Rim of the Valley

Why should it be a National Park?

Los Angeles is ringed by mountains, and the remarkable thing is how much of that ring is still empty. The Santa Monicas run to the sea. The Verdugos, the San Rafaels, the Simi Hills, the Santa Susanas, and the front range of the San Gabriels close the circle around the basin. From high ground in any of them you can see ten million people on one side and chaparral on the other. The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, created in 1978, protects part of this and is the largest urban National Park unit in the world. But it stops well short of the rim. The rest is a patchwork of county parks, conservancy holdings, city open space, and private land, and it has been disappearing steadily to development for fifty years.

This is also the closest thing in the country to a park for people who cannot get to one. Ten million people live within an hour of these hills, many of them in neighborhoods with almost no park space at all, and the corridor touches the San Fernando, Simi, Santa Clarita, and Crescenta valleys. The Interior Department's objection in 2019 was not about merit. It was that the Park Service already has more maintenance backlog than money, which is an argument about budgets rather than about whether the place deserves it.