Content area
Full Text
Solstice Canyon Park in the Santa Monica Mountains is enjoyable year-round, but winter is a particularly fine time to ramble through the quiet canyon. A newly opened path-Rising Sun Trail-lets you explore the park's upper slopes, from which you might even sight gray whales migrating past Point Dume.
Winter solstice, to us modern city dwellers, may seem nothing more than a scientific abstraction-the time when the sun is farthest south of the Equator. However, to some of the earliest occupants of Southern California, the Chumash, the winter solstice was an important occasion. It was a time when the cosmic balance was very delicate.
The discovery of solstice observation caves and rock art sites have convinced anthropologists that the Chumash possessed a system of astronomy that had both mystical meaning and practical application. To those of us who buy all our food in the supermarket, winter solstice is just a date on the calendar, but to the Chumash-who needed to know when berries would ripen, when the steelhead trout would run up Malibu Creek, when game would migrate-the day was an important one.
Solstice Canyon Park, carved out of land owned by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, opened on summer solstice in 1988. The park is administered by the Mountains Conservancy Foundation, the operations arm of the Conservancy.
The park's most recent project is the just-completed Rising Sun Trail, which climbs the east wall of Solstice Canyon. Master trail builder Bruce Heckel and his crew reworked an old dirt road and blazed some new trail to complete...