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225 Acres Added to Verdugo Mountain Park, New Trail Opens Above Descanso Gardens
Riding horseback in La Canada-Flintridge
Verdugo Mountain Park is now the 6th largest park in Los Angeles, thanks to Councilwoman Wendy Greuel's $2.7 million expenditure of Proposition K money to purchase 225 acres of open space, securing it from outside development. The park is located in the northeast Valley at the edge of northern Glendale and is home to an annual hike and trail run in November. A little further east, a new half-mile segment of the Descanso Trail will officially open on Saturday. It's just one part of La Canada-Flintridge's 24-mile trail system open to horses, bikes and hikers and is the second to last segment before there will be a full loop around the city. The trail, which connects to Pasadena and is above Descanso Gardens is reported to have "some surprisingly steep sections," according to the Pasadena Star News.
And in other mountain news, the renaming of Negrohead Mountain off Kanan Road was supported this week by the LA County Board of Supervisors. If successful, it will be named after John Ballard, who in 1859 moved from Kentucky to Los Angeles and eventually settled near Seminole Hot Springs in the Santa Monica Mountains. "The prominent mountain near Ballard’s land was dubbed a less-than-PC name for decades,"Casey Schreiner explains at ModernHiker. That was "until the Civil Rights Act forced cartographers to change the name of the mountain to the slightly-more-PC-by-comparison-but-still-pretty-bad 'Negrohead Mountain.'”
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