In March 2024, a couple weeks after I ran the LA Marathon for the first time, my body was crackling for action. I'd been gently slouching and schlepping for some twelve days, per recovery protocol. I understood intellectually that this was necessary and wise. Viscerally, though, I was bored shitless. I must get moving again, I decided, but I must not run. There was a mountain outside my window, and that settled it. I'd climb the mountain.

The San Gabriel Mountains are in the north east of L.A. County, and date back to the early Miocene, a geological period from about 20 million to 5 million years ago. Throughout that period, tectonic plates were busy moving and shaking, but the key contours of the mountains we see today are estimated to have formed some 7 million years ago. Mount Wilson is not the tallest peak in the range - that's Mount Baldy (formally, Mount San Antonio). But Wilson is likely the peak that most Angelenos could pick out in the topographical line-up when looking toward San Bernardino. This is for the most L.A. of reasons: Mount Wilson has broadcast hardware on top of it.

Specifically, there's a cluster of antennas that from downtown look spindly and toybox-macabre like Christmas tree angels made from chickenwire. The Wilson Observatory, a mecca of astronomy with two ground-breaking telescopes inside, is also atop Mount Wilson. But it's Colgate-white at an elevation where clouds often squat, and some days you'll contemplate the mountain and swear they've moved the observatory someplace else. Without the needly transmission towers, Mount Wilson would perhaps be hard to distinguish from the abundance of lower peaks and foothills around it, particularly as there's a mob of greenery homogenizing everything. Mount Wilson, you see, is located within the Angeles National Forest, meaning the hike to the summit is both a forest experience and a mountain one.

It was perhaps this duality that I found most intoxicating on that first climb in March 2024. I love forests, the sun-dappled sanctum of them and the way my steps on the dense earth seem to have less sound here, even as a snap or a squall from an unseen nearby creature booms like a mic check amid the trees. Equally I love mountains. The simultaneously nerve-racking and uplifting exposure to the elements that comes with altitude, the brute rock faces and vertiginous trails, and how I feel it right there in my stomach: self-responsibility. This is terrain where pity does not exist. If on a mountain I fall and break myself, what's going to get me back down again are the things I find in myself beyond the breakage. Resilience, ingenuity, the dividends of foresight. I understand that to some folks this extremity of independence would be terrifying. For whatever reason, I experience it very differently. I am exhilarated, affirmed, and profoundly grateful to be here in this my body, with these my wits, to figure out whatever physical riddle the mountain will next present to me.

There are numerous ways up to Mount Wilson, but widely considered the most rewarding of them is the eponymous Mount Wilson Trail. This starts at street level in Sierra Madre, a small foothills city famous for headlines like BEAR STROLLS INTO LIVING ROOM, RESIDENT IRONING. The trail winds up 7 miles from Sierra Madre through the Angeles National Forest, arriving at Mount Wilson after an elevation gain of about 4,500 feet. Unlike Mount Baldy, Wilson is not a snowy mountain - even in the depths of winter, we're talking a light frosting at most - so the crampons and ice-picks can be left at home. Sturdy shoes and robust fitness are the key requirements.

Hitting the Mount Wilson Trail for the first time in March 2024, I took with me about 2,000 calories worth of bagels, bananas, and energy gels leftover from my marathon. I also had a couple 300ml bottles of water, and a cell phone that I correctly guessed would be useless above a certain altitude. I'd memorized the key landmarks along the trail, so that if I lost my shabby Xeroxed map I could still find my way back down. I also learned bear protocol, mountain lion protocol, and rattlesnake protocol, albeit in the same restless way I watch airline safety videos. My suspicion being that, in the event, there's a 12% chance I'd actually do this stuff and not just straight-up lose my shit.

I knew absolutely nothing about the history of the mountain, its flora and fauna, or the changes in terrain to expect as I climbed. I left all those things to reveal themselves as I went along. I was restless, red-blooded, and here for big mountain.

Let me tell you some of the things I've learned about the Mount Wilson trail since that first fact-free ascent.

Most accounts of the trail begin in 1864, when ranch-owner Don Benito Wilson needed wood for his vineyard in what is now San Marino. At that time there was an old Native American path up Little Santa Anita Canyon that summited the mountain as it crossed the San Gabriel range. Wilson sent Native Americans and Mexicans to turn that old path into an access trail to the peak, so that the wood he needed could be cut down from the top. (Environmentally-conscious contemporary L.A. winces at this.)

