There was an old growth forest in the San Gabriel Mountains, full of big cone Douglas Firs. One of the early settlers in the foothills below, Colonel Theodore Pickens, sold five square miles of it for logging. Chinese laborers were sent in to chop down the trees.

With the trees gone, the winter rains sent boulders and mudslides tumbling down the canyons. Filmmaker John Newcombe, whose documentary is called "Rancho La Canada: Then and Now," says folks below the Pickens property signed petitions to save the forest.

"The federal government under Benjamin Harrison declared the mountains off limits to logging. They created the San Gabriel Timberland Reserve. That's technically the nation's first national forest."

President Theodore Roosevelt later changed the name of that reserve to the Angeles National Forest. Angeles Crest Highway takes you up to that "timberland reserve."

(Airdate: 4/5/2009)