Edgar McGregor

I moved the final rock aside and watched the pooled up water began to freely flow downstream. Somebody had built a large rock barrier to allow others to cross the creek without getting wet, but in doing so they slowed the flow of Eaton Creek into the wash section of the canyon. With thousands of young tree saplings vying for survival along the quickly drying wash, I could not allow this to happen. I looked up and counted several different groups of people staring at me as if they were seeing a ghost. I found this very annoying and stared back to get them to stop.

Eaton Canyon with it’s towering mountain peaks, deep gorges, meandering creek, and infamous waterfall has recently spent a great deal of time in 2023 as the single most popular hiking trail in all of Southern California according to AllTrails. With well over 5,000 hikers per weekend day, scenes with lines of people stretched across the wilderness are not uncommon. Every Saturday morning, the main parking lot and overflow lot fill to capacity within 45 minutes, especially during the spring season. Given the beautiful attractions, huge parking lots, tons of litter, and crowds of people walking up and down the trails all hours of the day, it is no wonder this canyon has earned the nickname the “Disneyland of Hiking Trails.” For locals who live in the area, this overuse is a burden. For the plants and animals in the canyon, the overuse of this natural space can be a detriment.

Eaton Canyon is not a normal park within the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation system; it is designated as a natural area. Natural areas by definition are meant to be safe havens for native wildlife with every form of natural process including growth, erosion, and decay being present. The Eaton Canyon Nature Center has the responsibility of maintaining the native habitat by picking up litter, removing invasive species, and keeping all human impact on the park to a minimum. This task becomes difficult when hoards of people visit the park each and every day. Despite this, the truth remains the same: It is a good thing Eaton Canyon is overrun by people.

Lines of people waiting to cross river crossing #2

Eaton Canyon is in the unique position to offer Angelinos a gateway to nature itself. That very line is on the homepage of this website for a reason. For so many Angelinos, Eaton Canyon is the only natural area they actually know of and have been in. Plenty of adults who visit Eaton Canyon are witnessing a natural, unaltered creek for the first time in their lives. The canyon requires no dangerous mountain driving to reach, it is within 30 minutes of Downtown Los Angeles, and the relative flatness of the main trail from the Nature Center to the Mount Wilson Toll Bridge allows people from most age groups and physical abilities to traverse it. The canyon is accessible via the Los Angeles Metro network, the waterfall runs year-round even during times of extreme drought, and the canyon offers a plethora of unique ecological biomes to explore. Eaton Canyon is subject to blizzards, 120°F heat waves, the fiercest of all Santa Ana windstorms, wildfires, rockslides, debris flows, and flash floods giving it a unique appearance with each passing year.

Eaton Canyon is beautiful because Eaton Canyon introduces nature to people who would otherwise never see it. There is quite a bit of nature in this part of the world, but there is only one canyon where hundreds of thousands if not millions of Angelinos actually do experience the natural world for the first time. That is the purpose we serve. We do not need to fight overpopulation. The only thing we need to fight is the impact of that overpopulation.

USFS Volunteer Pat Bylard conducting graffiti abatement just above the old USGS gauging station

Educate people all you want, but the fact of the matter is that going on defense and working hard to protect this natural area is critical for its survival. If the stewards of the canyon can keep invasive species to a bare minimum, keep all the litter picked up, keep rock walls from being tagged for too long, and keep rock barriers from blocking water flow, the overuse of Eaton Canyon can become a good thing. If we properly maintain this area, we can prove to all other natural areas worldwide that the impacts of human overuse are not something that randomly happens to parks, but rather something they choose to allow. Are we going to choose to allow it at Eaton Canyon? Or are we going to stand up, be the change we want to see, and be Angelinos’ gateway to nature?

L.A. County employees removing an invasive Castor Bean grove in the Equestrian Area

A recent list released by Fordor’s.com, a popular traveling website, has highlighted the San Gabriel National Monument as one of 9 natural spaces on Earth not to visit in 2024. The National Monument just north of Los Angeles was added to the list because it is covered in graffiti, littered with trash, and so heavily impacted by visitors that entire endemic species are being threatened with extinction. The situation has gotten so bad that piles of litter 3 feet high can sometimes be spotted in the East Fork of the San Gabriel River.