In the event, Wilson only spent a few weeks on the mountain, the wood he found there apparently not meeting his exacting standards. But the trail he'd made became popular with hikers, who would take one or two days to reach the peak then light bonfires to signal their safe arrival to those down below. (Another wince.) Real-estate entrepreneurs, including Wilson himself, seized on the opportunities raised by these avid travelers, building rest stops, cabins and hotels along the trail. In 1889 the Pasadena and Mount Wilson Toll Road Company was established and created a wagon road to Mount Wilson. The price to take the toll road in 1891? 25 cents.

The real-estate bigwigs fought amongst themselves and with the public over property limits, culminating in a court declaration in 1891 that the Mount Wilson Trail is a "public highway, and cannot be closed against travel". Around the same time, Pickering and Clark, a Harvard professor and telescope maker respectively, saw extraordinary potential in the mountain top as a site for an astronomical telescope. They went on to lay the foundations of what is now the Mount Wilson Observatory. In 1907, the toll road was widened from four feet to ten so that enormous telescopes could be transported to the top. Japanese laborers did that grueling expansion work.

In 1912, the toll road was opened to public automobiles, a hideous idea thankfully overturned 24 years later. From that point on, the toll road was closed to public travel and donated to the forest service. In 1948, the first of the summit antennas landed, and soon had many companions. After almost three-quarters of a century of revolving hospitality ventures on the mountainside - the first Mount Wilson Hotel having burned down within 8 years of opening - the last of the camps and hotels shuttered in 1976. With the exception of a few parcels, most of the privately owned land around the mountain was deeded to the forest service.

This is a conspicuously Californian story in a number of ways. Vineyards! Real-estate rumbles! White visions of prosperity realized by non-white labor! Enterprise first, environment a long-delayed afterthought! It's Californian in a few not-so-obvious ways too. The name "Don Benito", for example. That was, in fact, how Wilson came to be known after property concerns brought him westward. He was born Benjamin Davis to Virginian parents in Tennessee. His adopted name reflects his eventual settling in Alta California, as California was known then, because at that point in history it belonged to the Republic of Mexico. Wilson became a naturalized Mexican citizen and married into a powerful Californio family. Born American, he died a Mexican-American. In this motley history, we see a truth of California itself.

Another thing of critical importance to call out in the trail's official origin story is "old Native American path". That path is the true beginning of the Mount Wilson trail, not the wealthy landowner who had it juiced up by laborers to fatten his woodpile. The makers of that original path were the Tongva tribe, who used the mountain range as a conduit between the L.A. basin and the Mojave desert.

All of this is a hell of a lot not to know as you hike the trail. I can attest, though, from that first ignorant time, that the history makes itself felt all the same. Not the specifics, of course (unless you read the history boards mounted at the waypoints). It's more that, absent blacktop and trash cans and Coke machines, the mountain is entirely itself. Which is to say: largely as it would have been when those Tongva tribesmen traversed the mountains toward the Mojave, or when those Native American, Mexican and Japanese workers shaped the trail and toll road into what it is today. As a portal to the past, the trail is wide open.

The Mount Wilson trailhead is unusual in being situated smack in the middle of residences, many of them Craftsman homes with mellow back yards strewn with dog toys. You've seen those NOT THE MANAGER signs on unfortunately positioned doors on a motel lot. My guess is that residents near the trailhead have likewise considered NOT THE MOUNTAIN signs for their driveways. (A tip for first-timers: the trailhead is marked by an enormous overhead sign declaring MOUNT WILSON TRAIL.)

Once you've found the trailhead, the steep incline begins - immediately. So does what makes this first part of the trail in some ways the hardest: the exposure to the sun. To reach the top of Mount Wilson, and get back down again by nightfall, you need to get started in the morning, at which time the sun is hitting the south mountainside full-bore. After setting out, you won't encounter any substantial shade until the first waypoint up the mountain, known as First Water, and there's one and half miles of hard uphill trudging in that sunlight until then. It's a packed-earth trail about the width of a sidewalk, with the mountainside on your left, and a certain fall off the mountain on your right. No guard rail because that would be to deface the mountain on your account, and that's not how things work here.

On these lower slopes, you'll see craggy granitic rock, its distinct crystal structure giving the impression that chunks of it have been cut cleanly away (perhaps by Don Benito Wilson for a garden project). Chaparral abounds, together with the flamboyant succulent popularly known as the Spanish bayonet, named after the shape of its leaves. (Think of a very enthusiastic - or very nervous - Don Quixote, whose unique self-defense system is fully encircling his own body with outward pointing swords. That's what the Spanish bayonet succulent looks like.)

