Hiking Historian Tells Tales of Trails : Peak Experiences Make Writer John Robinson a Leading Expert on Southland’s Mountains

Go with John W. Robinson to most any mountaintop in Southern California and the Orange County man can 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, Cahuilla and 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 of Fullerton, 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.”

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

“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.

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 boy, who was raised in Long Beach, 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 state and, while in the Army, 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 something few people do, young or old. With a friend, he climbed 10,400-foot Folly Peak in the San Jacinto Mountains. It is a precipitous peak with 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 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.

He 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 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 “didn’t realize there was so much history in the mountains.”

His first book focused on camping and hiking in Baja California 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.