Pasadena Hunt Club Monument

In a somewhat out of the way corner in the Angeles National Forest, you can find a lasting monument to the Pasadena Hunt Club.

Pasadena Hunt Club

Back in the late 1890s and well into the 1900s, the Angeles National Forest was home to the Pasadena Hunt Club, an august association of blue-blood Pasadena gentlemen who would retire to the seclusion of the forest to participate in British-style fox hunts. Or at least that’s the conclusion we can draw from a long-standing monument and remains of a stone building that can be found a short distance from the Gabrielino Trail, just beyond NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

There isn’t a lot of information about the Pasadena Hunt Club. It’s not even certain how much actual hunting of foxes was done — although perhaps their quarry was obtained from the nearby Schleicher’s Silver Fox Farm on Mt. Lowe.

All we really know about the Pasadena hunt Club is that one Edmund Lockett had something to do with it, as evidenced by his name on the monument.

Lockett owned a gravel and a cement company (E. Lockett & Sons) that used to be located next to the railroad tracks at 552 S. Raymond in Pasadena (it’s now part of a U-Haul Self-Storage facility).

Around the marker you can see the remnants of a stone house with a fireplace and what appears to have once been a small fountain. Nothing is certain about the site, but it seems quite possible that this was once the club’s lodge.

You can’t see this relic of a past age from the Gabrielino Trail, but there is a small track leading off the northwest side of the trail to the lodge. The site was always been somewhat hidden, but after the 2009 Station Fire and subsequent flooding that reshaped the landscape in this particular part of the forest, the monument was half-buried under soil. In recent years, however, it seems to have been mostly uncovered.

Not the Valley Hunt Club

The Pasadena Hunt Club is not to be confused with the very similar sounding Valley Hunt Club, the organization that claims responsibility for beginning the Tournament of Roses Parade held each year in Pasadena. Unlike the Pasadena Hunt Club, the Valley Hunt Club still exists as a very exclusive club (with a cost of around $20,000 to join) hidden behind high hedges at 520 S. Orange Grove Blvd.

So while the Pasadena Hunt Club is distinct from the Valley Hunt Club (although they operated at the same time), it’s possible that Edmund Lockett could have been a member of both.

There are records of an Edmund Lockett serving as an aide for the Tournament of Roses Association (from an article in the December 31, 1896 edition of the Los Angeles Herald). In fact, according to the article, he was present in the second float of that year’s parade.

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Pasadena Hunt Club Monument

• Gabrielino Trail, Angeles National Forest
• GPS Coordinates: 34.217750, -118.175517 [ Google Maps ]
• what3words: ///hung.gently.added

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