At First Water - and the clue's in the name - the trail passes the stream that runs year-long into the Little Santa Anita Canyon. You'll hear it long before you see it: the soft pops of flowing water will pull you through the last thirty meters of that fully exposed part of the trail, and then suddenly there's an abundance of trees overhead, and a spur track down into the creek. When you first hit the trail at Sierra Madre, you might be surprised by how many other folks are doing the same. You might even be dismayed, if you came to the mountains to escape yappy human energy. Know that most people will turn off here, at First Water, or at the next waypoint, both places being waterside alcoves where physical recovery, picnicking, reverie or watercolor painting all tend to get done with hard-won absorption.

The toil under the brute open sun is largely done for now. From this point on, there'll be toil, alright, but shade will never be too far away, and in some parts it will be the defining fabric of the experience. Beyond First Water, as the trail continues up the western rim of Little Santa Anita Canyon, the jouncing of the stream down below will slowly fade out. The now voluminous forestry provides the visual and auditory entertainment instead.

This is when you round curves in the trail and the chaparral-clad side of an adjacent foothill will take up most of your field of vision. Among the flora here are the golden-orange Humboldt's lily, and lupine, a tall cone-shaped purple flower that flourishes on open hillsides. There's also the drought-tolerant yarrow, typically seen mounting its exclamations of tiny white blossoms at lupine's feet. Now and then the trail crosses rough gullies, formed by aggressive runoff tearing down the mountainside, long since sucked dry and turned bone white by the sun. Watch out for tiny lizards, only a few inches long, most often encountered in a palpipating freeze a few steps ahead, because they hang out in open sunny spaces and heard you coming a fraction too late. These are Western fence lizards, and will skitter off at astonishing hallucinatory speed soon after.

The next waypoint is Orchard Camp, located halfway up the mountain, some 3.5 miles shy of the peak. This began as Don Benito Wilson's own "halfway house" rest stop and depot, with a cabin, stable and supplies for travelers. A few decades later, fruit trees were added by homesteaders, together with more (and more luxurious) cabins and meal service. Orchard Camp, as the enlarged resort was now known, flourished for many years. Then the catastrophic five-day flood of March 1938 devastated the property, and it was ultimately abandoned two years later. None of its buildings or facilities have survived, but it's a cute little spot, streamside and with generous spaces for lounging among the trees. A few remnants of the former buildings are scattered here and there, stone foundations you might mistake for rudimentary benches.

Beyond Orchard Camp, the trail becomes much steeper and more uneven, with intense switchbacks zagging you through waist-high foliage or edging you past ravines that with an ill-timed stumble would swallow all your future birthdays. This elevation brings panoramic views of the L.A. basin, as well as direct views of a few perimeter antennas, close enough now for their gargantuan dimensions to register. Christmas tree angels they ain't. The climate subtly changes, with the air cooler and more refreshing (take big gulps), and pine trees joining the canyon live oaks and bigcone Douglas-firs. In earlier parts of the trail, it's possible to look back and see some of the path you've traveled. That becomes impossible here, with the trail snapping back and forth, and the verdure obscuring your immediate past. This is perhaps the most beautiful segment of the trail, and the first where solitude becomes a presence in itself.

The next waypoint, the Manzanita Ridge (known by some as the Santa Anita Ridge), is reknowned among hikers for the well-timed bench underneath its trees. It's also where the Mount Wilson Trail intersects with the Gabrielino Trail, another route to the peak beginning in Arcadia. By this point you will have nailed about 3,700 feet of the total 4,500 feet elevation gain from Sierra Madre to Mount Wilson. So go ahead and park your ass on that bench for a while, knowing you've earned it.

After then, you're taking the Gabrielino Trail upward until it terminates at the Old Mount Wilson Toll Road. Yes, the ten-foot-wide wagon road - opened then closed to automobiles a hundred years ago - along which history-making telescopes were once transported to the Observatory. Don't let "road" fool you: this is an unpaved dirt track, wide, graded, and, for the most part, clearing-cut (you may, as I did, encounter a fallen tree, necessitating a little scrambling and horizontal trunk climbing). Jeffrey pines and white firs lean in over the track, webbing it with shade and offering some relief from the now much-closer sun. Another balm you might not expect is how very much cooler the air is up here. Soon, in fact, it will be straight-up cold. Take a sweater, no matter how crazy that feels down on street-level.

