Fodor’s Travel magazine has some advice for Southern California nature lovers: Don’t go to the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument.
That’s right, the national travel publication placed the mountainous national monument — a natural place made up of rivers, canyons and lakes, unique species of flowers and animals and 600 archeological sites all within 90 minutes of 20 million residents — on its ‘don’t go’ list, saying the monument is overwhelmed with trash and graffiti and should be omitted from travel plans in 2024.
The 346,177-acre national monument, which includes 342,177 acres of the Angeles National Forest and 4,002 acres of neighboring San Bernardino National Forest, made Fodor’s “No List” along with Venice, Italy; Ha Long Bay, Vietnam; Mount Fuji, Japan; Athens, Greece; and Lake Superior — fantastic places that are being loved to death by too many visitors, too much trash and not enough environmental stewardship, the magazine’s November edition reported.
What was intended to be the “crown to the Valley of Angels,” the living monument of chaparral, oak and conifer trees as well as numerous picnic, camping and fishing sites, has become “covered in trash, tagged with graffiti, and (is) posing an increasing threat to nature,” according to the magazine.
Even after monument status was bestowed in 2014 by President Barak Obama, the area, along with the entire 700,000-acre Angeles National Forest, was left in the hands of the U.S. Forest Service to manage.
But the U.S. Forest Service, under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, did not get an allotment of dollars for the designation. Instead, the USFS must rely on corporate donations and the yeoman’s work of volunteer groups to maintain and manage the monument.
Recent publicity highlighted a portion of the monument at the East Fork of the San Gabriel River, which in the summer became inundated with people who left behind diapers, food wrappers and even mattresses. In a…
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