Marking the Anza Trail in the San Gabriel Valley: Campsite 61 at La Primaria

Diego Borgsdorf, the trail's cultural geography and GIS intern, at the Amigos de los Rios site at La Primaria, beside the San Gabriel River Trail. NPS.

The San Gabriel Valley

East of Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Valley runs along the southern foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, divided by the San Gabriel and Rio Hondo Rivers — the ancestral homeland of the Tongva people. Today it is home to two million people in busy, highly diverse cities, freeways, logistics hubs and housing.

Amigos de los Rios, a nonprofit founded there, has worked since 2005 on the Emerald Necklace, a network of green spaces, green schools, parks and trails through underserved communities of the Los Angeles Basin, aiming ultimately to link the mountains to the sea. One of its sites lies in El Monte, between La Primaria Elementary School and the San Gabriel River, beside a 34.5-mile paved bike route. Once a high-traffic corner by the I-605 freeway and Ramona Boulevard, it is now green space full of drought-tolerant native plants, a safe stop for residents and trail users.

Campsite 61

The Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail, part of the National Trails System, commemorates the 1775–76 Anza Expedition, in which more than 240 men, women and children traveled 1,200 miles to found the first non-Native settlement at San Francisco Bay. According to Anza's diary, on January 3, 1776, after two hard river crossings and a long day across the valley floor on Indigenous trails beside the washes, the exhausted party and its livestock could not reach the new San Gabriel Mission before dark. They camped on the west bank of the river, near today's La Primaria — the site known as Campsite 61.

The trail and Amigos de los Rios have partnered to put up interpretive signs at La Primaria telling that story.

Mapping the trail in the city

To build the partnership, the trail brought on Diego Borgsdorf, an intern with the Latino Heritage Internship Program. He is mapping historic sites such as Campsite 61 with GIS software to make new maps of the trail, and visiting other known landmarks around Los Angeles that could become trail sites.

National historic trails run through heavily built cities more often than people realize, but development hides them. Working with groups like Amigos de los Rios, with deep ties to their communities, helps the trail grow its recreation route and share a complex, diverse history with locals and visitors; signs and storytelling panels draw communities in, and the trail plans more such partnerships.

Sources

Based on "Trail Building along the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail in the Heart of the San Gabriel Valley," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.