CNPS San Gabriel Mountains Chapter

Shoemaker Canyon Road

A walk along Shoemaker Canyon Road is easy and pleasant. All of these photos are from mid winter (January 7, 2009), so the amount of flowering plants was highly limited. But even so, there was plenty of interest, including the geology of the rock cuttings along the road. This is the so-called Road to Nowhere, which ends after the second tunnel. The photos from this page are all the first section of road beyond the parking lot. That is, we didn't get to the tunnels. That will be for another occasion. However, you can see distant views of the tunnels from our page about the Heaton Flat Trail.

For details of the Shoemaker Canyon Road itself, see Dan Simpson's web page.

Click on the thumbnails to see higher-resolution images, 720 x 480 pixels.


Mt. Baldy from Shoemaker Canyon Road		Longstem buckwheat (Eriogonum elongatum var. elongatum)		Hollyleaf redberry (Rhanmus ilicifolia)

Bee hives, leafless bigleaf maple (Acer acrophyllum) in background	Black willow (Salix gooddingii)		Rock faces in the cutting. There are impressive rock structures in many places in the cuttings

Hoary-leafed ceanothus (Ceanothus crassifolius)	Footprints: Bobcat (L) and deer (R)		Bigberry manzanita (Arctostaphylos glauca)	Bird's foot fern (Pellaea mucronata)

Left: Looking towards The Narrows on the East Fork of the San Gabriel River gorge. Right: The parking lot at the end of East Fork Road. Below it on the river flat is the site of Hooverville, a makeshift mining settlement washed away by floodwaters in the 1930s.		Probably woolly Indian paintbrush (Castilleja foliolosa), in the parking lot, February 2009	Heaton Flat and the track up the canyon (L), and a closer view looking up at that canyon (R) For more detailed views, see the Heaton Flat Trail page. That trail goes up the canyon to the far saddle, then along the ridge line to the left.