Trapped in a Snow Avalanche on Angeles Crest We have such a friendly familiarity with the mountains above us that we forget that nature up there can be deadly. Recently a reader sent me a newspaper clipping on her parents’ rescue from a snow avalanche up on Angeles Crest Highway in April of 1967. Nature […]
The Mysterious Lost Mountain Cabin of Grizzly Flat – Part 2 Last week I wrote about a mysterious cabin that stood for many years on a shelf of land overlooking Big Tujunga Canyon. Thanks to local historian Art Cobery, we learned it had been built in 1925 as a base of operations for a homegrown […]
The Mysterious Lost Mountain Cabin of Grizzly Flat – Part 1 On the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains is a huge flat terrace perched halfway up the mountainside from Big Tujunga Canyon, between Vasquez Creek and Mt. Lukens. It’s called Grizzly Flat, no doubt for some long forgotten incident with the many grizzly […]
Another New Book! “Frontier Days in Crescenta Valley” Joining the many local history books on the shelves is the latest from the current president of the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley, Jo Anne Sadler. Jo Anne had previously written, “Crescenta Valley Pioneers and Their Legacies.” That book focused on biographies of many of our […]
New Book! ‘Wicked Crescenta Valley’ Books on the history of the Crescenta Valley have been numerous in the last few years, and more are coming! There are two out in the next couple of weeks – “Wicked Crescenta Valley”, available now, and “Frontier Days in Crescenta Valley: Portraits of Life in the Foothills”, which releases […]
The Briggs Water Tower – The Oldest House in CV? I’m often asked, “What is the oldest house in the Valley?” The answer is complicated as the earliest house built in the valley is Theodor Pickens’ cabin, constructed on Briggs Terrace in 1871. But it was relocated intact to Henninger Flats up in the San […]
Rockhaven Sanitarium Development Explained You’ve probably read about the proposal to develop Rockhaven into housing, retail sites or a “boutique hotel.” What happened to our new library, park and community center we’d been promised? This historic site, built in 1923 by women for the care of women with mental disabilities, had been much touted as […]
Old Town La Canada? In architectural preservation circles, the City of La Cañada Flintridge doesn’t get much respect. For evidence of that, refer to the Los Angeles Conservancy’s annual Preservation Report Card, in which L.A. area cities are graded on their efforts to preserve their historic buildings. Burbank and Pasadena received an ‘A’ grading, and […]
Touring Rockhaven Sanitarium Sanitariums for lung disease and mental problems were once the defining industry of the Crescenta Valley. La Crescenta was founded by a doctor who came here to start a sanitarium, and many others followed him until, in the 1920s, there were dozens of sanitariums. But out of all those facilities, there’s only […]
Mount Lowe Railway A century ago and just a few canyons to the east of the Crescenta Valley, on the face of the San Gabriel Mountains, was the Mount Lowe Railway – an amazing trolley trip into the clouds. In the late 1800s, the Crescenta Valley was lazily sleeping in the rocks and sagebrush. But […]