On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
ChasM
Hiya! I’ve been a clicker of these pages since, as Tim F recently put it, the proprietor was a disgruntled warblogger emerging from the dark shadows of the right. I don’t comment or make myself known much, but we rescued our little one-eyed Sanders in NYC thru this Shabeen (Calendar: July), and I read and love y’all, so here we go.
In 1980 I signed up for high-school photography class, borrowed $200 from an aunt (my first loan! a lesson in capitalism!), and purchased my first big-boy camera: a Canon AE-1 kit with a 50mm lens. It was between that and a Pentax that had a nifty leaf shutter, but felt too small for my hands. This turned out to be ironic in the bad way as the ergonomics of that fucking thing haunted me for 20 years until I got a Nikon. You see, it was an aperture priority camera and they put the aperture ring on the top right in exactly the place I rest my forefinger when I’m carrying the camera (I don’t like neckstraps, and in the days before hand straps, I would wrap a thin leather strap tightly around my hand so that I could use a loose grip as I carry at my side). There is no more heart-sinking feeling as a photographer than pushing the shutter expecting f4.5 and the corresponding quick tick-tick of 125th of a second and hearing instead “Click” … … … “Click” meaning you just lost the shot because you accidentally set the f-stop to 22 while advancing the last frame because the designers felt it important to locate that dial and the optimum finger-leverage spot in exactly the same place. One can page thru my pre-2000 contact sheets and see the dark and overexposed images and go, “yep, I remember that shot I didn’t get. Fuck that camera.”
Anywho. These are photos from the first roll that I have the negatives and thus scans of, my fifth roll overall. The first four rolls were used in class assignments, and all I have from them are some bad, faded prints that I turned in for grades.
Rustic Canyon is a magical garden for children. There are countless hidden routes and secret places that only the those who grow up there know. The creek which runs thru the center was the thoroughfare of fantasies for the kids of the canyon. These shots were taken in the uppermost parts of Rustic, north of the Sunset Tunnel, past the last houses of the horse-and-stable crowd, above the twisty rock section and the formidable waterfall that was no obstacle to the children of the canyon because they had been shown the way by the older ones. Now, these places are overrun with joggers and hikers from the nearby homes and beyond, but back then, only the scouts visiting Camp Josepho and us, the explorer kids from the lower canyon, treaded thru these forgotten places.
Forgotten, but not unknown. According to “Rustic Canyon and the Story of the Uplifters” by Betty Young, prior to the aforementioned BSA Camp there were at least two attempts in the early 20th century to build compounds in these upper reaches of the canyon. The last time I was up there, about 10 years ago, I couldn’t find much of anything left of the artist colony, but back in the day there were rotting stables and several artist studio buildings with clearstory windows facing south. I don’t have any pictures of them, as even by this time I think they’d been torn down by the rangers. And if you’re interested, I’ll sell you my copy of the book for an even two grand.
Just a stump near one of the stables. I like the texture of the paint and the barbed wire.
I don’t have the book with me atm so I can’t check dates, but I think the artist colony exited for just a couple of years after the war? Not sure, but there was lots of stuff just here and there and I was just developing my eye, so I thought this was cool.
There were a couple of houses farther up the way, partially destroyed by fire, and partially just crumbling. This was the interesting compound to explore. There were discarded things still about, and the sense that the people who built it had more money and better contractors than the artists down the road. This tangle of conduit caught my eye.
One of the two groups even built this culvert to divert the creek away from their homes. Not sure which group, but given the quality of the engineering I’m going to guess it was the Nazis.
Yes, real Nazis. This is the powerhouse the Nazis built, a structure that still stands although now covered by graffiti. I once moderated a flickr group dedicated to this area and if flickr still existed I’d send you over. The Nazis were there in the early 30’s, and didn’t last very long either.
That’s it! My first photo post from my first phot shoot ever. I hope to come back with more soon.
Cheers
ChasM
p.a.
Thanx!
JPL
I enjoyed reading about your adventures, and the history behind the pictures. Nazi’s are still in America, but fortunately their leader will be removed tomorrow.
Laura Too
Cool pics and backstory, thanks!
MazeDancer
What great photos!
arrieve
I love black and white, and one of many things I don’t miss about film is having to decide beforehand whether to shoot in color or BW.
The tangle of conduit shot is an amazing abstract. Please share more.
susanna
I thoroughly enjoyed looking over each picture, with imagination and curiosity. Particularly like these as B&W. Found it interesting to see where my eyes landed and was I looking or finding.
Thank you – hope there are more to come.
pat
So how do you digitize the photos?
