Prairie S.
Yelp
I got to the park via Mulholland Highway which traverses the Santa Monica Mountains on a Tuesday (also election day). The park was not crowded but it was November and yet.so.damn.hot.and.sunny. It's $12 to park all day but ONLY visa/mastercard are accepted, NO CASH. (COVID safety for the park employees!) On the way out I found out how quickly connected this park is to the 101 highway, a much easier road to get here. (You pass by the site of Kobe Bryant's helicopter crash in a January mist, off Las Virgines road.)
The best thing about this park is a semblance of ecological coherence and integrity. What you see is the same landscape that the indigenous people tended and lived off, with knowledge of the seasons, plants, and animals based on tens of thousands of years of association. That was before the down-and-out detritus of Europe and eastern U.S. came crawling west in the 1850s on the hearsay of striking "gold" in California. They were a murderous lot, who brutalized and massacred entire villages of native peoples to squat on what was not theirs. Just as it is a miracle that some indigenous people survived the existential devastation that white invaders brought, so also it seems miraculous to see old stands of mighty live oaks today, rising out of the hot, arid savannah grasslands.
A scant mile from the park you will see the consequences of anglo-American ecological destruction, in the ominously cookie-cutter streets of suburban Agoura Hills. That represents the willful, systematic destruction of the indigenous oak savanna ecology and its replacement by a dystopian imported version of nature: a tree complex that belongs in Vermont or Great Britain rather than in the brown surrounding hills. This replacement "landscape" that suits the anglo-aesthetic consumes too much water which drawns on yet more violence: stolen and transported water from indigenous territory hundreds of miles away in the Sierra Nevada foothills. But ecological incoherence is not viewed as a problem in a culture based on genocide, brutal occupation, and thin triumphalist myths. Just look at all of LA outside this state park.
The tremendous size and history of the live oaks here will pierce through the conscience of all-but-the-insensitive visitors whose standard american cultural upbringing offers only deafening silence and erasure of the indigenous people's socio-economic history. The little acorns underfoot were the staple food of the indigenous peoples. The ground and leached acorn flour as we use wheat flour today.
The park includes two ephemeral creeks, Malibu and Las Virgenes, along the sides of which are other magnificent indigenous species including the California sycamore with mottled tree trunks. I didn't get to the M.A.S.H. site (the celebration of fictional American imperialism in the 20th century!) nor the Reagan Ranch (to celebrate a racist man who played brinkmanship with nuclear annihilation of the planet, not to mention destroy all previously established social safety nets in this country?).
Under the incredibly deep shade of the oaks, one can hear, smell, and sense the universe of life teeming in the branches and nooks: blue jays, towhees, tits, and scrub jays screeching and kerfuffling. The darting movements of skinks and squirrels scraping trunks.
From the interior parking lot, the rock pool is a destination hike, in which, there is water and some beautiful rock formations. Of course, it being LA there was a photo shoot going on with a shouty young model posing for men with cameras, declaring her feelings and thoughts in an exaggerated volume sans mask of course.
This park is worth visiting for a stroll and a picnic, as many families seemed to do, but best, an opportunity to understand the indigenous sense of place and ecology.
If your eyes are open during your park visit, you will understand the true causes of California's epic ecological failures--fires, droughts, ground water subsidence etc. and be privy to insights lost to LA's boastful environmentalists. You will see what a century of deliberate American "improvement" has done to devastate nature's rationale, it's historic, indigenous ecology. Use this site to connect yourself more deeply to the true history and spirit of this land. You will see how to fix our problems (hint: it does not involve "green" technology, nor "green" products).