At this height, the views of the Angeles National Forest are essentially oil-paintings brought to life, albeit with the glaucoma effect of the slow-rolling mist. The forested peaks of the adjacent mountains will line up in that mist like fading Russian dolls. Somewhere on the skyline there'll be a snag - a conifer that has been driven out of life by severe drought or beetle infestations, with its bark, needles and branches all gone. Rather than promptly falling over, a snag will hold its ground - in conifers, sometimes for as long as a century. A stump standing proud in its deformity, ugliness simply impossible here. Even the antenna farm, all of it in view now, somehow looks fully subsumed into the natural design.

There's a subtle turnoff from the toll road shortly before it hits an active twenty-first-century road. Keep your eyes peeled for this turnoff as it's the most pleasant way to complete your journey to the peak. The alternative is continuing to the active road, which is used by the forest service and Observatory personnel (and occasionally cyclists). The road offers stunning north-slope views of the forest and will end with you standing awestruck below the nutsacks of the antennas. Not without its merits, then, but it's long, fully exposed to the sun, and monotonous. By contrast the turnoff is shaded and short. It will take you to the parking lot of the summit area, where - with a few footnotes I'll get to later - there's water, bathrooms, a cafe, and the Observatory itself.

If you're thinking of calling it a day and therefore an Uber to take you back down, know that cellular coverage drops off after the first two miles on the trail. So: no easy outs. You're at the top, and you're halfway done.

That first time in March 2024, I reached the peak in just under 4 hours. Coming back down was more like 3.5 hours. This is respectably brisk, and would have been significantly faster if I hadn't missed that turnoff to the summit area. I ended up taking the active road up to the personnel entrance instead. That nutsack view of the antennas, though, meant the mistake was worth making once.

I had dual motivations to get it done without dawdling. First, I'm a fetid little teenage boy in the body of a fully-grown woman, who thinks fast is the highest form of excellence in all things, to the infinite frustration of girlfriends/tennis partners/my highschool bandmates. Second, I learned on my way up that the only manmade source of water is at the summit. A descending climber told me this, about an hour before I ran out of water, some halfway up.

I'm not sure what I was expecting - I guess water dispensers at strategic points along the route, like in Runyon Canyon. I see now that this is about as fluffy white lady as it gets, second only to assuming the dispensed water would be Evian. There are natural sources of water on the trail above Orchard Camp - trickles of snowmelt or rainwater - but to drink this safely I'd need to sanitize it first, and I hadn't brought iodine or a boiling kit.

So reaching the peak would spell both a vigorous goal accomplished and water for the continuation of my existence, handily combined. That twofer made me laser-focussed on getting to the top as soon as possible.

(I've since learned that the water fountain in the summit area doesn't always work. You hit the faucet and get... sputtering bupkis. To put this in context, the summit area in its entirety is a few picnic tables, outdoor restrooms, and a rustic-style café whose opening hours are highly seasonal and did not happen to include this weekday in March. As luck would have it, the water fountain was operational that day, and I was able to refill my bottles. But the rookie mistake of running out of water halfway up could well have been compounded by that of assuming human stuff always works as it should on a mountain. If that had happened, I would have wound up severely dehydrated. Just one of the lessons I carried forward with me from that day.)

By this point in my narrative, I probably don't need to tell you that I came back down the mountain a different person. I've climbed mountains before and since, and none of those experiences affected me quite the way this did. I think because Mount Wilson is right there, in L.A.'s back yard. Other mountains require a long drive, special equipment, a pass, and sometimes an experienced guide. Whereas the way to Mount Wilson begins in an ordinary street, a few blocks up from a Starbucks and an ice-cream shop (recommended). After your eight-hour climb into the stratocumuli, you re-emerge to lawn-sprinklers, lawn-sprinkler-indifferent paperboys, and someone nearby berating their dog for eating socks off the laundry line. In its abrupt transition from the everyday to the extraordinary, the trailhead could be L.A.'s own wardrobe to Narnia.

Then there's what happens to my relationship with nature as I walk the trail. We talk breathlessly about the "proximity to nature" we feel in certain outdoor spaces, and I've always found that strange. Talking of the distance between ourselves and something else pre-supposes a distinction between the two. But we are nature. We've othered it through our culture of capitalism and consumption, but that's merely a construct, and, every now and then, nature will issue a blunt rebuttal (inside the matrix of our supposed supremacy, we call this a "natural disaster").

