LandNotes

CNN Screen Capture

There’s nothing like a cover up to launch a media frenzy—or a campaign!  Right now, all eyes are on TPL’s wrapping of the Hollywood Sign, and Cahunega Peak’s conservation star blazes brightly. But the Save Cahuenga Peak: Home of the Hollywood Sign campaign –like Tinseltown fame–will be brief, and life as we know it will again resume as the dust settles in April.

For TPL, “life as we know it” means saving land that people love best, all across the nation. The peak that is home to the Hollywood Sign will join a host of iconic sites that loom above the landscape and signify place to locals and visitors alike. 

What spot near you says “home” each time you see it?   Use the “Leave a Reply” box to tell us about your iconic landscape.

Photo: Rich Reid

Unless you have been locked in a closet for the last couple of days, you probably know that TPL is involved in a high-profile campaign to protect Cahuenga Peak, which looms behind and to the left of the Hollywood Sign as viewed from downtown Los Angeles.

The sign is an American icon, and the peak is a huge remnant open space in the heart of the Southern California megalopolis.  Due in part to the proliforation of blogs and social media, this project already has attracted more attention than any other in TPL’s history.  The only one that came close was our protection of 100 acres of woods at Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond in the late 1980s.  But that was when “facebook” was a nonsense word and a “tweet” was a noise that a bird makes.

You can check out the campaign website to learn more about the effort.

But our topic of the day is not the campaign itself, but the photo (above) that adorns the front of the official campaign brochure.  TPL’s marketing team has been beavering away for months getting ready for this campaign, our departmental quarters littered with brochures, case statements, pledge forms, bumper stickers, campaign buttons, website designs, post cards, and tee shirts–most of which read “Save Cahuenga Peak.”

But this photo?  The first time I saw it, I thought, “wherezat?”  You have got to hand it to Rich Reid (a photographer whose work I admire) for traipsing around one of the most settled corners of the nation to capture that reservoir masquerading as a mountain lake before nearly unsullied peak.

But isn’t the whole point that Cahuenga Peak is one of the last open places in a sea of development?  I argued strenuously for an image more like this one . . .

Photo: BAU10

. . . but, as is more and more the case these day, I was overuled. 

What do you think?  Beauty shot, or the mountain as jewel but in an urban setting?  To me the second photo better makes the case for why this conservation effort is so important.