Tales of the Trails : Hiking: Historian and author John W. Robinson has a story about nearly every peak and valley in the local mountains.

By BERKLEY HUDSON

Oct. 17, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SAN GABRIEL MOUNTAINS — Go with John W. Robinson to most any mountaintop in Southern California and hecan tell you a story about it.

Whether it is Mt. Disappointment in the San Gabriel Mountains, Toro in the Santa Rosas, Santiago in the Santa Anas or Folly in the San Jacintos, Robinson has yarns to spin.

He knows where hard-rock miners gouged tunnels out of granite and fought over claims, where the Gabrieleno, the Cahuilla and the Serrano tribes fished for trout and gathered acorns, and where 19th-Century bandits made their hide-outs.

Perhaps as much as any other individual in recent years, Robinson, an author and retired schoolteacher, has spawned a surge of interest in the region’s mountains.

“He really commands this territory of the mountains of Southern California,” said Thomas F. Andrews, executive director of the Historical Society of Southern California, which honored Robinson last year.

“He’s not an armchair historian,” Andrews said. “And once you’ve read his books, you can never enter that mountain world with ignorance or lack of sensitivity.”

Robinson’s most popular book, “Trails of the Angeles,” is a guide to 100 hiking trails in the Angeles National Forest, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Considered a Bible for local hikers, it combines hiking and history with facts about flora and fauna of the San Gabriels.

Since it was first published in 1971, it has gone through four editions and sold 80,000 copies. A similar Robinson book on hiking in the San Bernardino, San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains has sold 70,000 copies.

An introductory paragraph in his books says, “The author walked all the routes described in this guide, some of them many times over.”

“He is probably one of the best-selling hiking trail guide authors anywhere,” said Thomas Winnett, who owns Wilderness Press, the Berkeley-based publisher of a trail guide series that features five Robinson books.

His latest book was published in September. “The San Jacintos” is a history of the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains.

Robinson, who is 64, makes it clear how it all got started. “I was a hiker before I was a historian.”

His parents took him, his two sisters and brother camping each year at Yosemite. But the Long Beach boy fell in love with the outdoors when he camped in the San Gabriels.

The other day he headed up the Angeles Crest Highway to visit Vetter Mountain, above Charlton Flat in the San Gabriels. It provides one of the most panoramic views of the craggy rooftop of Los Angeles County. From there, high above the smog, you can often see, it seems, forever.

On the way, Robinson stopped near Mt. Wilson to look down into one of his favorite spots, the West Fork of the San Gabriel River where it winds through a ravine, green with trees. “As a young YMCA boy in 1939, I camped for a week down there and really loved it.”

This lifelong affection springs from the substantial change the mountains wrought in him. At age 10, he was plagued by a stuttering problem and self-doubt.

But with every stream he forded and every canyon he explored, he gained confidence. Year after year he returned to discover that the mountains were doing what speech clinics could not do. His stuttering was lessening.

“I feel so good when I’m out in the wilderness,” he said. “I forget all about (stuttering). I feel so free. I can say anything.”

Over the years, that sense of freedom led him to climb the 13 peaks in California that are 14,000 feet or higher. He trekked up Mt. Rainier in Washington and, as an Army soldier, went up mountains in Korea. In Mexico, traveling with a Sierra Club group, he went up 17,000- and 18,000-foot peaks. As a USC student in the late 1940s, he hiked with his fraternity brothers.

“I’m just a hiker, not a climber,” said Robinson, a longtime Sierra Club member, who only rarely uses an ice ax, crampons or rope.

Regardless, earlier this month he did what few people, young or old, do. With a friend, he climbed 10,400-foot Folly Peak in the San Jacinto Mountains. It is a precipitous peak with broken gendarmes and huge granite outcroppings, making it one of the more rugged routes in Southern California. Round trip, the hike took 10 hours.

“I used to roar up those 10,000-foot peaks,” he said. “But I discovered the other day that I’m getting old.”

To his own amazement, one of his three daughters ran a marathon up Pike’s Peak in Colorado. This is something Robinson said he could never imagine doing.

Besides hiking, his other love is reading. His four-bedroom condominium in Fullerton, which he shares with another of his daughters, is chockablock with books. His weakness, sometimes his addiction, he said, is buying rare and historical books at Dawson’s Book Shop in Los Angeles.

And his shelves do groan with an amazing collection: California history, art in the West, Hollywood, literary Southern California, fur trapping, John Fremont, Sierra Nevada, conservation, mountaineering around the world, deserts and more.

