Prospecting for Beauty
Treasure map to the best park bench in Southern California
From this bench, above the clouds, you look south over a cliff’s edge, across the highway, onto a mountain vista including the north side of majestic Mount Baldy, seasonally snowcapped, and down into the Blue Ridge Canyon — which indeed contains a bluish haze and often a blanket of fog.
Returning down Highway 2, you’ll descend into Wrightwood, which has one upscale restaurant (the Blue Ridge Inn) and a novelty shop, plus a couple of bars and diners. Beyond Wrightwood, make a right onto Lone Pine Canyon Road, which offers a back-road exit from the town and plunges you at a 10-degree grade, straight shot down the mountain, from forest to desert, past the cathedral-like Vasquez rocks, named for a 19th-century outlaw who hid there for 20 years. A right on Highway 138 takes you to the 15 freeway, where you’re 90 minutes from downtown L.A. The landscape’s transformation to the city is a history lesson — from rustic canyons, past abandoned 20th-century vineyards and the tractors that continue to tear them up for sparkling mega-suburbs, earth-toned gated commuter communities of identical two-story homes. Looming signs for Lowe’s and Home Depot, like church spires, announce the shopping centers that serve these sprawling new empires.
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