Ascending to Mount Wilson and experiencing the shifts from one micro-climate to the next – witnessing with each step that nature bends not, cares not; that I could be here or not here – I realize, by extension, that means it's fine that I am here. I'm not having a negative impact. (Following the mountaineering code of conduct, of course.) For once, I'm in perfect harmony with other creatures as they are and should be. I'm not pouring asphalt down the throat of a meadow, or slashing power lines through nesting birds, or turning rivers purple with chemicals that make my wheetos a dollar cheaper, or fouling the air with my shitty catalytic converter. On Mount Wilson, I am tiny and irrelevant - and harmless. All of which feels exquisitely - yes - natural.

There was a moment at the peak that particularly haunts me. I was apparently alone in the summit area, having met no one for the final two miles of my ascent. I'd refilled my water bottles and chowed down my last bagel, and now was taking a quick breather at the picnic tables. That's when I noticed motion ahead of me. Continuous, silky motion, soundless and inexorable. The mist was rolling in and up the mountainside, not hurriedly exactly but not lazily either. It looked like ghosts, an endless flow of them, busily darting into the trees, set on an unknown destination. Every hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I knew this was my reward for the grueling climb up. To witness this highway of ghosts.

I resolved then and there that I'd be coming up here again. Once per year, at least. This mountain had just become my one and only place of worship.

It's June 2026 now, and, while I have visited the various lower waypoints numerous times since March 2024, I still have not made it back up to the peak. This despite the mountain never having been far from my mind (or, in LA, from my sight - I typically have a balcony view of it).

So what happened?

Actually, you likely already heard. You just might not realize that the headlines and the antenna-studded peak in the San Gabriel Mountains are in a relationship.

In January 2025, Southern California experienced an outbreak of destructive wildfires - fourteen fires in total, of which the largest two were respectively the second and third most destructive wildfires in state history. (The Camp Fire of 2018 grimly retains the top spot.) The Eaton fire, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley, saw 19 lives lost and almost 9,500 structures destroyed, most of them in the foothills neighborhood of Altadena. The Palisades fire – primarily attacking the Palisades neighborhood, nestled between the ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains – saw 12 lives lost and nearly 7,000 structures destroyed. (These numbers should be received tentatively, as full accounting of deaths indirectly attributable to the fires continues to this day.)

I am not going to write about the experience of the fires. There are far better commentators, not least people who were in Los Angeles at the time, which I was not. I can only tell you about the Australian outback and the tears dripping onto my laptop keys there, as I followed the wildfire live feeds, and, inevitably, the Eaton fire in particular.

This broke out in the evening of January 7th, 2025, in Eaton Canyon, known to most for its nature center, its moderate-intensity hiking trail up to a waterfall, and as the start point of the Mount Wilson Toll Road. On this day, Santa Ana winds traveling at up to 100 mph propelled the flames from the canyon southeast into Altadena. Within six hours of ignition, the burn area had expanded to over 1,000 acres, and the Angeles National Forest was alight. By the afternoon of January 9th, the flames were tearing through the forest toward Mount Wilson. The Wilson Observatory was evacuated, and the broadcast industries braced for the loss of the antennas.

Through incredible efforts from firefighters, bolstered by fuel treatment previously undertaken in the area by the forest service, the fire was kept below the ridge line of the mountain, and both the Observatory and antennas were saved. Imagery released by the Angeles National Forest service on January 13th, showing blackened trees at the foot of the antennas, underscores this was the closest of shaves.

On January 16th 2025, containment of the Eaton Fire was at 55% with 14,000 acres burned. Full containment was not declared until January 31st, a full 24 days after the fire broke out, with the total acreage lost put at 14,021 acres. About 55% of that was located in the Angeles National Forest - an area of about 15.5 square miles (or 50 square kilometers). Much of it was what I'd walked through in the upper stages of my climb.

From January 7th onward, the Mount Wilson Trail was decidedly closed.

The A-train to Pomona North passes the San Gabriel Mountains. Sit on the left side of the train when traveling east, and you'll have a front-row seat to them. For a long time after the Eaton fire, I could barely look.

Altadena effectively no longer existed. The affront of this to my recent memories of its cafés and small-town-hidden-in-a-big-city streets was too abrupt and aggressive for acceptance to be arriving any time soon. The view from the train did nothing to force acceptance - you cannot, and never could, make out Altadena clearly from there. But there was no escaping the sight of what was once the forest engulfing Mount Wilson. The very trees that had shaded me en route to the peak had been reduced to a stump-stubbled wasteland. Heartily green before; now the blotchy brown-yellow of a cadaver.

