I read old Southern California trail guides from the 1960s and 1970s and I’m envious of the kind of backpacking people were able to do back then.  They happily lugged heavy guitars, fry pans, hobnail boots, and 50-pound packs into the wilderness without batting an eye, without the benefit of the sleek ultralight gear we have today.  They enjoyed trails that were regularly maintained and patrolled by rangers, and they enjoyed springtime hikes among green forests and rushing streams.

That California is gone with the wind now. The world has changed, and not for the better.  Almost all of Southern California’s national forests have been vaporized by scorched-earth megafires in the past 10 years, leaving nothing but thorny shrubs and thistles where there used to be old-growth oak and bigcone spruce.  There’s no shade anymore, and no water.  All those fires laid down thick beds of ash that make rains run off in flash floods rather than soak into the ground.   Thanks to budget cutbacks, there are no trail rangers anymore, and the only trail maintenance that gets done is by volunteers, who can only scratch the surface of what needs to be done to keep the wilderness accessible. Historic, beautiful trails disappear in the chaparral, lost to the ages.

This is the new California wilderness that my friends and I encountered on our recent weekend backpack in the Dick Smith Wilderness. We hiked fourteen miles from our car to a remote mountain valley called “Don Victor” – named for a 19th-century homesteader who successfully found the cure for his tuberculosis in the dry air of the wide, lonely, windswept valley – and though we were only about 50 miles as the crow flies from Los Angeles and its twenty million inhabitants, we saw no footprints besides those of deer.  The trail guides assured us that there was reliable water to be found year-round along stretches of the creek, and our goal was a delicious-looking swimming hole we had seen pictures of online. But even though it was only the second day of spring, at the tail end of what is normally Southern California’s wet season, we couldn’t find even a trickle of water! I started to panic under my breath, worried about the consequences of heat exhaustion and dehydration if we didn’t find water.  I figured we might even have to wait out the hot midday sun and make an early emergency exit back to our cars, nursing our last few ounces of water on a long nighttime climb back to our car.  After exploring along the canyon off-trail for an hour or so in search of our mythical swimming hole, crashing through willows and thorny shrubs, we finally found a slightly-flowing puddle a few feet long and a couple inches deep, which we managed to carefully decant and filter, allowing us to set up camp and calm down in the waning light of late afternoon.

Disaster was averted, but as we settled down to a dry camp in the nearby meadow – without a camp table, fire ring, running water, or any of the other blessings those oldtime backpackers used to enjoy – I felt bad that I had unknowingly misrepresented this trip to my friends. We never found that swimming hole and didn’t get to enjoy the refreshing dip we had been looking forward to all day. I started to realize that I needed to disillusion myself and adjust to the new reality around me.  Charred by devastating fires, unpatrolled, unmaintained, and four years into Southern California’s historic drought, the wilderness is a different place now: dangerous and demanding.

But there was an upside, too.  As we settled down to dinner at camp, and a sliver of moon and Mars emerged on the western horizon, and the quails and poorwills engaged in their soothing evening serenade, I realized that with the right bunch of hiking buddies – fit, well-prepared, open-minded and resourceful – there really is nothing to worry about.  We make the best of a bad situation, we learn our lessons, and we look forward to our next adventure.

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