I Found My Thrill on Woodley Hill

We read all about the places like the Alpe, or others that begin with the word Col or Mur, places of legend and lore, and the toils of competition that take place upon them. For the most part those places are the realities of others, but we all, each of us, have our own realities, realities that without too much difficulty could be recited and listed, and pointed to on a map. Check your own list; it is likely there are plenty of Passes (if you've ever lived in a valley, any way out involves a pass), there are the roads that go up, up into the mountains - the GMR's, the Highway 39's, Trash Truck, the Crest. Then there are the canyons, similar to passes in many ways, and often peaking at a pass, places like Topanga, Big T, Little T, Big Santa Anita, Carbon, San Francisquito, Bouquet, and others - mine is a lengthy list, and yours probably is as well.

As long as that list may be, it has a beginning, a #1 to start things off. My list, if I wrote it out, would start off with Woodley Hill. Woodley was one of three hills we knew as kids and the steepest of the trio. Haskell Hill was child's play in comparison, while Balboa Hill was longer, maybe even higher, but more gentle of grade. Funny thing about all three, they only look like hills when approached from the south, or when looking south from their summits. Technically, I suppose, Woodley is more correctly a bench with a sudden steep rise from bottom to top, and a mostly level run from the top to the distant mountains. None of that mattered to a bunch of kids, of course, Woodley was just a means to a challenge, a challenge to ourselves, against one another and, though we could not identify it then, a challenge against the constraints of childhood.

I can't say as that I remember the actual first time we went up Woodley Hill so that, once there, we could turn around and fly down Woodley Hill, helmet-less, on the sidewalk, timing the light at the bottom so that we could roar through the intersection without a thought that some driver might be turning in front of us, and that face full of smile, half excitement half terror, and made all the larger by shot of adrenaline. That time, and those that came after, just kind of blur together, an oatmeal memory, a bunch of individual ones all stuck together. At the time, Woodley would have been the edge of the familiar world; sure, we knew there was more beyond, even would have had occasion to go there, just not by bike, not on our own. Woodley was intimidating, more so than anything that has come along since then. Taking into account the de-mystifying nature of experience, hindsight tells me that Woodley Hill was steeper and longer than any climb or, conversely, descent I have ever done.

Woodley Hill is lined by houses, but only along one side, the downhill side. This might have made screaming down the sidewalk rather hazardous, but there are no driveways and most of the houses, excepting a few at the very top have long lines of steps to the front doors; I've always guessed that most of the people living in those houses enter through the garages lining an alley at the back, rather than climb the stairs at the front. The other side of the street is the grassy expanse of the VA Hospital. At the bottom of the hill, the climb starts immediately at the cross street; I had a pick-up truck once that, unless I got a good running start, I had to floor to get it up the hill at anything like the speed limit. Looking up at the top, there is nothing to see but blue sky, or grey, or brown, depending on the time of year. Vehicles coming down the hill appear out of no where, looking like little hot wheels falling over the edge of the living room couch on a strip of orange plastic. From the top you can see all the way across the Valley and the drop is as precipitous as any modern roller coaster and "that" close to free-fall.

I don't know, today's reality might not live up to the reality of the past. The hill might be the same, but the way I saw it then, is not quite the same as the way I see it now. The first is unlike any that come along after. What was your first, and how does it stack up now?

1969 - probably a couple or so years before the first ascent / descent