Quantifying the devastation inflicted by the Eaton Fire on the mountainside populations of canyon live oak and bigcone Douglas-fir is no easy task. Not least because it can take up to a year to evaluate whether a tree is too damaged to be saved. Moreover, there are many insidious ways in which flora within or near a burn scar can become collateral damage, even when the flames are long out. Ash, debris, and fire retardant chemicals infiltrate ecosystems. The elevated erosion rates of denuded soil impedes root growth and seeding. Regardless of the extent of vegetation destruction, if the heat of the fire remained close to the soil for an extended period of time (known as "residence"), the soil structure may be permanently altered. Finally, if the trees have burned, the undergrowth almost certainly has too, and with it the birds, the bees and the vast network of things that flit, nibble and scrabble - the myriad of micro-interactions that feed into the flourishing of the tree.

I'm not a geologist, but I riffled through white papers intended for them as I sought to understand the exact status of the Mount Wilson Trail. Was it gone forever? I had reason not to think so: specifically, the Chantry Flat, the trailhead in Arcadia where the Gabrielino trail begins before winding up to Mount Wilson. Much of the land around the Chantry Flat had been catastrophically damaged by the Bobcat Fire in 2020, compelling the forest service to close the trail indefinitely, just like the Mount Wilson Trail was now. After four years of restoration work, the Chantry Flat had reopened in 2024.

So it would be four years, then? Given the scale of the Eaton Fire, likely a little longer. The Bobcat Fire had not made headlines in most of the western world. Canberra had not sent firefighters to assist with the Bobcat Fire. Six years?

At my present rate of competing, I'd have run twelve more marathons by then. I'd have written four more novels, maybe five. I might have gotten married. Hell, I might have gotten divorced. I pictured myself taking to the reopened trail to avoid being served divorce papers. Yes, I would totally do that. In my imagination, the trail was exactly the same as it had been before, but I myself was this unknowable, six-years-older blur.

Whatever the exact number of years, it was a long time. I had to put it out of my mind. I did, but the view from the A-train never got easier. I had to focus my attention on the survivors instead: those crazy-utilitarian, crazy-magnificent antennas. Of course the broadcast gab-sticks prevail while the forestry gets it in the neck. L.A., baby. You love it, or you ain't here.

Early in 2026, a vicious-delicious rumor began circulating. The Mount Wilson Trail had partially reopened.

I wrote this off as an AI hallucination unwittingly admitted into human discourse. Then the forest service website confirmed. The trail was now reopened to the public, at least as far as Orchard Camp. It turns out there are people as haunted by the trail as I am - some salaried, some volunteers - who had worked alongside CAL FIRE, scientists and arborists to tend to the recovering forest. On their side in this was the weather. L.A. County was emerging from its wettest rainfall season in 15 years. This was double-edged for the residents of Kinneloa Mesa and Sierra Madre, the foothill communities directly below the slopes of the burn scar. There, all that rain slashing down on the exposed soil could, at the turn of a dime, become flash floods, mudslides and debris flows invading their homes. For those communities, evacuation warnings had become as commonplace as an upsell call from Spectrum.

This announcement from the forest service came in March 2026, when I was about to run my next marathon (the L.A. again), and then was traveling. So it wasn't immediately that I acted on the news. By the time I was free to hit the trail again, in May 2026, another update from the forest service enlarged the how-about-that to an all-out hallelujah. The entire trail had been reopened. All the way to the peak.

I'd be seeing them again, those busy ghosts, so much sooner than I thought.

I was three marathons stronger than in March 2024, which inevitably meant I was a lot more conscious of dehydration. (Somewhere around my third marathon I realized intelligent hydration might be the key to unlocking my full potential.) My heightened respect for H2O was well-timed: it was summer now, and my previous ascent had been in spring. In the San Gabriel Valley, that can spell a difference of 15-20 degrees Fahrenheit. Those first 1.5 miles of exposed trail up to First Water were going to be even more excruciating now.

This time, I wasn't fooling around. I took a gallon of water in a huge master bottle that I carried in my backpack, plus two quart bottles mounted on my belt that I'd refill from the master bottle as necessary. I took kettle chips and electrolyte tabs for the salt and power minerals that water alone couldn't replenish. I took bagels because they'll probably be prising them out of my cold dead hands at my own funeral.

