A group of friends walked all 25 miles of Sunset Boulevard in a day. Doing so reminded them of L.A. history and their own experiences on the winding street.
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Why hike in L.A.? There are as many answers as there are Angelenos who lace up boots and hit trails. Southern California’s mountains and forests can serve as an outdoor gym, a sanctuary from the urban buzz, a spiritual space to heal and reflect, a place to pose and be seen (especially on Instagram), an entry to the natural world of tarantulas and newts, and a place to scale an unthinkably high peak. For the devout, it’s a lifestyle choice that in nonpandemic times brings us closer as a community.
(Tomi Um / For the Times)
Where to start? There are roughly 1 million acres to explore in the L.A. area. The nation’s largest national park in an urban setting, the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, offers 154,000 acres from Hollywood to Point Mugu. Continue east to Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area and Griffith Park, handy urban green spaces that are a freeway off-ramp away, then head east and north to the wilder Angeles National Forest where you can roam 700,
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Welcome to The Wild. Winter is an ideal time to explore the close-to-home front range of the Angeles National Forest. Josephine Peak would be a good place to start. It’s not particularly high, at 5,558 feet, but it offers spectacular views of Los Angeles, which can look like the Emerald City of Oz rising in the distance. Turning north toward the forest, you’ll see a vast quilt of canyons and high points in the San Gabriels, most prominent Strawberry Peak.
One of the oddest items on top: Open-air green shelves where hikers have left mementos such as a Yosemite cap, sunscreen, notes, rocks and even a dollar or two. It’s a remnant of a fire lookout that stood from 1937 until it burned down in the Big Tujunga Canyon fire in 1975. I always wondered who Josephine was. The local Sierra Club’s Hundred Peaks Section says a U.S. Geological Survey surveyor named the peak after his wife, Josephine Lippencott. No word on whether