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Arroyo Seco — Description

This is the gorge in Arroyo Seco, where local legend says that the water leads to a bottomless pit! I pressed when I heard this story: “surely they’ve dropped a line down there or something?” “Well they went out once with the cops and threw down a hunnerd’n’twenty feet of line and it still didn’t reach bottom. The water’s always there, even when the rest of it is dry.” So that’s the local legend. It’s a fun day trip hike in to go swim through a slot canyon and across several deep pools in the most brutal chaparral desert country in Los Padres National Forest. There’s a campground that you can drive to, but a decade or so ago a huge boulder fell on the road back to the gorge and they never got around to moving it so you have to hike back if you want to go cliff jumping into a bottomless abyss. At some point the canyon gets into Pasadena area, and there’s a dam at a point called (ominously) Devil’s Gate, and after that it’s just another concrete lined ditch meandering through Los Angeles, devoid of character and swimming holes and designed not to catastrophically flood everything. There’s a picture of the devil’s face in the rocks of the gate online, which if you squint might look like a deucedly unhappy-looking face. I don’t recommend going to Los Angeles, whether a devil is guarding the gates or not, simply because I don’t like spending hours parked on a 14 lane freeway.
Teleportation is much much more efficient. Not to mention green.