I wore a preternaturally blue t-shirt so that I'd stand out against the vegetation in the bird's eye view from a rescue chopper. I shared a route plan and detailed biometric profile of myself with my emergency contact, all but enclosing coffee, donuts and forensic collection bags for the Sheriff's Department. (Fun fact: it is the LASD who handle cases of missing persons in the Angeles National Forest.) I did the cliffnotes thing again on encounters in the wild with bears, mountain lions, and rattlesnakes.

Before I set off, a hiking friend gave me a casual warning. When folks haven't used a trail in a while, he said, it gets honest. That was his word. Honest. After listening some more, I decided he meant: a little unruly. Without the disruption or fright of hikers intermittently stumping by, flora and fauna spread out and get cosy. The forest service works to keep the trail free of threats to human life, of course, but will otherwise not hem in nature. So it was likely there'd be quite a few micro-obstacles along the way, where nature had made itself at home (to be clear: made itself at home in its own home; I do appreciate the arrogance of my tone here). In addition to my ascent this time being hotter, I should also expect it to be harder work.

Boy, did he turn out to be right.

Things went more or less as expected until Orchard Camp. Those first one and a half miles were indeed tough but they passed quickly in the euphoria of getting to do this again. This part of the trail had been outside the burn area, so, yes, looked exactly as it had done two years before, just as I'd imagined. I encountered another hiker about once per minute - trail runners plus what I've come to think of as obvious First Waterers, here for that first waypoint then back again. They're in workout clothes, there's no backpack, their car keys are on a carabiner in their belt hooks. Only Arizonians climb a whole mountain like that.

Soon after passing First Water, I fell into conversation with a guy from San Diego, who was visiting L.A. with his sister. We both smilingly struggled with each other's accents (him: heavy Latino; me: Virginia Woolf locked in a basement for a year with nothing but American talk radio). When he heard I was going to the peak, his eyes went wide.

"Ah but," he said in an indecipherable mix of excitement and concern, "The 'byss."

After a moment, I decided he meant 'abyss', and was referring to the canyon. Kind of a heavy way of putting it at 9am on a beautiful morning. But then he had strikingly artistic sleeve tattoos and complicated eyes - I figured poet. His further remarks seemed to support my interpretation. He'd recently tried to get to the top himself, he said, but the "'byss" had forced a deviation, and he'd never made it. I made vague sympathetic noises, while internally shuddering at the idea of turning around without reaching the top. The endpoint was the journey for me. Everything up to then was administration.

Continuing on alone toward Orchard Camp, I realized that at some point I'd crossed into the burn zone. You might think the borderline would be hideously obvious. But that is to picture a burn zone in a manmade domain.

Nature abhors a vacuum - we've all heard that. But it's not until I was standing in these post-fire depths of the Angeles National Forest that I truly appreciated the meaning. What I saw made me think of an abandoned cemetery, rediscovered after half a century, by which time an orchard has sprung up in it. The only clue to the sorrowful history of the place is the occasional mausoleum scowling through the overgrowth, and by then it's benign with bird shit.

It was the same here. Every now and then there was a tar-black tree, typically standing alone in a bend of the trail, and I had to look again before registering its significance. Given full attention and properly understood, the tree was decidedly ugly and harrowing. And yet the robust life that had roared up all around it - in just two years, not fifty - had taken this foreground monstrosity and somehow made it a footnote. The long grass was almost neon-green. Flowers were everywhere, and their colors the most passionate of whites, reds and yellows. You've heard of the phoenix rising from the flame. Well, here it was a peacock.

So I guess I'm wrong about one thing: we humans are not nature, not in one important way. The conduit of sorrow is human memory. Nature, at least out here, has one tense only, and it's a forward-tilting mix of present and future. Aristotle's right, but I think he could have gone further. Given a vacuum, nature will turn it into a carnival.

When I reached Orchard Camp, I'd encountered only one other hiker since the guy with his warning about the abyss. In March 2024, solitude had not settled in for another mile or so. There were several reasons I could think of for it arriving earlier this time. The hot season, for one. And the news of the trail's reopening might be spreading only slowly (and meeting with the same disbelief I'd felt at first). So I didn't worry too much about it. I pushed on past the camp and into the intense switchbacks that would take me up to Manzanita Ridge.