Although Eaton Canyon is not currently located within the official boundaries of the national monument, that could change in the near future. More on the efforts by Congresswoman Judy Chu and U.S. Senator Alex Padilla to expand the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument can be read here. One has to wonder whether such a designation would make any kind of difference at Los Angeles’s most popular waterfall hiking trail.

Here is a link to the 2024 “do not visit” list.

Over the past 116 years of weather record keeping, there have only been six cases of back-to-back winters in Eaton Canyon in which more than 25.00″ fell. These back-to-back wet winters are exceptionally important for the biodiversity of Eaton Canyon as some plants and animals depend on occasional prolonged wet periods to thrive, not just survive. Contrary to popular belief, the Western U.S. Megadrought is not over in California whatsoever. Megadroughts are defined as 20+ year long periods with below average precipitation, high temperatures, low humidity levels, decreased soil moisture levels, increased wildfire threat, significant forest mortality, groundwater depletion, irreversible land subsidence, weakened food chains, and threatened biodiversity. One single ultra-wet winter in California is not enough to repair the damages caused by this megadrought. Until the ecological damages can be somewhat repaired, this megadrought is not over. In order for California to escape from this megadrought, 3-5 years of back-to-back wet winters must occur in the state. These back-to-back wet winters we are looking for in California occurred in Eaton Canyon in:

• 1937, 1938 and 1939 (3 wet winters in a row)
• 1943 and 1944
• 1966 and 1967
• 1992 and 1993
• 2010 and 2011 
• 2023 and….. 2024?

The El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is a periodic and regular shift in oceanic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) along the equatorial east Pacific ocean from the area south of Hawai’i eastwards to the west coast of Peru. ENSO does not occur anywhere else in the world, only in this one region. When ENSO is in its negative phase and sea surface temperatures are cooler than average, we call this La Niña. When ENSO is in its positive phase and sea surface temperatures are above average, we call this El Niño. Given the expansive aerial extent of this periodic phenomena, climatologists have noticed a pattern emerge with each ENSO cycle within weather conditions worldwide. In California, El Niño typically means heavy winter rains while La Niña typically means less winter rains.

According to TropicalTidbits.com, we are currently in moderate El Niño conditions with SSTs +1.3°C across the equatorial east Pacific. NOAA has issued an ‘El Niño Advisory’ with a 85% chance of this event turning into a strong El Niño (SSTs >1.5°C) and a 30% chance of turning into a historically strong El Niño (SSTs >2.0°C).

 

The connection between wet winters in California and El Niño exists because El Niño steepens the temperature gradient between the North Pacific and the Equatorial Pacific. This steeper gradient strengthens the subtropical jet stream, a weaker counterpart to the polar jet stream. When the subtropical jet stream is stronger, it is able to undercut more wintertime ridges of high pressure that would normally sit off the coast of California and block any rain storms coming in. Instead of pushing these ridges aside like when the polar jet stream is amplified, an amplified subtropical jet stream simply pushes the ridges northwards, allowing warm Pacific storms with a strong tropical moisture tap to sneak into California. As a result, El Niño winters are typically not great winters for low elevation snowfall in California. It is those winters with a strong polar jet stream, like 2023, that can bring tons of low-elevation snow throughout the state.

Not all El Niño episodes are created equal, and there is no shortage of examples in which El Niño conditions failed to bring decent winter rains to California. There are other meteorological factors at play all across the globe, one of them being pure luck. For many California weather enthusiasts, the colossal failure of winter 2016’s rainy prediction pains us to this day. Hopefully this time we are not hyping ourselves up again only for it to be 90°F throughout much of February.

 

Winter 2024 is expected to be wetter than average in Eaton Canyon. Just how wet remains to be seen, though it is unlikely we will get another 43″ of rainfall like we did last winter. There is also no knowing if any storm will produce high enough rain rates to ecologically destroy Eaton Creek, which was destroyed and reordered in 1938, 1943, 1969, 1980, and 2005. Without a recent canyon-wide wildfire in Eaton Canyon, such a storm is unlikely in any given winter, though they are most likely in El Niño winters