Here, I’ve collected my thoughts and some writing from local journalists that really helped me makes sense of just what I saw on my hike. I can only speak from what I saw, as one man from way up north.
When I started, I really didn’t know what I would find, other than a TON of cars and freeways. By the end, what I had seen left me unsettled more than anything else.
It was definitely surreal: an endless repeating sequence of gated communities, strip malls, warehouses, occasional nice walkable old main streets, then drive-throughs, gas stations, fire halls, and hospitals. That part I expected.
What I didn’t expect was how draining the experience would be. Despite the mountains always in the background and fun places to stop, the lack of greenery, the endless traffic, and the overall inhuman landscape made for a terrible experience when I compare it to any hike or urban walk I’d done before.
An alien landscape
Three days in, I was really tired. I had trained to be in the best shape of my life for a marathon, and I struggled with how far apart things were. I’d walk for hours, would still have hours to go, and it didn’t feel like I went anywhere. And the distance that I covered in four days is someone’s commute every single day?!
You’ve probably heard talk of LA as a city designed for cars, but I think it can be said a little more imaginatively: it’s a place designed for machines, and not humans. I felt like I was in some sci-fi machine city (without flying cars), that was never meant to be experienced by human beings. Which is a little odd to me, since this place was designed and built by humans (…right?).
Crossing gigantic high speed roads and freeway on-ramps was bad, but the pedestrian crossings away from traffic lights were, ironically, the scariest of all. Here’s an example of one:
Each time I crossed the street, I had to constantly look around and over my shoulder for turning cars, to make sure I was seen. It really felt like the planners and engineers thought no one would ever be walking or rolling.
I also naively thought that this route might be one (despite being terrible for scenery) that would be entirely accessible to anyone say, using an e-scooter or a wheelchair, since in theory it’s entirely paved. The truth was that sidewalks abruptly ended more times than I could count. So much for that.
Hostile architecture doesn’t help the experience. Benches and chairs were plainly designed to be uncomfortable and to prevent laying down. This isn’t anti-homeless design, it’s anti-human design–everything about these places sends the clear message of “Don’t stay here. Move along.” So I never rested very long, unless I went inside a donut shop, a restaurant, or a library.
Nothing green in sight
Access to natural areas and parks in cities really should be a human right. The benefits are well-known: people who have access to green spaces nearby are overall healthier and actually live longer. It’s easy to see why–if you have a pleasing, calm place to enjoy close to home, you’ll go more often.
The horrible lack of green spaces in Los Angeles is well-known, and the problem is especially bad in poorer neighbourhoods where many Black and Latino people live, the legacy of systemic racism in the form of redlining. The places that these people call home are the complete opposite of scenic: there is very little greenery and shade, they are close to freeways, and they are covered in concrete. It’s especially bad in South and East Los Angeles (here‘s a fresh article from LAist discussing the challenges of greening), but the areas I walked through weren’t these “typical” disadvantaged areas. Property values are high (absurdly high, as of all of Socal), and incomes are pretty middle of the pack.
The few parks I came across offered little escape. Whenever I come across a city park on my travels, I usually get a sense of excitement: this is where people come to play, have barbecues, and parties, sort of like an outdoor living room. Granted it was on weekdays, but the parks I came across were usually depressing. The facilities weren’t in great shape, and people were clearly living there.
All but one of the rivers I crossed were encased in concrete, for flood control. Given to their own devices, the rivers would naturally overflow and flood whenever there’s rain or snow (neither happen often, but the results can be catastrophic). These rivers would have supported living wetlands, but sadly, they have been reduced to storm sewers, adding to the inhuman moonscape feel.
A warehouse for a neighbour
The way buildings were arranged was absolutely ridiculous to me. I saw people living right beside warehouses many times. In Baldwin Park, houses backed onto a working open pit gravel mine. There were houses in Rancho Cucamonga that were right beside an elevated freeway. I somehow doubt the people living here want these neighbours.