The vibrant bloom I have already noted quickly became voracious here. The way forward was overhung with the giddy heads of flowers and the less lovely appendages of brambles. An almighty bellicose drone rose up on both sides of me - hundreds of bees and yellow jackets, going for their Christmas bonus at all that nectar. Very soon, I rounded a curve in the trail and encountered the first of two sights for which my prior ascent had not prepared me.

Ranks and ranks of fire-blackened manzanita bushes. On this hillside, and the next one over, and the next one after that.

Dead-wood manzanita, meaning manzanita reduced to leafless silver limbs by old age or drought, are common on these relentlessly sun-exposed slopes. So it's probable the flames arrived to the already lifeless. But knowing this did little to reduce what was unsettling about the scene. The size of a small tree, the manzanita has a distinctive twisting shape to the spread of its limbs. As I took in all the lost bushes, what struck me was the collective forever writhe of them, emphasized in that hideous black. If you did not know the manzanita bush, you might imagine these were shapes they'd adopted in their attempts to escape the flames.

Yes, unsettling, but with a savage beauty to it too, like a madman's calligraphy. What enabled that beautiful side, I think, was that once again nature had brought its insouciance. The dead soldiers of the bushes, dead on their feet in formation, were set deep in shrub and buoyant wild grass and the tiny white megaphones of bindweed flowers, all of it come into existence since the fire.

I stood for a very long time with this sight, feeling very much how I did when I saw the summit mist roll in. I don't know why I exactly was picked to witness this, but I'm sure glad I was.

About a half-mile later, another curve in the trail brought another sight I struggled to process. This sight I cannot call uplifting. In fact, it spelled the end of my hike on this day, and, for now, the end to this story.

As I have said, I'd prepared - kind of - for encounters with bears, mountain lions, and rattlers. Make myself big, make myself small, make some noise, make no noise at all - I'd more or less assigned the correct reaction to the correct species in the sorting rack of my frontal lobe.

What I hadn't considered - not for the faintest flicker of a moment - is encounters with penny-sized creatures of the air.

My kind-hearted San Diegan was not as high on Nietzsche as I'd thought. There was no "abyss". He was saying "bees".

Bees like the ones in front of me right now. I grew up in a brownstone English village, where it's practically a rite of passage to have masonry bees nesting in your laundry basket. Yep, I've seen bees in all kinds of wack places. But this was something else. This was bees - hundreds of them? Thousands? How do you count bees? - swarming out of the ground itself, just a few meters ahead.

By the ground itself I mean the trail. The earth underfoot that was taking me to the mountain top. With no other way forward here, because it was rock face to the left and bone-crunching ravine to the right. That ground itself. Presently full of tiny holes disgorging or re-swallowing bees.

Fuck.

You already know that, in my determination to revisit the peak, I absolutely stood there and thought about just charging over the bees.

The nest consumed the full width of the trail and was two or three meters long. I'm a fast runner. I'm not, to my knowledge, allergic to bee stings. I was dumb enough to be standing here contemplating it, which is in the same zip code as dumb enough to actually do it.

Ultimately, though, my better angels cleared their throats. "Bee's nest hop-scotch". I could not deny that would make the perfect accompanying illustration for the textbook definition of nutjob.

And so, very, very reluctantly, and cursing the buzzy slummy busybodies, I turned around and retreated back down the mountain.

This is, of course, not the end. What I realized in the flamboyantly alive post-fire forest is that endings are something we choose as humans. Nature's arguably healthier position is that there are endless transitions, with the design throughout being to live even harder.

So I will try again for the peak in November, the other side of my next marathon. I'll update this story then.

I reported the bees to the forest service, recognizing that to some hikers they might well present a threat to life. I have no idea if the rangers will dispatch their version of realtors and gently make the case for a 10-bedroom condo in a nearby tree instead. Perhaps, on identifying the species, they'll decide it's not necessary. As I've since learned from hiking friends, had I sprinted over the nest, or even just ambled, it's possible that no harm would have come to me. Most species of ground bees, it turns out, rarely sting.

While this revelation is certainly annoying - you mean I could have peaked, after all? - I've thought about it and believe I would have made the same decision, even had I known. Stingers or no stingers, I would have been treading on the roaring life of the mountain. Rude. Boorish. Entitled. The exact opposite of tiny, irrelevant, and harmless - or, how the things I love most about Mount Wilson make me feel.

So the bees said no, and I agreed not to be a jerk. Hopefully next time they'll permit me another shot at the summit. Until then, the mountain is for them, not me.