Into the mountains and through the woods

Our trip to the tiny mountain town of Wrightwood should have taken only 90 minutes. We thought that by leaving home at 2:30 last Friday afternoon we would beat the traffic. Wrong on both counts. We drove four miserable hours in stop-and-go traffic through triple-digit heat, traveling a mere 80 miles to our destination.

Our plan was to meet Vic’s Irvine Valley College summer birding class at 6 a.m. Saturday at the junction of the I-15 and Route 138 for a field trip up to the Wrightwood area. Most of the class got up at 3 a.m. to make the drive that morning. Since I’m not much of a morning person, we stayed at the Best Western Cajon Pass the night before. We still had to get up at 5 a.m., but that seemed far superior to me than getting up at 3 a.m. And besides, the Friday arrival gave us time to scout out a nature trail that we hadn’t hiked before.

We started out bright and early Saturday at Mormon Rocks, which have a history all their own. In 1849, the old Mormon Road stretched from Salt Lake City across the Mojave Desert, and down Cajon Pass. These spectacular sandstone formations are where Mormon pioneers stopped to reassemble their wagons after they had lowered them piece-by-piece down steep Cajon Pass.

The Mormon colony purchased the Mormon Rocks area from the Lugo family, who gained title to the entire San Bernardino Valley in 1842. Nathan and Truman Swarthout homesteaded in Lone Pine Canyon. Swarthout Valley still bears their name, even though they abandoned their holdings and returned to Salt Lake City in 1857.

Swarthout Valley was homesteaded by many other settlers, among them Sumner and Buford Wright, which is where Wrightwood gets its name. The Wrights raised pedigreed cattle and trotting horses and grew apples. These days, Lone Pine Canyon and Wrightwood are better known for hiking, birding and relaxing than for cattle ranching.

At Mormon Rocks, white-throated swifts darted and dove above us. They were oblivious to our presence as they courted and mated in mid-air. It was the best look I had ever had of these acrobatic birds.

At the San Bernardino National Forest Fire Station, we hiked the nature trail. Having scouted it the day before, Vic opted to lead the class to the top of the ridge and back the way they came, rather than hike the entire loop trail.

The hills were covered with chamise, a chaparral shrub. The chamise bushes were capped with a delicate froth of white blooms. Areas between the blooming chamise bushes were filled with wildflowers. I was so busy taking pictures of the showy penstemon, deerweed, golden yarrow, mariposa lilies and other wildflowers that I only made it halfway up the hill before the bird class came traipsing back down. They had spotted rufous-crowned sparrows, lark sparrows, and California thrashers, along with a host of other birds of the chaparral ? 26 species in all.

We stopped at the picnic tables at Big Pine Station at the far end of Wrightwood to tally up the birds we had seen so far. The picnic area was abuzz with bird activity. Violet-green swallows nested in cavities in black oaks, mountain chickadees sang overhead, and acorn woodpeckers hunted for insects to feed their young. The class was able to add western wood-pewee, chipping sparrow, oak titmouse and white-breasted nuthatch to the day’s tally.

We continued up Route 2 to the Grassy Hollow Visitor Center in Angeles National Forest. Several of us relaxed on the wide shaded porch of the visitor center and watched Steller’s jays, Western bluebirds, and dark-eyed juncos at the bird feeders. Vic took the more hardy souls on a walk through the pine forest to find white-headed woodpecker, pygmy nuthatch and purple finch. We enjoyed a delightful picnic lunch in the shade before heading off to a barely paved one-lane road that led to Blue Ridge Campground.

I was so distracted by the brilliant yellow of Western wallflowers and the reds and blues of other mountain wildflowers that I hardly paid any attention to the birds. I photographed mountain bush lupine, Indian paintbrush, white ceanothus, and other mountain wildflowers that I seldom get to see.

However, the sight of nesting Williamson’s sapsuckers was too good to pass up, so I put down my camera in favor of binoculars. Green-tailed towhees put on quite a show with their bright rufous caps and green backs. Band-tailed pigeons, a fox sparrow and a yellow-rumped warbler in breeding plumage completed the list of 50 species of birds for the day.

But there was more to see in the mountains than birds and wildflowers. The class also observed 10 species of mammals, including Merriam’s chipmunk, black-tailed jackrabbit, western gray squirrel and a coyote. Of the 10 species of trees that we saw, my favorite was the Jeffrey pine. There are always a few people in each class who have not yet stuck their noses into the deeply cracked bark of these venerable trees to sniff their powerful aroma of vanilla laced with pineapple. It’s one of those mountain treats that makes fighting the traffic through Riverside and San Bernardino worthwhile.

After a cold milkshake for me and a root beer float for Vic in Wrightwood, we headed home. The return trip took only 85 minutes.