So far, this year’s summer has been rather chilly and cloudy in Southern California. I can only dream of cold cocktails on hot summer nights.
Category Archives: Photography
Night Hike
Something I love about the Los Angeles area is that despite all its insane sprawl, it still offers the possibility of escape from the urban mess; to seek moments of refuge and relative solitude in the wilderness of the mountain chains surrounding the basin.
These pictures were taken on a night hike last weekend. (Click to enlarge).
The Mystery Truck
Crossing The Bridge to Nowhere
Trekking up and down the East Fork of the San Gabriel River last weekend, through intense heat and about 20 wildwater crossings, we found the mysterious Bridge to Nowhere.
Why is there a bridge in the middle of the wilderness?
I was wondering too.
Built in the San Gabriel Mountains in 1936, the 120 ft (27 m) high bridge was supposed to be part of a road connecting the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County with Wrightwood in San Bernardino County. But the road was never completed.
After being overcome by a flood in March of 1938, the road construction project was abandoned.
The bridge remains, leading nowhere. It is accessible only on foot.
Beast of Burden
Urban Safari No. 2
L.A. Noir at Musso & Frank
Here is a shot I captured during a cocktail hour at Musso & Frank, one of Hollywood’s legendary old joints. In its heyday it was a popular hangout for the Hollywood scene, including movie stars, film directors, producers and writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler. Ernest Hemingway sipped cocktails here, and Orson Welles used to hold court.
Legend has it that Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and Douglas Fairbanks raced each other down Hollywood Boulevard on horseback, the loser having to pick up the dinner tab at Musso & Frank.
This shot takes me to L.A. Noir. Perhaps this is Philip Marlowe‘s hat …
The Road Not Taken
This is a picture I took at the Huntington Library last week. At first I was not sure if I liked it. But when I was told that the image evoked impressions from one of my favorite poems, I was sold on it.
Here is the poem by Robert Frost, first published in 1916 in the collection Mountain Inverval. (More information can be found here.)
•••
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
•••