So what was I looking at? Zoning regulations–what can be built, and where–are drawn up by cities. The county government seems to only take responsibility for unincorporated areas (ie, neighbourhoods that only pay property taxes to the county, not to any city. Plenty of places are like this, at home too).
The “gravel pit right beside single family homes” scenario is explained when you see where the city lines are drawn. The gravel pits are in the city of Irwindale while the homes are in the city of Baldwin Park, and as far as I can tell cities do not care what happens to people living outside their boundaries.
The urban area is split across five counties, well over 100 cities, and tribal governments. Getting that many local governments to agree on anything is a lofty ideal, to say the least. In a report written in 1994, planning academic Judith Innes at Berkeley noted that the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), ostensibly in charge for regional planning for greater LA, had “[…] neither the funding nor the authority to implement a regional vision.”1 .
I wonder how much has changed since 1994.
The ignored Inland Empire
The Inland Empire (or I.E.) is pretty obscure in the popular imagination, overshadowed by LA and the OC. Combining the cities of Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ontario, it’s home to about 4.5 million people. Despite having so many people, I really had never heard of it before my trip. It’s also telling that there’s little tourism promotion. San Bernardino County has a tourism website that focuses more on the desert and the mountain resort towns like Big Bear Lake. The city of San Bernardino has one page on its website, describing it as “…a city brimming with untapped potential as a tourist destination.”
However, being a part of the Greater LA area (which really should be thought of as one continuous giant megacity, going far beyond Los Angeles itself), the I.E. serves vital purposes, that are uncomfortable to talk about because of the class divide.
The I.E. seems to be where lower paid workers live, since housing is more affordable than on the coast (but not by national standards!!). Other than the government offices, hospitals, and the universities–Cal State, Redlands, UC Riverside are the big ones–there seem to be few places where you can find higher paying jobs here. A few companies are headquartered here, like Esri (that makes ArcGIS software) local chains Stater Brothers and Baker’s Drive-Thru, but it pales with how many are in LA and Orange County. Metrolink commuter train schedules reflect this: they take commuters out of San Bernardino in the morning in two different, but predictable directions: west towards LA and southwest to Orange County.
The I.E. does have jobs at home, in the massive, city-sized complexes of gigantic e-commerce warehouses, but this is low paid work, vulnerable to automation in the future, that also creates huge amounts of air pollution from all the trucks. I might have pounded the concrete in the 90 degree heat for a few days for fun, but these people are doing it year-round for a few bucks above minimum wage, to get you the stuff you impulse bought online at 2am (I definitely am guilty of this, but I’m trying to break the habit).
San Bernardino filmmaker Sofia Figueroa made an excellent series of shorts called The Warehouse Empire that show what is going on far better than an outsider like I can: notably, the warehouses are taking over Latino neighbourhoods and severely impacting the health of the people that live there.
It’s good to see grassroots resistance to the injustice done to these communities. Local groups, like the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, focus on worker education and advocacy in the warehouses and bring attention to terrible working conditions like excessive heat. The People’s Collective for Environmental Justice fights against the air pollution in the I.E.–which regularly has the some of the worst air quality in America–and fights for the health of the community.
To get a sense of just how many warehouses there are, the Robert Redford Conservancy (yes, the actor endowed it) at Pitzer College in Claremont has a fantastic website called SoCal Earth. Scroll down to “Warehouse City” to get an idea of just how quickly the warehouses multiplied.
In human terms, about 13% of the I.E. workforce–an amazing 200,000 people–find employment in logistics, either in the warehouses or as drivers. For the rest of SoCal, 3.6% work in logistics (the full report by UC Riverside is here). Self-driving trucks and completely automated warehouses would be very bad news here.
SoCal as tragicomedy
A lot of people I know at home think about LA in terms of the movies set there (La La Land? Friday after next? Beverly Hills Cop? Beverly Hills Ninja?). For me, I got a movie-like experience, but it wasn’t the movie I had in mind.
