Ace, the Glendale Trifecta, and What the Quiet Had to Say
There is a particular kind of quiet you only find on a trail when no one else is around. Not silence exactly. The chaparral has too much going on for that. But a quiet that settles over you like something lifted. The scrub oak moves. A hawk works a thermal overhead. Your trail shoes find a rhythm on the fire road, something between a hike and a run, the pace you fall into when the legs are warm, and the grade is manageable and there's nowhere else you need to be. And next to you, a twenty-pound Schnauzer/Scottish Terrier mix matches it stride for stride, nose down, ears up, doing the job.
That was most of 2014 and 2015 for me. The kids were grown or nearly so. Kailey was in Pennsylvania, finishing college and then starting medical school. Ted was away at school, though I could still catch his baseball games when the schedule allowed. Faith was finishing high school, more independent by the week, her own life assembling itself in ways that were good to see and strange to adjust to. The house that had been full for twenty years was going quiet. I was in a relationship that wasn't what I wanted. Somewhere in that mix of pride, uncertainty, and an open calendar, I started getting up early on Saturdays and taking the dog to the mountains.
Ace and I, out on the trails above Glendale and Pasadena every weekend, covering ground, not saying much to each other because we didn't need to. He wasn't asking any hard questions. Neither was I, exactly. But somewhere on those fire roads, between mile two and mile six, with the city falling away below and nothing required of me except to keep moving, the questions had a way of surfacing on their own.
We were in shape for it. On weekdays, rain or shine, we'd run a morning 5K through our La Crescenta neighborhood, before I left for work. Ace set the tempo, pulling hard through the first half mile until he settled in. By the time the weekends came, we weren't starting cold.
It started simply: hike the peaks above home. Verdugo Peak. Cerro Negro. Mount Lukens. They sat above the sprawl, indifferent and patient. I lived close enough. One weekend at a time.
Ace volunteered without being asked.
Cerro Negro: The Training Ground
We started with Cerro Negro because it was close, and close meant we could keep coming back. Cherry Canyon Park is five minutes from the house, free, dog-friendly, and on a weekend morning active with runners and trail regulars who know the difference between a hike and a workout. The San Rafael Hills aren't dramatic. They're the small, scrubby range east of the Verdugos that most people in La Cañada Flintridge drive past every morning without a thought. We weren't there for drama. We were there to build.
Every weekend for about a month, Ace and I pushed through the park's 130 acres until we knew it like the back of our hands. Cherry Canyon Motorway. Ridge Motorway. The Cerro Negro Trail proper, a stretch of single track through scrub oak with views east over the San Gabriel Valley. The Five Points junction, where the fire roads fan out, and you pick your line. We tried every combination, figured out which climbs built the most and which descents let us open up. Covering 130 acres on repeat turns a park into a training circuit.
What I remember most about that stretch isn't any single morning. It's the repetition. The way a trail changes when you run it enough times to stop thinking about the footing and start thinking about everything else. In late fall, the light comes sideways across the ridge by mid-morning. The San Gabriels, sharp and snowcapped on the coldest days, appear and disappear behind the shoulder of the hill as you move. Partway down from the ridgeline, where a small creek had coaxed a strip of coast live oaks into existence, the trail went shaded and cool. Coming out of the exposed chaparral at pace, that stretch always hit like a reward. The temperature dropped five degrees, the light went green, and Ace picked up his knees a little as if he felt it too.
The summit tower at 1,887 feet now holds communications antennas, but a painted bench sits nearby, pointed southwest toward Glendale and downtown Los Angeles. We'd stop briefly, water up, take in the view. Ace worked the fence line. The hawk that seemed to live on the same thermal every morning ignored us both. Then back down, moving.
The post-hike ritual was as reliable as the trail itself. A few minutes south on Foothill Boulevard to Juice It Up!, something cold and green for me, shade and a spot on the patio for Ace. He had a talent for making strangers feel personally responsible for acknowledging his efforts. He was usually successful.
Cherry Canyon was our warm-up. By the time we moved on to bigger things, we were ready.
Verdugo Peak: The Figure Eight
I wanted to approach Verdugo Peak from the north, not the way the trail guides suggest. The Brand Park approach from the Glendale side is the most-written-about route, but it puts the city in front of you from the start. I wanted to earn the view. So we started at the end of Whiting Woods Road in La Crescenta, through the gate of the Verdugo Mountains Open Space Preserve, and hit the fire road moving.
