Sometimes you don’t see the San Gabriels until the streets stop and the mountains start. The veil suddenly thins, and there they are, in height and magnitude overwhelming. You plunge into a canyon flanked with soaring slopes before you realize you are out of town. The San Gabriel Mountains are as rugged as any terrain in America, and their extraordinary proximity to the city, the abruptness of the transition from the one milieu to the other, cannot be exaggerated.

            John McPhee, Los Angeles Against the Mountains

 Should an ember ignite the canyon one day, what would I want to save, what would be too painful to lose?

             Ruben Martinez, A Political Ecology of Fire in Los Angeles