If you’ve ever seen Terry Gilliam’s films Brazil or the Zero Theorem, you’ll know that he specializes in bringing a very specific vision to life: a future that is awful for almost everyone, but not by being tyrannical like in 1984. Instead his characters live in a world that is full of goofy contradictions, advanced technology that is silly rather than useful, and endless dehumanizing bureaucracy, where people are crushed by the absurdities of the system rather than by pure evil. These worlds are tragicomedy, born out of supposedly good intentions (Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is relevant too, but I won’t get into that now).
California is one of the wealthiest, most prosperous places on planet Earth, with huge social safety nets, yet there are signs of poverty everywhere in SoCal. The state has led the country in vehicle emissions standards for decades, yet San Bernardino County still has some of the worst air quality in the country, because of vehicle emissions. Giant warehouses got built very quickly in people’s backyards in the I.E., yet there’s still a huge shortage of housing everywhere.
It was laughably absurd and heartbreaking in turn to see these wild contradictions. The hardest part to deal with though, is that people living through this poverty and in this polluted air hardly made those choices. California has some of the most talented and creative people in the world. It’s puzzling.
Perfectly dystopian
When putting together this trip, I joked with a friend that it was “cyberpunk” or “post-apocalyptic”: what hiking could look like in the far future, when nature has been obliterated and replaced by an endless city.
I found that this joke isn’t far from reality. In Greater Los Angeles, so much of the natural is gone, replaced with concrete or a chintzy cartoon version of nature. I think about the THUMS islands off Long Beach (here’s a great article at Curbed LA), which are actually camouflaged oil rigs, or the many cell phone towers disguised as palm trees. They are outrageously fake if you look at them for more than a second.
It is absurd how unpleasant it is to get around on foot. It should be nice because of the near-perfect climate (well, besides the heat waves and forest fires) and mountain backdrop. Instead, it’s awful: dodging cars and breathing in car exhaust, resting on uncomfortable benches, walking beside endless concrete walls, and attempting to avoid dehydration in the direct sun. And all this through neighbourhoods that are quite frankly, terribly designed.
If it hadn’t been for the Mexican food and the people I met, it would have pretty much been purgatory.
So can I recommend this hike to anyone else? Well, no, unless you live in the year 1700, or you’re excited by truly absurd dystopian settings from the imagination of Terry Gilliam.
Would I do it again? Well, I’d dial back the mileage per day to be able to wander more, add more days so I can make it to the beach, and wait until the housing and air pollution situations improve. So it might be a while, but I’m optimistic.
And finally…
I didn’t do this alone. I got so much love from the folks on Reddit at r/inlandempire, r/asklosangeles, r/los angeles and r/socalhiking. Thanks for all your advice and support. Thanks to everyone who read along–I hope it was fun to read and inspired you to fight for the place you call home. Thanks to Yvonne and Mom for your love and for making sure I didn’t get run over. Thank you to Jane Kubke for inspiring me to write. Thanks to Will: I’ll get out to see the scenic parts of LA sometime soon. And thanks to everyone I met along the way, and to Luci, Brian and Rosa at Charter Oak Library, legit one of the best libraries I’ve ever been to. Keep up the good fight.
–Jon
P.S.: I’ll add some extra stuff and pictures from the other days on my trip. There’s some walking from LAX to Baldwin Hills, Long Beach, and going from DTLA to LAX taking transit, which was an adventure in itself.
- Innes, J., Gruber, J., Neuman, M., Thompson, R., Langenthal, J., & Kirschenbaum, J. (2005). Coordinating Growth and Environmental Management Through Consensus Building: Regional Planning in Los Angeles. Vol. 2, Case 10. Appendix Case Studies. UC Berkeley: Institute of Urban and Regional Development. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tg1s896 ↩︎
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