The Whiting Woods climb is steep from the first step and stays that way. Steeper than the approaches from the south, which partly explains why the mountain bike traffic thins out fast. Fall was cooling into winter, and the air still carried the faint remnant of the previous season's fires. On those early weekend mornings, we often had the trail to ourselves. Ace worked ahead at his own pace on the north-facing slope, where the cold hangs on longer, burning off the chill section by section.
The Verdugo Motorway opens things up when you reach it. The range is only eight miles long and two miles wide, and from the main fire road you can see both sides at once. To the north, La Tuna Canyon drops away, and the San Gabriel Mountains rise immediately behind it. To the south, nothing yet. Just ridgeline, chaparral, sky. The summit keeps itself hidden until you're almost on it.
At 3,126 feet, Verdugo Peak announces itself with radio towers and a communications building. These mountains are honest about what they are: not wilderness, but the rough working edge of a city that ran out of room. The infrastructure can't take away the view. On a clear winter morning you see downtown Los Angeles to the south, Pasadena to the east, the full San Fernando Valley to the west, and on the best days, Catalina Island, faint and gray. We stopped here long enough to mean it. Ace sat beside me, which he almost never does voluntarily on the trail, as if the summit required a different kind of attention than the climb.
The descent ran us down the southern slope toward the La Tuna Canyon side, skirting the range in a loose figure eight before we climbed back through the preserve and dropped to Whiting Woods. Long miles, good miles, the kind that accumulate in the legs and leave you honestly worked.
The reward was Jeremy's. The little diner on Honolulu Avenue has been a La Crescenta fixture long enough that the servers know the regulars by their usual orders. The shaded outdoor patio doesn't just tolerate dogs. It welcomes them, with an ice water bowl already out when you arrive. Ace would drain it fast, with the urgency of a dog who has covered serious miles. I'd order over-easy eggs with whatever came alongside them, drink too much coffee, and watch him go out under the table before I finished my meal. A complete morning.
Mount Lukens: The Hard Lesson
We didn't go to Mount Lukens without preparation. The full loop from Deukmejian Wilderness Park is over ten miles with nearly 3,000 feet of gain, longer and harder than anything else on the list. For several weekends beforehand, we ran the lower trails out of Deukmejian to build legs and get comfortable with the terrain. Ace knew those trails well enough by the end that he'd accelerate through sections he'd sorted out, taking turns wide, reading the grade ahead. Those Saturday mornings had their own rhythm: pre-dawn drive to Markridge Road, hit the trailhead hard, cover the miles, then drive to Everest on Foothill Boulevard for something massive. A breakfast burrito, usually. Everest has never once underdelivered on portion size.
The full summit day started at the Cooks Canyon Trail. The opening miles are unlike anything else on this loop. The trail drops into a shaded creek bottom where a year-round stream runs through a narrow grove of sycamore and willow, the kind of low canopy that doesn't belong to the chaparral at all. Four narrow footbridges cross deep ravines in quick succession. After weeks of exposed ridge running, that cool, green corridor felt almost startling. Ace moved through it with extra attention, nose in constant contact with the ground, processing a completely different set of information than the dry hillsides offered.
The Cooks Canyon Trail connects to the Rim of the Valley Trail, which climbs out of the canyon and links to Haines Canyon Motorway. This is where the mountain starts asking serious questions. The motorway is a long, grinding fire road that wraps around the back side of Lukens, gaining elevation steadily with no shade and nothing to look at except the next section of road above you. The San Gabriel Mountains fill the view to the north and east as you climb, the chaparral giving way to scrubbier, sparser growth. It is not a scenic stretch. It is a work stretch.
The Mt. Lukens Truck Trail branches off near the top and delivers you to the summit. At 5,074 feet, the highest point within the city limits of Los Angeles is marked the way civic infrastructure always marks things: radio towers, locked equipment buildings, chain-link fence. The USGS benchmark is set in concrete in front of the towers. You have to step off the road briefly to stand on the actual high point. We did. Then we ate our snacks, drank our water, and looked. To the west, Verdugo Peak sat on its ridge, visible and now familiar. Beyond it, Griffith Park, downtown Los Angeles, the Pacific. To the east, the ragged skyline of the San Gabriels. The marine layer that had softened the morning start was burning off faster than I'd expected. We felt good. We started down.