JanieM
Flickr is still there, though it has changed ownership who knows how many times. I log in semi-regularly (including just this moment, to make sure), and everything I ever uploaded is there, although I never had anything but a free account.
*****
Great stories and pictures.
SkyBluePink
Very atmospheric- very cool pics
?BillinGlendaleCA
@pat: Scan prints with any scanner, or scan the negatives(or slides) with a scanner that can that can do that. I have a relatively(around $200) that can scan negatives and slides) from Epson.
HinTN
I love the great staggering spider!
DaddyJ
Nice photos! The setting and the dreamy wide-gamut black-and-white remind me of the location shooting done by Conrad Hall for the original Outer Limits TV series. Is Rustic Canyon is in or near Los Angeles?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@DaddyJ: Yes, it’s close to Will Rogers State Park, I’ve been intending to go there.
Chas M
@pat:
I used a Epson flatbed scanner, I don’t remember the model except that it had the number 800 in it. It had registered negative holders so you can do about a dozen shots at a time.
Chas M
@DaddyJ: Yes, as BillinGlendale said, it’s near Will Rogers Park next to Pacific Palisades. To get to the upper part of the canyon, take Amalfi Dr up to Capri Dr and then walk up Casale to a dirt road. Follow the dirt road about 3/4 of a mile and you will come across an old stone gate, I think there are stairs there that lead down to Murphy Ranch, which is the Nazi compound.
JustRuss
Very cool. The AE-1 was my first camera, I think I still have it somewhere. Took high-school photo in ’79.
Chas M
@JanieM: And so it is! Here’s a link to the Rustic Canyon group with many color pictures as it looks today.
BigJimSlade
My wife and I have hiked around there many times – nice to see some shots from 40 years ago!
In fact, the section between Camp Josepho and Will Rogers, once you get past the turn offs to go up the ridge to the east, she calls the Heart of Darkness because it’s not very far to Will Rogers, but takes way longer than you think it should because you’re continually ducking under branches and trying not to slip on mossy rocks as you cross the creek several times.
Chas M
Last reminisce: There was a place – I can’t imagine it hasn’t been built over by now – that the kids of the canyon called Clay Mountain. In the Rustic book I linked to, it says it was called “Goo Mountain”, but I don’t know where Betty was getting her information. Not from our cohort anyway. I really wish I had gone there after I got into photography because it was the strangest place, but maybe some places are meant to live on only in the memories of childhood.
It was a hidden place, the only way to know were it is, was to be shown by the older kids. We often started at the bridge but since it was the pre-gated driveway 70’s, and it was our canyon, we also often shaved time, hassle and soaked feet by going down to the last house nearest and just trouping down their driveway and hopping into the creek. Even if the owners or a neighbor saw us, there would be not a word by a wave. Kids of the canyon on the explore.
Once in the creekbed, the walls are supported by about 5 feet of wire, not concrete. There’s a lot of overgrowth on both sides and you can’t really see any of the yards or houses, so you have to know exactly where you are in the canyon, the place where there are no homes on either sides. We climb up the fenced creek wall, over the prickly stuff that looks like poison ivy but isn’t, don’t worry. Under some scraggly bush and then there are big oak trees and you know you’re close. The red sand tells you you’re almost there. Red, crumbly sand canyon wall. And in the middle of that red sand is a grey, clay crevasse. Spit on it and turns soft in your hand. The clay crevasse is about 1 1/12 -2 feet wide, just big enough for a 10 year-old to squeeze into and wedge upward. And as you do, as that clay crumbles under your fingers it dislodges small, white, pieces of… what’s this? Seashells? Yes. Seashells.
And that’s the moment when a 10 year-olds mind is completely blown. This place was under the sea. Deep time is a thing. Wow.
BigJimSlade
@Chas M: I grew up in Sunset Mesa, and there was a clearing at the top of Surfview where we could bring our bikes and go off little jumps that a friend’s brothers made and used to use with their dirt bikes (motorcyles). And now we hike up Las Leones and I see where we once scurried down a steep drainage to get down into the canyon with our BB guns. It’s overgrown now, and that drainage is too steep.
Mart
@Chas M: Nice pics, thought for a minute I was looking at the state of Washington. Your story reminds me of my dad walking me from my grandparents southern IN house down a creek heading for the Ohio River. We collected dozens of fossilized sea critters. And me thinking there must be something to his story that this used to be an ocean; but how?
JanieM
@Chas M: Great story. It takes me back to the days when we used to scramble around hidden places that we thought the grownups knew nothing about.