Went to Elephant Hill Open Space
I was bored earlier this week and decided to take a short drive to Elephant Hill Open Space, a park? in El Sereno that is quite a bit crazier and weirder than I realized before I went.
I'll just say that my experience at the space was positive and that I was never in danger while I was there - though I did repeatedly wonder "am I allowed to be here???" while I was exploring. (As far as I know, I was indeed only walking in places that I was allowed to be.) I do think that based on what I've read about the place, I'd only go back with company... but going there alone was, in the end, totally fine for me.
Before I left to visit, I skimmed a quick description of the park which mentioned that local activists had spent the last few years trying to stop illegal off-roading in the area. I also noticed that the space had no parking lots and no official main entrance - I've since read that it has over ten entrances, most unsecured, which contributes to the off-roading issue. I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to figure out which entrance I should approach the park from, then gave up and just decided to let Google Maps take me there - which was the wrong move, I think. If I ever went back, I think I'd park near either Burr or Lathrop street - one option on either side of the hill - and approach from one of those two directions.
Here's a map of the southern part of the space - the two blue arrows are the ways I'd rather enter, and the red arrow is the way Google tried to send me in.
Google tried to get me actually driving into the park on a steep, muddy track at the end of Harriman Street. I ended up turning around and parking in front of a nearby house, and the area was so private and cul-de-sac-y that I felt awkward about taking a picture, but here's my screenshot of what the approach looks like in Google Street View.
It's crazy - I cannot overemphasize how steep that muddy track is. I actually slipped a few times while walking up it. There's a "do not enter" sign next to it, too, but the track is in fact a "road", not a parcel of owned land... and as far as I can tell, it was fully legal for me to walk up it into the park. Which I did!
The park beyond this point is gorgeous, weird, full of trash... and right now, after the storms, completely covered in massive plants. It's mostly invasive Black Mustard - huge ones, with gigantic leaves sometimes over a foot long, and super-thick stems as wide as my thumb. I haven't seen mustard plants this big anywhere else in Los Angeles before.
I was walking up Burr Street, which goes up a kind of canyon. I could see some cut mustard stems that looked like they might have been mowed, but it was clear that most of the routes carved through the mustard were from offroad cars:
The whole time I was walking up the canyon, I could tell that some big vehicles had driven through recently - after the rains last week, for sure. I wasn't sure whether I should expect these to be maintenance vehicles or offroaders... but the deeper into the park I got, the more clear it became that there's still a ton of offroading happening here.
The best place to read about what goes on at the park is this LA Taco article from 2022. The amount of chaos that locals have been putting up with is completely insane - there are stories in that article about people waking up to find a car almost sliding into the back of their house, or to find injured offroaders threatening them in their back yards. It sounds completely nuts. I have no idea if it's gotten better or worse since 2022, but if you want to imagine what I was experiencing this week, just imagine me going further and further up the hill and noticing more and more deep deep tire tracks and thinking, "oh boy, this isn't maintenance!!"
There are tons of extremely old wrecked cars in the area I approached from. At one point, I passed a parcel of private property with multiple ancient, skeletal wrecks outside of it. The Burr Street canyon features a wreck completely swallowed by mustard, which you can see in the picture at the top of this post. The LA Taco article I linked talks about how the place has been a hot spot for offroading since Boomers were kids, and about how the chaos level has been high since all the way back then, too. I didn't see any modern abandoned vehicles, but an Instagram page for a local advocacy group has pictures of recent wrecks.
That local group has been organizing trash removal events for years, but illegal dumping is common here, too. When I got onto Burr, I assumed that the piles of mulch I saw everywhere were for some park development operation... instead, it turns out that these mulch piles just appear here illegally.
The area I explored led me to two separate flat areas at the top of the hill. The very tip-top of the hill had a huge mud puddle and a crazy view of the San Gabriel mountains:
A lower flat area had a couple burn marks with scattered coals and melted metal bits - probably from fireworks:
It goes without saying that setting fires on top of a hill too steep for fire trucks to drive up is like, peak antisocial behavior, extraordinarily dangerous, totally cringe to do in a city that just burned the fuck down a year ago. I can see why local residents would be extremely anxious about this stuff - if a fire starts behind their house because someone's hot car drives over dry grass, it would be a whole operation to put it out. And that does happen occasionally!
Between the puddle and the burn marks, there was a shit ton of scattered trash next to an enormous Peruvian Pepper tree. I took a crazy phone cam panorama (not included here; it's too wide to look good in a blog post) showing both the trash, the cityscape of El Sereno, and the San Gabriels. It's really wild to get up to the top of an extraordinarily lush green space like this and just find garbage:
If that dark spot under the pepper tree looks like a hideaway to you, you're not wrong. There were a couple shelters built in the trees here at there at the top of the hill, but they didn't look actively lived-in and I didn't see anyone up here. I did find posts on a couple sites about people living up here... but I'd be really surprised if anyone is doing that right now, during the rainy season. There were a ton of spots where water was pooling, and a lot of water damage to the paths. It's extremely exposed, with zero protection from the crazy storms we've been getting. If anyone is actually trying to live up here at the moment, they're probably getting walloped.
Historically, the biggest trash dumping culprits have been construction companies, not homeless people. (The LA Taco article has a crazy story in it about a construction worker coming to a trash clean-up event because he feels guilty about dumping there.) There's apparently also a ton of trash coming from people who go to party at the top with their cars. I found this instagram post from a few years ago pointing out that someone partied here so hard that they left their bra behind.
I got to the top - it's less than a mile of walking from the Burr entrance - and took a bunch of pictures. You can see both Downtown LA and the San Gabriels from here. I can understand why developers in the 80s wanted to build luxury housing up here - it's a luxury view. We're very lucky that this place ended up as a park.
I got a lot of good plant pictures and accurately identified many plants! None of them were particularly exciting, so I won't subject you to another blog post where I just list a bunch of wildflowers... but I had a good time, I got great pictures, and I would love to go back there. Unfortunately, based on what I've read about the place, I am not sure I would go back on a weekend, or go back alone.
I was there midday on a Monday, so it's not surprising I saw no offroading vehicles here, but the saveelephanthill Instagram account has videos of offroading from fairly recently, and it's very clearly still going on all the time. I found a lot of tire tracks in still-fresh mud from last week's rain.
I'm not saying that I think an offroader would like, shoot me or attack me - but these people are driving huge trucks on the trails where I would be walking or standing. They do not have shoulders or sidewalks - in a lot of cases, the trail I was walking on was created by the offroad vehicles themselves. The only place I had to stand was inside the tire tracks the cars would be driving inside. So if you go here, there's just a chance that a drunk man driving a giant car comes rocketing uphill directly at you. I am a fucking nerd; I don't trust myself to navigate that social situation adeptly, and I won't subject myself to it alone.
But if this sounds interesting to you, I think you should go! It's extremely cool shit. The history of the hill is super interesting, and the LA Taco article is a wild ride. I'm kind of glad that I didn't read it beforehand... because maybe then I'd have been too spooked to go!