Rich Aranda holds the big .44 Magnum loosely in one hand and swigs deeply from a king-sized can of beer with the other. "See that big rock up there?" he says, gesturing broadly with the gun barrel toward a pockmarked boulder perched on the shoulder of the hill in front of him. "When I got divorced, I used to come up here. That rock was my ex-wife. I put a lot of chips in that thing."
Then, with the beer still cradled in his left hand, Aranda, a used-car dealer from Maywood, zings six quick ones down the line. Like Kirk Douglas mowing down a gang of trail thugs, he barely aims the gun, holding it low, sending up spurts of dirt around an old fire extinguisher that someone has propped up 50 yards away.
This is Pigeon Ridge, one of 14 designated shooting areas in the Angeles National Forest. Like many other spots in the mountainous 1,000-square-mile forest, it is a place of excess.
The gullies are ankle-deep in shell casings and ammunition cartons, trees are shattered from the impact of illegal armor-piercing bullets and dumdums and the air resounds with the thunderclaps of sophisticated weaponry.
"You have freedom here to have a gun, right?" says one of the hundreds of "plinkers" who hike up to Pigeon Ridge every weekend and stand shoulder-to-shoulder, pumping hot lead into the hills. "You have to use it."
Law enforcement agencies and the U.S. Forest Service, which administers the Angeles forest, are gearing up this weekend for the onslaught of summer, when increasing numbers of city dwellers shuck their inhibitions and do their thing in the wild. Authorities are beefing up patrols, clamping down on rule breakers and putting up heavy steel gates at some entry points to head off nighttime rowdiness.
The Angeles, second in popularity among all the national forests to Tonto National Forest in Arizona, has become the prime escape for millions of Los Angeles area residents. "You can think of the Angeles as a giant urban park," said George Roby, the forest's supervisor.
Have the Problems of City Folk
That means that it has become both a place for Southern Californians to engage in their notoriously unrestrained recreational activities and a setting for transported urban customs, including crime, traffic and vandalism. Use of the park has increased about 20% in the last four years, officials said.
"We have all the problems that you have in the city," said Don Stikkers, supervising ranger in the Mt. Baldy District, the forest's most heavily used area that includes San Gabriel Canyon and the heavily traveled California 39.
About 27 million visitors a year jam into the forest, almost two-thirds of them entering along the southern face of the San Gabriel Mountains overlooking the San Gabriel Valley. The Forest Service is putting the finishing touches on a two-year project to set management priorities for the busy forest.
Here are some of the busiest stretches of forest in the nation. On a hot day, as many as 4,000 cars will drive up the narrow, two-lane highway to the Crystal Lake Recreation Area at the top of the canyon 28 miles from downtown Azusa, according to the concessionaire who runs the campground there. Up to 30,000 people will spend some time in the canyon. On holiday weekends such as this one, heavy traffic often forces the Forest Service to close the lower entrance to California 39, which has been blocked above Crystal Lake for the past eight years by landslides
"This is L.A.'s backyard," said a beleaguered Ranger Rita Nolan last Sunday, handing a picnicker a citation for lighting an illegal campfire (the forest is already under Stage I fire restrictions because of drought conditions) and waving accusingly at a pair of skateboarders schussing down the middle of California 39.
For many park users, the forest is apparently a kind of frontier where they can escape society's petty restrictions.
"I can come out here and drive like I want," said Ron Romero, a trails-biker from Alhambra, taking a break in the dry lake bed that has been designated for off-road vehicle use in the San Gabriel Canyon. "I won't get a ticket. I can get away from things here, relax, take out my aggressions on my bike. You can't drive like this on the street."
Another shooter on Pigeon Ridge suggested to Aranda, a short man with a red bandanna tied jauntily around his head, that there should be more supervision in the shooting area (where, according to one Sierra Club official, so much buckshot has been fired already that "when the streams flood and then recede, they leave little shoals of shotgun shells instead of sand and gravel").
"You want to charge money to come up here?" Aranda demanded, handing the big "Dirty Harry gun" to his wife and picking up his rifle. "This is already a police state."
