Bagging the second most famous intersection in Los Angeles.
The normal way to get to Anoka and El Medio from the top o' Reseda Blvd is to take the 134 to the 101 to the 5 to the 2 to the 10 to the 405 and get off on Mulholland where you belong.
However, I instead decided to hike it. Truth be told as it ever shall be here, Will Rogers State Park was the original destination. So, after parking well before the MRCA-controlled parking lot at Marvin Braude Park, I walked up the road and soon made it to The Hub. However, I found that the Backbone Trail - which starts off Fire Road 50 just before Temescal Peak - was closed. Which is a bit odd since it was open in September. I'm assuming the recent rains had a negative impact. It was closed with a plastic mesh fence I could have easily got around, but I'm forced to assume they know what they're doing and they closed it to avoid damaging the area.
Confused, I asked someone if they knew how to get to the Palisades and they said, "hike, hike, hike!" Both of us chortled, and I pressed on even though I didn't get the joke.
But, I did decide to set a new objective: Temescal Falls. I've never been to them, and they don't appear notable enough to be prominently featured on the map I had, but I assumed they'd be something at least.
Onward and upward I climbed, eventually ascending the snowclad slopes of the Green Peak monolith (1936'). It was yet another example of mountaintop defacement, with some kind of radio repeater. It was hard to take a pic without wires or structures in the way, but I did my best.
Continuing on, I made it to the turn off to the Falls but the trail to that was closed too. Shortly after that juncture, the Bienvenido trail was also closed. It just goes down to a housing development full of multimillion dollar homes packed very close to each other, so that wasn't a big loss.
Shortly after that, the wide fire road became a more narrow trail, single track in places. It was rocky and loose in parts, slowing things down. That wasn't an issue on the return. Around that point the weather shifted from the clear, warm Valley climate into the foggier, cooler coastal climate. On the return it was good to get back to higher temperatures.
My new objective was "whatever", until I saw a sign that it was 1.5 miles to Sunset Blvd so I decided to turn around there. Eventually the trail ended at a city street, which turned out to be the Anoka and El Medio intersection. In retrospect I see that Sunset was half a mile away and the beach was under two miles away, but that was all the road walking I was going to do. I wasn't going to walk on asphalt to something I rarely visit anyway.
As can be seen in the photos below, that intersection has two houses that burned down in the Palisades DEI fire.
Having obtained the "summit", I turned tail and headed back to the better parts of L.A. About two-thirds of the gain were on the return.
Total stats were about 16 miles RT with about 3200' of gain. I don't need to tell you that I got a late start so I was pushing it to get back before dark because that's when the vampires start walking through the Valley. I'd wanted to do this mostly in Zone 2 but over half was in Zone 3 due to a fairly fast pace. Those are Polar's zones and I need to adjust them so more was probably in Zone 2.
