The San Gabriel Foothills

For three decades Mike Kobeissi has worked the La Cañada Flintridge market, in a town on the southern edge of the San Gabriel Mountains, and this index climbs from that edge into the range: its rock, its forest, its observatory and its climate.

The scale of the range is regional. National Geographic reported in 2014 that about 350,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest, roughly half of the San Gabriel Mountains, were to become a national monument. The mountains hold about 70 percent of the open space in Los Angeles County and supply about a third of its drinking water, some 17 million people live within an hour’s drive of their 10,000 foot peaks, and more than three million visit each year.¹

The range is also one link in a longer chain of open land. KCET covered a crowded public meeting in La Cañada Flintridge in January 2014 on the National Park Service’s Rim of the Valley study, whose area runs from the Santa Monica Mountains through the Simi, Santa Susana and Verdugo Hills to the San Gabriels.² The mountains made a place for science too. Carnegie Science recounts that George Ellery Hale learned in December 1904, while riding a mule up the San Gabriels above Pasadena, that the institution would fund his observatory on Mount Wilson, where Edwin Hubble later used the 100 inch Hooker telescope to show that the universe reaches beyond the Milky Way and is expanding.³

The entries climb in order: The San Gabriel Mountains, Angeles National Forest, Mount Wilson Observatory and The Mediterranean Climate.