An Old Friend
A trip to Peter F. Schabarum Park
Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Hacienda Heights is a pretty good way to spend $7. That’s the price of parking for a day, which is cheaper than a lot of other things nowadays. The admission fee gets you access to a pretty nice manicured section of the park, where you could host things like birthday parties and picnics, and the equally if not more delightful trails. If you live in that nexus of southeastern Los Angeles county, the San Gabriel Valley, and northern Orange County, this is an excellent place to spend a weekend morning.
My family discovered the trails here when I was fairly young, and I have many memories of being herded into our minivan on a Saturday morning to go off hiking when I would rather have stayed at home to watch cartoons. When I turned onto Colima Road and saw the park’s edge, bordered by sidewalks and busy streets, all of them started to flood back. I was making my return under slightly different circumstances, traveling with a best friend on a Saturday afternoon, but I was delighted to see just how little had changed.
Turn into the front gate and you’ll be greeted by an expanse of green grass and tables, shaded by tall trees. There is a stream that runs through a great deal of this area, but given our drought and the fact I visited in late August, water was nowhere to be found. This part of the park is fantastic, but don’t get me wrong, it’s not what I love most about it. The real gem is the trail. Visitors have their choice of two different trails, although I have more familiarity with the eastern one, the Schabarum trail.
Once you make your way onto the main path, you will find yourself transported to a different world. Gone are the stretches of soft grass, unnaturally green for this time of year, and in are the familiar parched shrubs that give many of California’s more wild areas their intrinsic character. With just a few twists and turns, I find myself deep in a beautiful, and fragile, landscape. As a member of the generation that can’t remember flying without long security lines at airports, I remember being told that native ecosystems were in danger worldwide. Most of the messaging, however, centered around the rainforests and polar extremes, and not our local one, which has been on the losing end of a long and steady battle. Just 10–15 percent of our coastal sage scrub remains, which is a rather difficult pill to swallow.
I’m not qualified to talk about what kind of ecological devastation that represents, but it should be evident that this level of loss is unacceptable. There is no replacement for what has been paved over or replaced with whatever plant from some far away land a random person found attractive. But as we’ve seen with many crises and problems recently, human beings are terribly unequipped to visualize such large-scale problems.
Well, if anyone needs help visualizing what could be and what was lost, have them come to a park like this, or any other preserved pocket of this land as it once was. Even in summer, when most of these plants have gone dormant, the landscape is strikingly beautiful. At every turn, there are sagebrushes, sages of all kinds, laurel sumacs, and California buckwheats. What a pity it would be to ignore this natural color palette of gold, green, and everywhere in between, waiting to wake up with the rain.
The trail itself is not very difficult, although admittedly a significant deal more difficult under the summer afternoon sun. This gives the hiker plenty of time to appreciate what’s around them, and where the built landscape intersects with the natural. There are houses everywhere around the immediate area, and it is impossible to ever truly escape urban sprawl when you’re in the Los Angeles basin. There’s something to be said about appreciating the contrast and dichotomy, but I would encourage people to look a little closer at the shrubbery. Pick out individual plants, and see how they have grown in with their neighbors. There are splashes of color here and there, particularly from the buckwheat, that stand out from the rest.
For all the talk of drought we hear on the local news, and the havoc it wreaks yearly on lawns and homeowners, it is important to remember that our native plants are adapted to stretches of dry conditions. There is still life starting up and beginning in these conditions, and you can almost feel how reared up the landscape is to receive just one day of rain. Come spring, this place will be buzzing with color, aroma, but there is a certain beauty captured when life continues to persevere in harsh conditions.
It’s important to remember that a place like this exists, and to take in all that it can give. Standing up on a hill, in the middle of nature that’s so uniquely Southern Californian, it’s not hard to think about the things that really matter. Why we have to exit the trappings of our normal lives to find ourselves or have the space to actually hear ourselves think, I don’t know.
Communion with nature is inherently a lonely affair. The plants don’t talk back. The hills don’t either. We’re writing ourselves onto the landscape, and we hear the echoes from when we were there last. When I’m fully immersed here, that boy I was who fell in love with the aroma of a sagebrush while huffing and puffing up the trail seems to have never left.
For the 10–15% of the sage scrub habitat that survives, we must give it everything we can, in a time when it’s more vulnerable than ever. However, it’s more imperative than ever, in my opinion, to visit and see this park, or any other preserve of California wilderness, for not just what we have lost, but for what still breathes and lives, and what could be.
Just a note: although I believe every resident of Southern California should embrace the native plants and ecosystem of this land, it is important to also recognize the Tongva people, the region’s original and rightful stewards, and how much of the current movement around preservation is built upon their traditional knowledge. This land belongs to them, and nothing will change that. I recognize the connection that exists between the Tongva and this land is unique, and I instead write from my perspective as someone who has grown up here and wishes to see this ecosystem protected and respected.