The descent follows the Crescenta View Trail, and the name earns itself fast. The switchbacks face south and west, the entire Los Angeles Basin opening below as you lose elevation. It is the best view on the loop. It is also fully exposed, and by mid-morning in late spring, the sun was working hard. Ace's black coat absorbed it all. I noticed him throttle back. Not dramatically. Ace doesn't make a production of discomfort. But there's an unmistakable way his stride shortens and his head drops, and you understand his body is managing something his will hasn't acknowledged yet. I pulled back to his pace and started watching his gait and breathing instead of the trail.
About two-thirds of the way down, he found the redoubt before I did. A flat stone outcropping we'd named on earlier training runs, a small ring of rocks throwing just enough shade for a twenty-pound dog to press into. On a normal day it was a waypoint. That June morning it was the most critical piece of real estate on the mountain. I poured out the last of our water, half to drink and half over his coat, and we stayed until his breathing steadied and his ears came back up.
The Crescenta View Trail connects back to the Dunsmore Canyon Trail for the final stretch to the parking lot. We covered it at a walk. We made it down.
I packed two extra water bottles and set the alarm an hour earlier every time after that.
Standing at the trailhead cooling down, I ran the math. Cerro Negro. Verdugo Peak. Mount Lukens. Three peaks above Glendale, all done. That's when the name came to me: the Glendale Trifecta. It made the whole thing sound more official than it was. We'd done it, and I liked knowing that.
Pasadena: Learning New Ground
The trifecta was done, but the Brown Mountain and Arroyo Seco loop was still out there. Twenty-six miles. A different order of distance than anything we'd attempted. The Cerro Negro and Verdugo months had built us for the Glendale peaks. For this, we needed Pasadena.
Over the next several weeks, Ace and I explored the trail system threading through Hahamonga Watershed Park, the Upper Arroyo, and the Lower Arroyo, all connected through the hinge of Devil's Gate Dam. The full circuit circumnavigates the Rose Bowl in a loose loop, the stadium visible from multiple angles as you move through it, a strange and grounding landmark for an urban trail run. The terrain shifts constantly. Sandy wash. Oak woodland. Exposed ridge. Paved path alongside a golf course where you could hear golfers debating their lie from across the fairway. It keeps you paying attention.
Hahamonga is 1,300 acres, named by the Tongva people who lived here long before anyone else. The word means "Flowing Waters, Fruitful Valley," and it earns that. The park sits where the Arroyo Seco first leaves the San Gabriel Mountains and opens into the basin, and you feel that transition on foot. The lower trails run through open sandy wash with wide views of the front range, JPL's buildings visible to the west. The upper trails narrow and go shaded in the oak woodland, the temperature dropping noticeably. A disc golf course runs through one section, and you get used to the distant sound of a disc hitting chains while hawks circle overhead. It is a genuinely odd park, and we liked it.
Devil's Gate Dam is the connector. Built in 1920 as the first flood control dam in Los Angeles County, it sits where the Arroyo Seco pushes through a narrow gorge. Its name comes from a rock formation that once resembled a devil's profile in the canyon wall, now covered during restoration and gone, but the name remains. A tunnel under the 210 Freeway links the watershed to the Upper Arroyo, and passing through it always felt like a gear change: from the open, arid wash of Hahamonga into the greener, more wooded character of the Arroyo proper.
The Upper Arroyo trails run alongside the stream, water audible most of the year, Brookside Golf Club pressing against one edge while the canyon drops away on the other. The Rose Bowl appears and disappears as you move. In the Lower Arroyo, the Colorado Street Bridge appears above you, its Beaux-Arts arches rising 150 feet over the canyon. The traffic on it so far up reads more like architecture than road. Ace had strong opinions about the stream crossings in this section, which varied by season and by how much he'd been looking forward to getting his feet wet.
Together, the three parks gave us mileage and variety. By the time we'd run those trails for several weekends, we had the legs for a long day and a feel for how the Arroyo Seco canyon behaved. Knowing the terrain from the bottom gave us a sense of what we were climbing toward.
The post-hike stop on those Pasadena mornings was Lucky Boy on Arroyo Parkway, a roadside institution producing breakfast burritos since 1961 with no signs of reconsidering. The burrito is massive in the way only a place utterly indifferent to trends can manage: home fries, eggs, bacon, cheddar, the whole thing wrapped tight enough to hold together but large enough to challenge the paper bag's structural limits. Ace would get his water. I would get the burrito. Neither of us had complaints.
