The Santa Monica Mountains: Range on the Edge

The Santa Monica Mountains is the only range that transverses a major metropolitan city in North America, slicing Los Angeles and defining it, shaping its hills and its valleys, its canyons and its ocean front.

The Santa Monicas is undeniably a range on the edge of the world, welcoming the Pacific into its rocky ridges, almost daring the ocean waves to break at its foothills. The mountains are dotted with mountain lions, bobcats and mule deer, rock singers, movie stars and writers, lilies, oaks and steelhead trout, bikers, hikers and grizzled peaks that seem to kiss the sky.

Along the course of its forty-six-mile span, the range encompasses Dodger Stadium, Griffith Park, Laurel and Coldwater canyons, Hollywood, the Hollywood Sign, Beverly Hills, the Getty Museum, Pacific Palisades and Malibu, to name only a few points of iconic interest. And these are mountains that have gone uncelebrated, until now in The Santa Monica Mountains: Range on the Edge, a compelling history and commentary by award-winning writer Matthew Jaffe, punctuated with 140 breathtaking images captured by renowned landscape-art photographer Tom Gamache.

The definitive biography lovers of the Santa Monica Mountains have been waiting for, the story of a magnificent range on the edge of America's edgiest city.

An ambitious book, as sprawling, quirky and varied as the range itself. More than a coffee table book and just short of a travel guide, it's nothing less than a love letter to the wild heart of Los Angeles. --Veronique de Turenne- Los Angeles Times

A spectacular collection...a visual and literary tribute to an important but little known feature of this gigantic sprawl of a city...a rare and beautiful photographic portrait and historical profile. --Jim Cornfield in Rangefinder Magazine

For all the people, pavement, and pressure that define life in Los Angeles, there is an equal share of solitude, unspoiled beauty, and relief in and around the city. It's the Santa Monica Mountain range -- a lovely swatch of topography that can save your sanity. You just need to know it personally, and The Santa Monica Mountains: Range on the Edge by Matt Jaffe and Tom Gamache (Angel City Press, Los Angeles, 2007; $40) was written to make the introduction.
Complex geology has set the stage here. Gamache illustrates it with gallery-quality photographs, and Jaffe populates it with the people, civilizations, animals, and subcultures that make it so endlessly fascinating and beautiful.
Read the book and you'll probably get the sense that these mountains are bigger and deeper than you'd ever dreamed: bigger in the potential for days-long hikes, meandering drives, and weeks of exploration; and deeper in history, culture, politics, and natural science. If the Laurel Canyon music scene was wild in the 1960's and 70's, consider earlier fights here between grizzlies and men, the constant threat (and promise) of wildfires, and more recent battles to develop the land.
So far, about 70,0000 acres have been preserved. Jaffe takes you through the territory within that landscape (and equally compelling areas outside it) in a way that makes its beaches, meadows, ridges, and sycamore-shaded creeks feel very familiar, like a place you suddenly recognize as home.
This is a range on the edge indeed: of the Pacific, of Los Angeles, and of issues and desires that shape society. But it's a range that welcomes you in -- and this book is your invitation.--Jim McCausland, Sunset Magazine