can spot deer from their backyard. Many people may know the range because they’ve hiked its bucolic trails, stopped to photograph its ephemeral waterfalls, or driven through its windy roads on the way to someone’s house. But establishing the name of the mountains, which have long been misidentified in print and conversation, was important to Jaffe and Gamache, who both live in Calabasas. “Generally speaking, what happens with the Santa Monicas is that they’re not taken as a single entity,” says Jaffe, a senior writer with Sunset Magazine in Los Angeles. “People talk about the ‘Hollywood Hills,’ and I’ve been seeing references lately to the Malibu Hills. “We tried to take the mountains as a single thing and, when you do that, you really can see just how much is played out here and how diverse the mountains are. You go to Point Mugu and see how wild the mountains are, versus the developed areas in Hollywood. It’s a remarkable contrast.” Determining which areas and points of interest were actually included in the range proved to be time-consuming, which confirmed to Jaffe and Gamache that there was some clarifying to do. “Is Dodger Stadium in the Santa Monicas?” they asked the National and State Parks services. The answer is yes. “It took a year or two before we finally got consensus from everybody,” says Gamache, who was surprised that these details weren’t readily accessible. In the process of creating the book, Jaffe and Gamache spent four years revisiting and re-experiencing parts of the Santa Monica Mountains. Gamache, a renowned landscape-art photographer who has spent much of his career photographing the Santa Monicas, reshot about 40 of the 140 images that appear in the book. “In order to appreciate the Santa Monicas,” Gamache says, “you have to come back again, again, again and again. And you have to be very discerning. You have to remember what it was like before and you have to experiment–with words and film.” Jaffe agrees: “I think what was critical, especially when we had a little bit of extra time, was getting back out to places I had been before–even a local trail right by my house–and being able to see things at different times of year or in different conditions.” In the last sequence of the book, for example, Jaffe describes coming down the Backbone Trail during the particularly wet year two years ago. “I had hiked that trail maybe 10 times before, but I’d never seen it in a huge rain year,” he says. “So instead of things maybe being a little bit scruffy, all the sage was fully bloomed out and the smells, everything, was at its absolute peak. You don’t always get to see the Santa Monicas like that.” The book takes readers on three different routes through the unique east-west range. Chapters on “Mulholland Drive,” “Pacific Coast Highway,” and the “Backbone Trail,” represent distinct personalities–edgy, quirky and untamed. In the “Pacific Coast Highway” section, Jaffe devotes several pages to the eclectic individuals and groups–including a large number of Europeans emigrants–who settled in Santa Monica Canyon and Rustic Canyon in the early 1900s. A parcel of land in upper Rustic Canyon was transformed in the 1940s from a Nazi enclave, designed to shelter a group of Nazi survivalists, to an artists’ colony established by grocery heir Huntington Hartford in 1950. “Among the final artists in residence was a nun named Sister Gladys Ann, a 20-year member of the order of Sisters of Loretto,” Jaffe writes. “Hipper than your average nun, she drove from the canyon to Mass on Sunset Boulevard in a Thunderbird loaned to her by Jewish friends in Beverly Hills. While at the colony, she worked on such non-traditional works as a bronze of a skiing nun and the Marcel Duchamps-inspired ‘Nuns Descending the Stairs.'” Jaffe admits he was struck by “the sheer amount and the quality of cultural activity that’s gone on in the mountains,” especially with regard to architecture. Beginning in the 1920s, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler began building hillside homes that complemented the landscape. Jaffe and Gamache feel indebted not only to the 20th-century artists whose works have taught them to value the landscape of the Santa Monicas, but also to the people and organizations that have worked hard to protect the mountains over the years. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, led since 1980 by Palisades resident Joe Edmiston, is one of the groups that has helped acquire land for and protect the Santa Monicas, which now encompasses 70,000 protected acres. With this book, Jaffe and Gamache aimed to bring awareness and a better understanding of the Santa Monica Mountains to readers in order to inspire conservationism. “There have been these huge environmental battles fought over the past century all around the country, and they’ve tended to be the big glamorous spots–the Redwoods and The Grand Canyon,” Jaffe says. “Obviously, those are incredibly important, but now people are beginning to look at what’s literally in their own backyard. The Santa Monicas offer an opportunity to begin to learn about the intricacies of nature in a different way.” As Jaffe points out, their book coincided with the culmination of two decades-long battles: the defeat of the Ahmanson Ranch development and establishment of the 2,983-acre Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve in 2003, and the acquisition of the King Gillette Ranch in Malibu Canyon in 2005. Gamache, who lives at the entrance to what was “the Ahmanson Project,” shudders at the pollution that the development would have caused in the drainage system of Malibu Creek and Las Virgenes Creek. He remembers that L.A. Country Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky “came out to a meeting [about the project] and called Malibu Canyon ‘our Yosemite.’ That rallied some people.” Both wilderness advocates, Jaffe and Gamache met over a decade ago and have collaborated on countless assignments in Southern California and the Southwest. Their inspiration for this book began with the Old Topanga Fire, which broke out on November 2, 1993. “That was the first time I had seen a really big wildfire in the Santa Monicas,” Jaffe recalls. “It blew me away’the power, the devastation but then also the recovery afterward. There is no better education to the whole cycle of burn and recovery than what I was able to see that year. It just got me more interested in the Mountains. And Tom [Gamache] is so plugged in out here that he just began taking me to different places; he was key to my education.” Gamache, who has lived in the Santa Monicas since the early 1970s and worked in more than 100 other national parks throughout the country, has photographed many fires. “The first time I covered a fire, I stood looking at a V-shaped canyon, photographing as fire went down one side,” he recalls. “It took maybe 2 to 2-1/2 hours to descend and it took 12 minutes to cover the same area going up. These are things you don’t think about. “You don’t think about the fuel that’s out there,” he says, referring to the chaparral of the Santa Monica Mountains, “the amazing volatility of it, the oil that’s in this stuff. This is designed to burn.” Jaffe adds, “What we have now, they’re not quite natural fires in the way they once were, but it is still part of the process of clearing things out. And I guess you just have to accept that this is a stage in the continuum that the mountains are going through at any given time.” One of the many unusual and interesting details that Jaffe includes in the book tells of a Santa Monica Mountains blaze that changed the plotline of the final MASH episode. The Korean War-era series was filmed on location in Malibu Creek State Park, and the fire destroyed its outdoor set. Gamache, remembering the real fire and the TV episode, says, “You can actually see that they used a third camera unit and they had stand-ins–people running back and forth between the tents as the whole place was burning. Then the story was written that they got bombed.” For decades, the Santa Monica Mountains were an anonymous backdrop for many movies and TV shows. Now, Gamache and Jaffe are bringing the mountains to the foreground and raising the curtain for all the world to see and applaud. “If there’s one thing that people get from the book, I would like them to maybe look at a place that they’ve taken for granted, look at a place that is, in some cases, literally in their backyards, and to see it in a different way, with appreciation,” Jaffe says. “In a really urbanized world, to know that you can have this connection to the natural world, is valuable. In the Palisades, people can have that connection a little bit more directly than in other parts of Southern California.” Published by Paddy Calistro and Scott McAuley of Angel City Press, “The Santa Monica Mountains: Range on The Edge” is available at Village Books on Swarthmore. ———– Reporting by Associate Editor Alyson Sena. To contact, e-mail: newsdesk@palipost.com.