Now that he has finished writing the San Jacinto book, he said he is glad to have time to read and hike again. In 1988, he retired after 35 years as a schoolteacher, first teaching in Redondo Beach and then in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District. He taught junior high and elementary students.

The other day, as he reached Charlton Flat in the San Gabriels, Robinson put on a floppy hat to shield his balding head from the sun. He headed up the short trail to Vetter Mountain, high above the cloudy marine layer shrouding from view the megalopolis in the distance.

The sky was blue, the air crisp. A cottony blanket of clouds filled the canyons below. Robinson’s own guidebook describes the place best:

“Simply put, Vetter Mountain offers you maximum view for minimum effort. The fire lookout, perched on this prominent high point above Charlton Flat, affords a rewarding 360-degree panorama of the heartland of the San Gabriels.”

Once at the top, where the fire lookout is under renovation as a historic site, Robinson surveyed the scene.

You could see for miles and miles. Mountaintops were everywhere. To the north loomed the backbone peaks of the range: Pacifico, Waterman, Twin Peaks and Williamson. To the east were the peaks and valleys of the San Gabriel Wilderness and beyond that, Old Baldy, the San Bernardinos and San Jacinto Peak.

To the south, there were Strawberry and San Gabriel peaks and Mt. Wilson, and in the distance, in Orange and Riverside counties, Saddleback and Toro. To the west was the rugged expanse of Big Tujunga and Alder Creek.

“I’ve climbed all these in view,” he said. “Mt. Gleason. James Gleason was a miner down in Acton in the 19th Century. It was called Soledad City. He cut timber, took it down the steep road with mules. He discovered gold on the north side. They mined all over the San Gabriels but never found much gold.

“That’s Mt. Markham, named for the former governor of California,” Robinson said, pausing only a moment before detailing the histories of other peaks.

When he first began to write, putting together short stories for Sierra Club pamphlets in the 1960s, he said he “didn’t realize there was so much history in the mountains.”

His first book focused on camping and hiking in Baja and was published in 1967. “It’s not very good,” he said. “Purple prose. Now I write like I talk.”

Then in 1970, as hiking enjoyed a renaissance amid the environmental movement and as he coped with being newly divorced, Robinson proposed the “Trails of the Angeles” idea. The historical books soon followed.

In writing the books, he said, “I’ve learned an awful lot of facts.” But more than that, he said, “it gives you an insight into the whole human adventure.”

Walking down Vetter Mountain, Robinson moved quickly along a dirt trail, lined with a thorny jumble of buckthorn and manzanita.

Wind whistled through the pines. In the distance, a motorcycle roared along the Angeles Crest Highway.

Then, without a hint of regret, he turned back to say something that seemed the completion of a thought he had left unspoken.

“I’ll keep on hiking until I drop dead on the trail,” he said, and smiled.

Robinson will be one of a dozen authors featured today at the Southern California History Fair, sponsored by the Museums of the Arroyo, a consortium of historical institutions in Los Angeles and Pasadena. The fair is from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Heritage Square, 3800 Homer St., Los Angeles. Admission: $6 adults, $3 teen-agers and senior citizens, and free for children 12 and younger.

They Left Their Mark

How some of the landmarks in the Angeles National Forest got their names: * Eaton Canyon: Named in honor of Judge Benjamin Eaton of Pasadena, who piped water from the creek to his ranch in the 1870s.

* Mt. San Antonio: Arroyo San Antonio is mentioned in the diaries of the Anza expedition in 1774. It is unclear when the name began to be used not only for the canyon but also for the mountain. Miners vulgarized the name to Old Baldy. Today the peak is commonly known by the nickname of Mt. Baldy. At 10,064 feet, it is the highest peak of the San Gabriels.

* Mt. Wilson: Named for Benjamin Wilson, owner of the Lake Vineyard Ranch in today’s San Marino. Wilson built a trail to the top of the mountain in 1864 to get lumber for fences and wine barrels. For much of the first half of the century, the telescope at the observatory there was the largest in the world. Wilson was the grandfather of Gen. George S. Patton Jr.

* Switzer Falls and Switzer Camp: Both the falls and the camp were named for Commodore Perry Switzer, who established the first resort camp in the San Gabriel Mountains in the upper Arroyo Seco in 1884. Oddly enough, Commodore was his given name. He was named for the American naval hero of the War of 1812.

* Vetter Mountain: Named for Victor P. Vetter, former district ranger and fire dispatcher in the Angeles National Forest, who died in 1932. The mountain was named a few years after his death when a fire lookout tower was built there.

Source: John W. Robinson