Led by Gail Wise and Nancy Beverly
By Gail Wise and Lynne Kirste
Sixteen of us did a nice little urban hike through my neighborhood and we learned a few things about Eagle Rock, old and new. It had been raining all morning, but the sun finally poked out just a half-hour before hike time, right on cue, and we had perfect walking weather with temperatures in the high fifties and some interesting clouds and cloud cover.
We started at Gail and Lynne’s house, where Lynne showed off her little native plant garden, including toyon, sages, buckwheat, monkey flowers, California poppies and yarrow. Like many people, she has joined the Homegrown National Park movement (https://homegrownnationalpark.org/). Plants are the base of the food chain, and our local insects have evolved alongside our local plants. They can’t get by on imported plants. The insects support larger animals, so every kind of critter, from insects to birds and mammals, needs local, native plant species to survive and/or thrive. For instance, a non-native Gingko tree might be pretty, but it doesn’t support any local species, whereas a native oak will support many hundreds. Even small yards with native plants help keep the local environment healthy. We saw another example of this later on our hike at Addison Way and Eagle Rock Boulevard, where a local church worked with the Wild Yards Project, started by Eagle Rocker David Newsom, to plant a native garden on church-owned land there.
After leaving our home, we stopped down the street at the site of protests near a local city council member’s home. The council member had been involved in the scandal in which racist and homophobic comments were made in a conversation with other council members and were caught on tape. Activists camped out at the intersection near the home for several weeks from morning until night, and sometimes closed it to traffic and held organized protests. Neighbors were mostly sympathetic, and some brought food and coffee to the protestors. Others were a little bit frustrated by the disruption but tended to be good-natured about it. Eventually, the protestors moved on.
We then left that scandal behind and climbed up a fire trail behind Occidental College to “summit” little Mt. Fiji (866 ft), which despite its diminutive size offers spectacular unobstructed 360-degree views of the entire area. It was a little overcast so we did not get the good view of the San Gabriels that one would normally have from there, but we did have views of closer peaks, Mt. Washington, downtown Los Angeles, Griffith Observatory, Century City, Glendale, Highland Park and, of course, Eagle Rock, including the boulder that gives the neighborhood its name. While the sun was not at the right angle to hit the ledge in the boulder and make a shadow that looks just like an eagle in flight, we could see a pretty good birdlike shadow to get the idea.
From there, we entered the campus of Occidental College near the solar array. We had a special guest, Rodney, who was a former computer science professor at Oxy. He told us that the solar array provides 12% of the campus’s power. He also pointed out a seismometer that the Geology Department uses to measure earthquake activity.
After passing by the oak-lined quad and briefly checking out the chapel with impressive stained-glass windows, we ascended the Obama Stairs. President Obama was a student at Oxy for two years before transferring to Columbia University. He gave his first political speech at Oxy right near those stairs, and the college has since inscribed part of the speech onto the steps. We then went up to his former dorm, where there was a contact sheet of photos of Obama in his college days that was blown up into a big display.
We then proceeded around the baseball field that is the home of Occidental Tigers. It’s nestled snugly into the hillside. We then walked down toward the Quad. On the way there was a little garden with madrone trees (aka strawberry trees), one of which had lots of fruit. I explained that you could eat the little red berries, so some of us had a few and found them tasty. Rodney let us into Fowler Hall for a pit stop and where there was a huge historical photo covering a whole wall that showed the Eagle Rock area many years ago.
From there we went past the admissions office with its lovely, landscaped yard (not with native plants though, alas) and walked along Escarpa Drive with some very interesting residential architecture overhanging a hillside and caught some more good views.
We then walked down another charming residential street to Eagle Rock Boulevard, the site of the little native garden mentioned above. After resting for a few minutes on the garden’s tree stump stools and benches, we proceeded up Eagle Rock Boulevard to Vidiots, a beloved non-profit with a multi-use space that has an enormous collection of DVDs for rental and two movie theaters, one of which seats 271 people.
After that, we wound up on Colorado Boulevard with a number of local restaurants to try out and ended the hike at the Eagle Rock City Hall. Eagle Rock used to be its own city, but joined Los Angeles in 1923, mainly to have access to a reliable water supply and sewage system. So that’s why we have our own City Hall.
Lynne and I had delicious Mahi-Mahi burgers at The Four Café. I hear reports that two hikers took my advice and tried out the croissants at The Penny Oven, which are the best I’ve ever had outside of France. Try them out for yourself sometime and let me know if you agree.
So, it was lovely to be able to introduce the group to the neighborhood. I sure am glad the weather cleared for us so that we could do it.
Special thanks to our co-lead, Nancy Beverly, who managed to squeeze in another GLS hike while preparing for her one-woman show, a book signing and who knows what else!
