The Huddlekufflers had made a run at "Devil Canyon" before, in May of 2024 from below, starting from the outlet at a housing development in Chatsworth: viewtopic.php?p=69318&hilit=Baby+Kitten#p69318 It was fun little adventure with Tiny Baby Kitten and the gang, but we didn’t get very far up the canyon: The big 22-23 winter had filled the trail full of blowdown about a half mile up from the city outlet, turning us around.
This time I planned a loop coming from above, starting at the ending point of my 39th Birthday Oat Mountain epic, a parking lot on Brown’s Canyon Road. But instead of coming from above, we went down, into a deep corner of the Santa Susanna Mountains front country.
First we had to hike a bit past the gate up the road. Forest is still coming to terms emotionally with the concept of voluntarily walking uphill. He was a bit grumpy at the start. This brings up the phenomenon of “getting over the hump” which I think many of us STILL can feel at the start of a hike on that first real climb - you gotta get warmed up mentally and physically. Us big kids have the experience and inhibitions to know it’s a temporary pain and ignore it. A 5 year old is a whole lot more transparent about the feeling.
But after a couple hundred feet of gain Forest cheered up as we settled in, the cool breeze of recently departed weather making ideal conditions for trekking across the sedimentary hummocks of the south facing slopes of the Santa Susanna Mountains, their grass-adorned slopes that undulate above the homes of millions of others in the San Fernando Valley, including our own. .
.
.
Turning off Browns Canyon Rd leaving the pavement behind, we began a long and winding descent on a two track down into Devil Canyon. Justina is our family wildlife enthusiast and birder and she was spotting critters left and right, like this Brown Crested Fly Catcher. .
.
.
Forest described himself as a “junkyard dog” and lived his best “junkyard dog” life here in this scenic dumping site along our road. No shortage of mystery objects. .
.
.
Birds nest available for rent. .
.
.
The road became progressively more unmaintained as we made our way deeper into the backcountry, past a horse stable with no humans but lots of dogs. Winding past steep orange slopes of the Llajas formation sediments (a new one for me) we reached Devil canyon. Here was our entry point, complete with oddly isolated cement paving stones. The only remaining ruins of something - no telling what. .
.
.
Devil Canyon was lovely - an overgrown but well-built single track leading us along a modest and lovely burble of water leisurely making its way over gravel and dislodged conglomerate clasts on its way to the San Fernando Valley. Stream crossing started to become more numerous, and Forest practiced his leaping skills over the water and poison oak thickets adorning it. .
.
.
In this isolated little oasis of oaks, grasses and Miocene shales somewhere northwest of Los Angeles, we came across the only person we were to meet that day: a lone man and his horse. In turn, we were the only people he and his 4-legged companion had seen that day either. In broken English he offered to give Forest an opportunity for his first horse ride, and in a place where a stranger isn’t a stranger and helmets and liability feel far away, Forest had his first experience riding a horse under the live oaks of Devil Canyon. These sorts of scenarios are near and dear to me; now more than ever as a father. .
.
.
The trail continued to deteriorate, and soon I was using decade-old aerial imagery to keep us on where the path once had been before getting swallowed by riparian nature. .
.
.
The south side of the Santa Susanna Mtns are a lot more gentle than the radical vertical slabs of anticlines and synclines of the north side, but I got a little waterfall fix in nonetheless as we pushed our way through the wildflowers. .
.
.
The Poison Oak was FLOURISHING. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much on a hike. We had Forest go into a poison-oak mode with his sun hoodie. (And you can see a wall of it in this photo.) .
.
.
Feather find. .
.
.
The stream often decided to use the trail itself as its path, and dry feet became a thing of the past. .
.
.
We stayed JUST on the northern edge of the legendary Chatsworth Formation, save this one boulder of it that had tumbled down into the canyon. The particular cretaceous turbidite sandstone immediately unmistakable. The oldest formation of our route. What an icon! .
.
.
Frog alert! With no felsic igneous plutons dominating the landscape with white rock, the California tree frogs here in the Santa Susannas are a little more sandstone-beige than the white ones you see hopping around the angular boulders in the San Gabriels. .
.
.
At the joining of Devil and Ybarra, an impressive retaining wall allowed for us to preside over the canyon confluence. .
.
.
At this lowest point of our hike, 1,300 feet, we bid Devil Canyon farewell and worked our way up Ybarra Canyon. Because of the overgrown state of the trail, this whole adventure was taking longer than expected and Justina was understandably concerned about her evening plans, so we picked up the pace.
Further up Ybarra Canyon we encountered Elliot’s bicycle, apparently crash-landed a couple miles from takeoff in nearby Porter Ranch where that famous ET scene was filmed. Dima - does this count as finding plane wreckage? .
.
.
Near our finish line, we intercepted the route taken by Forest and I on our horse and dog-filled wild-boar skull extravaganza “Sacred Oaken Loop” from a year and a half earlier, coming across the same Indiana Jones Bridge: the Santa Susanna’s own “Bridge to Nowhere. “ .
.
.
In case you haven’t noticed, I love coming across old routes as I travel new ones. It all feels like writing another chapter in the same story.
5.68 Miles, 1427 of gain. With a mostly overgrown trail or unmaintained roads through forgotten corners, this was a wild one for a family hike. I love my team for tackling it, and often thriving in the experience. Afterwards Justina characterized this hike as "freakish" ............but I might have also overheard her say she "loved it" ?????????????
