The famous California poppy! Fields and fields of them, so magnificent and splendid, blah blah. Well, suppose you live in Los Angeles, and you haven’t yet gone deranged, and you don’t have a car, and you decide you want to see these poppies.
You’re going to look up the best places to see them, and all the lists are going to include places like Antelope Valley poppy reserve and Lake Elsinore and Chino Hills and this and that. Well, you can’t get to any of those places by bus and train, unless you take the train or bus as far as they’ll go, and then walk 7 miles. On roads without sidewalks, under the hot sun, with no shade, cars zooming by, horrid air pollution, etc etc.
Any case, I found a place where you can see the poppies anyways! To be sure, it took me like 4 hours to get there, and the characters on the second to last bus I took were possibly legitimately psycho. But, that’s like everywhere in Los Angeles.
Any case, the place you’re trying to get to is the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve, and in particular, the Victory Trailhead at the edge of the park.
Here’s a map. This shows the general route that I took. You see Los Angeles Union Station to the east, and the Victory Trailhead is in the west. I actually started even further east, which added the extra hour and a half. There’s also several different ways to get there, including a train. So look it up yourself to see what’s best.
But for me, from Union Station, I took the red metro line to the North Hollywood Station. I know! The Red Line is possibly the most psychotic of all of them, and that’s saying something in a city where all the metro lines rival each other for the most distinct and exalted state of psychosis. Well, I got off in North Hollywood Station, and man! That place is a DUMP. Holy cow. Like, really be careful because you might get killed. I think people have been killed there … but you can say the same for most of the metro stations, probably. Well, from North Hollywood Station, you’re going to take the Orange line bus. Yikes, that bus sucked too. You know, that bus usually has a special lane, I think, that lets it go fast. But when I did it, that special lane was under construction. So instead, we were stuck with all the traffic.
Also, there’s two types of Orange Line buses. One of them goes I think to the Canoga Station, and the other goes several more stops to Chatsworth. If the bus to Canoga leaves at 12:00, then the Chatsworth bus leaves after 10 minutes, and the next Canoga bus is 10 minutes later, etc. Which means if you want to go to Canoga or any of the earlier stations, you’re in luck, because the most you’ll ever wait is 10 minutes. But unfortunately, the stop you want is Sherman Way, and that is the very next stop after Canoga. I think it worked out for me that I had to wait a full 20 minutes at North Hollywood, and as mentioned, that place is a dump.
And then it was all slow, because the special lane was closed, but we finally made it to the Sherman Way stop, and then I had to walk like 10 minutes or something in order to be at the right place to catch the 169 bus. There’s no shade on any of these streets. But the bus came, and off I went till it dropped me off randomly on the side of the highway, and from there, you walk a ways up a hill, and you get to the Victory Trailhead!
You’ll know you’re getting there when this giant mansion pops up as you walk along Country Oak Rd:
And then the Victory Trailhead is right there:
Make sure you bring a lot of water. Cause most of the park looks like this, and there’s no shade:
Ok, I guess it’s pretty, whatever. Just so you know, by looking at the map, these mountains and hills seem to be the eastern end of the Santa Monica mountains.
Well any case, the park is pretty big. And I had already been 4 hours on the bus and metro and all that. And, now to top it all off, I wandered and wandered around in the park, and I didn’t find any poppies anywhere! The time was ticking. The afternoon was fading. And that meant I’d be stuck on public transit after dark. I looked and looked, walked and walked, sweated and sweated. When I’d just about given up, I stumbled upon the poppies. By that time, it was 4:30 pm, and that meant the poppies were closing up! So even though I found them, they weren’t full bloomed, but looked more like this:
Oh well, I still saw them! So let me show you where in the park the poppies actually are.
It’s in that general area, along that first trail to your left as your walking into the park, that first goes backwards up a hill. See, I pretty much walked every other trail in the park first, before I found the poppies at the end. And they are actually pretty close to the entrance.
So there you have it! The hillsides in that one area were pretty well covered with them, but I didn’t see the poppies along any of the other trails at all.
As you recall, it’s a four hour trip back (at least for me), and if you miss a bus or whatever, it can easily be more than that. So I left around 5, and I took the 169 bus back to Sherman Way, and then I took the Orange Line back to North Hollywood Station. Let me tell you, that bus was hauling crazytown at that particular hour. Just my luck. Then we got to North Hollywood Station, and you know it was getting to be sunset, and as mentioned, that place is a DUMP. Not somewhere you want to be after dark. Also, after dark, you don’t want to be taking the Red Line. So I checked the map, and it said the 501 express bus that goes to Pasadena was leaving from North Hollywood just at around the same time my Orange crazytown bus was arriving. I ran across the massive bus lot, and the 501 was a little late, so I made it. Because otherwise, I’d have had to wait 30 minutes for the next 501 bus, in this dump. So I made it.
Of course, just remember that though the 501 styles itself as an express bus, it hardly qualifies. It passes through Glendale, Burbank, and more on its way, and takes over an hour from start to finish. And of course, this is if you want to go to the Pasadena area or further east. If you were trying to get back to Union Station, you might have to end up taking the red line after all. After dark, alas! Or, if you take the 501, you can take the metro from Pasadena to Union Station. Of course, at Pasadena’s Memorial Park station you also have a very, very good chance of getting killed, so good luck with all that.
Remember the poppies are in their prime I think in March and April.
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