The Arroyo Seco: Twenty-Six Miles and a Detour
A few weeks after the Pasadena training runs, we drove back over for the real thing. The route ran counterclockwise from the Gabrielino Trail trailhead near JPL, up through El Prieto Canyon, across the Brown Mountain Truck Trail and the Fern Truck Trail, then the Ken Burton Trail toward Switzer Falls, before dropping back down the Arroyo Seco and completing the loop on the Gabrielino. Twenty-six miles. Over twelve hours.
The first several miles up El Prieto were familiar, the same shaded oak woodland and creek crossings we'd trained in, but longer and gaining more purposefully. Ace moved well, sorting the crossings cleanly, nose down in the canyon where the scent register is richer than anything on the exposed ridgelines. The Brown Mountain saddle opened the San Gabriel Valley below us, the Rose Bowl sitting on the valley floor, familiar now, seen from a completely different angle. The trail toward Switzer Falls threaded through increasingly narrow canyon terrain, the creek appearing and disappearing as the walls closed in.
Somewhere on the Ken Burton Trail, we took a wrong turn.
The trail thinned, and the canyon narrowed until we followed the Arroyo Seco into Bear Canyon, a slot canyon where the walls press close, and the creek fills the floor. A fallen tree spanned a dammed pool. It looked passable. It was not. We both went in, Ace first, then me, in a sequence that was avoidable and undignified. The water was cold enough to be instructive. Ace surfaced immediately, swam to the bank with the matter-of-fact competence of a dog who has been betrayed by humans before and expected no better, and waited on the rocks while I worked out my own exit. Patient. No moral support offered. He sat there, soaked and watchful, ready to move as soon as I got myself sorted.
We retraced our steps, found the right trail, and kept moving. Soaking wet, upward of sixteen miles in, still four or five hours from the car. Switzer Falls was worth it. The water drops into a pool that looks impossibly clear for something thirty miles from downtown Los Angeles, and we stood there a while, Ace finally still beside me, both of us dripping, the canyon quiet around us.
We got back to the car as the last light left the sky. No post-hike stop. Twelve hours on trail, an unplanned swim, twenty-six miles. We drove home. Ace ate his dinner, arranged himself on the couch with the settled finality of a dog who has given everything and has no further obligations, and didn't move until morning.
What the Quiet Had to Say
I sat in the quiet of the house and thought about the year.
Kailey was in Pennsylvania building a life I could admire from a distance. Ted was away at school, still letting me catch a baseball game now and then. Faith was nearly out the door, the last of the three, her own story gathering momentum. I'd spent twenty years as an involved parent, present, deliberate, all-in. Now the thing I'd given myself to most completely was winding down on its own schedule, which is the only schedule it ever follows. A relationship in my life wasn't what I needed it to be, and I was slow to admit it. I wasn't ready to answer questions about what the next chapter looked like.
The trails didn't answer any of that. But they gave me a place to carry it. That's what I was looking for, without knowing it: not solutions, just space. The fire roads don't ask anything of you. They go uphill, and you either follow or you don't. The thinking happens somewhere in the middle miles, when the effort is high enough to quiet the noise and low enough to let the mind move. By mile four or mile seven or mile twelve, things that had seemed complicated in the house at six in the morning were sometimes clearer. Not resolved. Held more honestly.
Ace didn't care about any of it. He wanted to be where I was. He woke up every weekday morning ready for the 5K, every Saturday ready for whatever came next. He fell into the creek in Bear Canyon, swam out, shook off, and waited for me to catch up. No complaint. No recrimination. Watchful, patient, ready. That's the best thing about dogs. It's also the thing I was trying to teach myself.
He was better at it than I was.
We kept hiking through 2015, and into 2016, and beyond. The questions got answered, some better than others. The kids kept building their lives. I kept lacing up the trail shoes on Saturday mornings, though the routes changed as I did.
Those two years on the trails above Glendale and Pasadena: the trifecta, the Arroyo, the long Saturdays spent covering ground. I carry them. Not because we climbed anything remarkable, though the views were good. Because of what it felt like to have a few hours every week that were completely uncomplicated. The two of us. Moving through the quiet. Working things out one mile at a time.
