Some Things One more WordPress weblog

For this Friday afternoon-into-evening stairway walk from Secret Stairs, Beth and I covered Walk #27. For this one, we got to pass a couple of Easter Island mo’ai (which I now know are called mo’ai), a muddy dirt road more in-place in a rural woodsy area of the country, and a house/exhibit reportedly with a 2600-year-old mummy inside. We also got to go up a couple of staircases that we went down on our February 12 Astro Loop hike.

Watch this Three Stooges short to see what I think of on every one of these stairway adventures.

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Beth and I planned to cover two stairway walks today from Secret Stairs: “Whitley Heights” (# 36) and “Hollywood Bowl and High Tower Loop” (#37), both of which start and end at the intersection of Highland and Franklin Avenues in Hollywood. Before driving to Hollywood though, we fortunately noticed the 2023 Academy Awards on schedule for this very evening at the Dolby Theatre … only one block away from our start/finish point. My dislike of the hunt for a parking space and Beth’s aversion to slow traffic convinced us to change our plans and to reschedule those stairs for another day.

We instead went on Walk #2, which, in the community of Eagle Rock, takes only a few minutes to drive to. Soon after (easily) parking the car, we saw two large tiltrotor aircraft flying from west to east. We guessed that they might be in use to aid rescuing snowbound people in the mountains around us that took huge snow loads last week. But we saw several other military aircraft – jets and helicopters – moving in varying directions, so we decided that they either had Sunday training to do or were part of festivities at the Oscars or some other big event. We enjoyed a perfect-weather partly cloudy day for our ups-and-downs today that made us a little sad that winter might be done for this year.

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With legs holding two days of stairs already this weekend, Beth and I drove to Santa Monica for Walk #40 from Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles, climbing the steepest stairways yet. Early in the walk, we got some directions from a couple of kind ladies out on their (non-staircase) walk. The best part: they are 89 and 90 years old and still making good time around neighborhoods.

At the westernmost reach of our outing, we got to pop into an Open House. We figure that even if someone gave us money to buy the $5.55 million house outright, we would still find it challenging to come up with $60,000 every year to pay its property taxes. That being said, we are ready to find a way should anyone choose to buy it for us.

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For the second of three planned walks this weekend, we chose Walk #29 from Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles, which winds through hilly areas of the Los Feliz district and culminates at the Griffith Observatory, which we reached just at sunset. Highlights include the Ennis House (a Frank Lloyd Wright design) and the Observatory. We ran across only a few people for most of the hike, but got to have one conversation with a follower of Southern California Weather Force, a meteorologist who predicts an “Ark Storm” hitting California sometime in the middle to second half of March.

A couple of turns and climbs inside Griffith Park brought us to the base of the Observatory and its crowd of visitors from all over the world.

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Walk #1 from Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles is the Secret Stair walk closest to home, scaling the San Rafael hillside area of western Pasadena. Starting this first evening walk of stairs for Beth and me, it appeared that a number of houses chose to drain swimming pools, as lots of water ran down from several residences and into the street. Through the hike though, we realized that it just takes lots of days for heavy rains of last week to seep down and out of the hills.

Somewhere past the halfway point of the walk, we discovered some wind/rain damage that will necessitate an edit of the book for later editions: “Follow Cheviotdale … up to a huge gnarled eucalyptus at the corner of Juniper.” The trunk of this eucalyptus tree lay on the ground along Juniper Drive, recent strong winds having uprooted it from the rain-softened soil.

We will follow this Friday walk with two more this weekend, one on Saturday evening and one on Sunday.

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Beth and I went on Walk #15 from Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles by ourselves today. We climbed stairs on lots of wet hillsides and enjoyed views of low snowlines in the hills and mountains to the north. We lucked out with this one partly-sunny day in between two February 2023 winter storms. We also got to cross paths with another pair of staircase walkers for the first time!

After the walk, we enjoyed lunch at Larchmont Bungalow Café, which Beth had driven past many times when she commuted to West Hollywood for work.

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Spyros joined Beth and me for Walk #10 from Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles, trekking up and down through neighborhoods just northwest of the point where Mission Rd turns into Huntington Dr. Most of our walk took us through Rose Hill and Hungry Valley, with views of Montecito Heights down below us, ironically.

Three squeezes through a locked gate (with permission from local resident Sam) gave us highlight panoramic views from Paradise Hill of downtown LA and Dodger Stadium to the south and west, with the San Gabriel Mountains rising up to the north. Local residents are working to keep Paradise Hill from becoming a gated community.

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Walk #23 from Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles climbs and descends hills in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, up against Interstate 5 and the LA River. In addition to the stairs and hill houses, Beth and I walked along a portion of the Corralitas Red Line Trail but got stymied by construction blocking the route. Our hope is that the closure is temporary and only for hillside repair or – even better – park construction.

We also got to see Judy Garland’s (Frances Gumm’s) 1933 “castle” home beside one of the stairways. Late breakfast at Ivanhoe Restaurant fueled us for the last couple of stairways.

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Walk #5 from Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles, starts near Southwestern Museum and makes a clockwise loop in the Mt. Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles, just southwest of Highland Park.

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