Johnson:This is a beautiful area that's just filled with a lot of biodiversity, and a lot of it probably is contributed to my ancestors and the ancestors of the other Native people around here because I think there's a misconception in hunter-gathering that we just kind of picked things and let them alone, but we really cultivated and cared for the plants because in return they were taking care of us.

So I picked something to kind of show you all that I think people should grow more often in their own yards, and this is California bay laurel.

It's of, like, the bay leaf plant, similar to the stuff that you, you know, put in your beans and your stews and stuff, but this one is a lot more floral, and it's a great insecticide.

Mosquitoes, flies, like all those annoying, pesky, little bugs, you can actually take the leaves and put them on a tray, and before you step into your house, you can step onto those leaves and release the smell, and that will help keep bugs out of your house, and so if you grow a bay laurel plant, then you have an abundance of these beautiful leaves keeping the bugs away.

I don't recommend that anyone gathers them now because we don't have access to caring for the land like we used to, and so I really want people to care for their own plants in their own yards, and so if you'd like to smell it.

Masters: Oh, I'd love to, yeah, yeah.

Especially with the rain, it's like... Johnson: Oh, yeah.

Masters: Oh, wow.

Casey, you got to... Schreiner: This is my jam right here.

Johnson: Yeah.

Ha ha ha!

Mine, too.

Schreiner: I love that stuff, yeah.

Johnson: Yeah, and you can cook with it, but it is really strong.

If everyone picked a bay laurel tree, then the tree would be bare.

Masters: Yeah.

Plant it in your backyard.

Johnson: Plant it in your backyard, but what I would love to see is hiking enthusiasts and people who are interested in plants looking up their invasive plants in the area.

Find your invasives and find what they're useful for.

Masters: And so in historical times, these trails, including possibly the Gabrielino Trail, would lead you up to, well, to your friends, your-- Johnson: Yeah, yeah.

Part of the hunter-gatherer, nomadic lifestyle is that you meet the plants where they're at, and so there's an abundance of beautiful medicines that are by the coast, that are up here in the mountains.

There's lots of food up here, and there's lots of food down there.

Masters: You literally had to hike, but that's like a completely different concept of hiking than we have today, and one of the people who really helped popularize that concept was Will Thrall?

Schreiner: Yes.

Will Thrall came out here from Connecticut late 1800s, kind of a sickly kid, but really wanted to be out in nature because that was sort of the dominant philosophy at the time.

Like, if you got out in the fresh air, if you had a physical activity, you were in good spirits, and you were a healthy, good person.

Masters: I mean, there's some truth to that, right?

Schreiner: There was some truth to that, but he hiked these mountains with the early settlers and homesteaders who were up here and got to know all of them personally.

He wasn't necessarily, like, a professional doing this.

He was just the guy who knew a guy.

Ended up getting a career with the L.A. County Department of Recreation and Parks once they started kind of promoting outdoor recreation in all these great hiking resorts during the hiking era.

Masters: So he helped drive people up into the mountains onto these older indigenous onto these older indigenous trails.

Was he aware of this indigenous knowledge about the use of plants?

Schreiner: He formed a group called the San Antonio Club, which is kind of an early Boy Scout, Sierra Club style hiking group, and he was up here, and he admitted that he didn't really know much about what was here.

A lot of the writing you can tell he's sort of, like, making things up as he goes, but he did try to search out experts, which included the indigenous folks who were up here, and let them tell their stories in their way.

So the public was better informed by these experts.

He wanted other people to get up here and enjoy these places.

He was an early booster and early driver for outdoor recreation and hiking as we know it.

Masters: So Thrall advocated hiking as a form of physical exercise, but as you're saying, it's more than just that, right?

He wanted you to commune with the surrounding landscape.

Schreiner: Exactly.

Masters: So Thrall was well aware of the--you know, the indigenous history here, but a lot of the hikers who come up here today, the landscape they enjoy is really the product of thousands of years of indigenous cultivation.

Johnson: Yeah, absolutely.

Masters: Samantha, what do you hope people who hike up here take away from this landscape that your ancestors have been in for so long?

Johnson: I think there's this really interesting and heartbreaking rhetoric in California that this pristine land that we all live on and love just kind of happened, and, you know, that no one was here before, and all of a sudden, these people found it and it was discovered, and no one had ever existed here before, but really, what happened is that my people and many other Tongva and many other native tribes survived multiple waves of genocide, and so you know what I would love to see more often is just recognizing that there were people who were here before and there are people who still are here trying to live and trying to survive in our ancestral home.

Schreiner: It is really interesting, too, because the San Gabriel Mountains had some of the first federally designated wilderness areas, and when the Wilderness Act was passed, we got some of the first ones here, and there's this concept of wilderness, especially in that federal form of untouched, pristine land, but you're 100% right.

There were people here cultivating that land, and you even see that in the fire policy here in California, where we sort of said, "Stop, don't touch these forests," for a long time, and then they ended up burning even worse than they would before, and it was because people were here tending them and taking care of them that they were in a balanced ecosystem before that.

We have a lot to learn from the things that we've forgotten in the past.

Johnson: Yes, absolutely.