Puente Hills, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Puente Hills in Los Angeles, California.

Puente Hills is a rugged enclave where eastern Los Angeles County's suburban character meets chaparral ridgelines, canyon systems and an elevated chain of open hills separating the San Gabriel Valley from the coastal plain to the south.

Positioned between Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, and Whittier, the area occupies an east-west upland extending through Turnbull Canyon Road, Colima Road and Fullerton Road from the Lower San Gabriel River toward the Chino Hills at the San Bernardino County line. Steep slopes and narrow canyon floors break sharply from the surrounding residential grid, with coastal sage scrub, oak-lined drainages and exposed ridges occupying ground that rises hundreds of feet above adjoining communities. Movement through Puente Hills follows winding roads and trail corridors that repeatedly cross saddles between Turnbull, Sycamore, Powder, Brea and Tonner canyons, revealing how strongly topography governs passage across the range. Residential development climbs portions of the northern and southern slopes, yet extensive undeveloped ridges still form a continuous visual barrier between communities on opposite sides of the hills. The result is a greater area whose long ridgeline, deeply incised canyons, preserved habitat and commanding elevation maintain a geographic division that remains conspicuous within the heavily urbanized eastern Los Angeles basin.

What you should know about Puente Hills.

Puente Hills is best known for forming the southern upland of Rancho La Puente, the immense Mexican-era property developed by John Rowland and William Workman after their arrival from New Mexico in November 1841. Rowland applied for the land early in 1842, and permanent title granted in 1845 encompassed 48,790 acres stretching across much of the modern La Puente Valley and surrounding hills. Rowland and Workman established adobe residences near San Jose Creek and built a diversified enterprise based on cattle, sheep, wheat, wool, grapes, wine and brandy. Their partnership divided the property in 1851, giving Rowland 29,000 eastern acres and Workman 20,000 acres to the west. Rowland became California's first large-scale commercial wine producer, and Workman shipped his wine as far as Boston, connecting a still sparsely settled inland ranch with distant commercial markets. Their fortunes separated sharply during the 1870s: Rowland died in 1873 with his property intact, but Workman pledged nearly his entire holding as collateral after entering banking with his son-in-law Francisco Temple. Failure of the Temple and Workman bank during the financial crisis of 1875 transferred most of Workman's estate to lender Elias J. Baldwin and preceded Workman's death the following year. Subsequent subdivision fragmented the great ranch, yet the Puente Hills remained the elevated southern boundary of a property whose nineteenth-century agricultural enterprises helped shape settlement across a substantial portion of eastern Los Angeles County.

Petroleum created a separate industrial chapter when drilling entered the hills during the closing years of the nineteenth century and continued across portions of the range for decades. Oil extraction began in the Puente Hills in 1897, placing derricks and service roads across terrain previously associated principally with grazing and agriculture. The industry expanded during the early twentieth century as Southern California petroleum production accelerated, giving the hills an economic role distinct from the citrus, walnut and avocado cultivation spreading across adjacent lowlands. Petroleum activity persisted into the 1940s around Hacienda Heights, leaving industrial sites embedded among steep slopes that subsequently faced intense residential pressure. A different use of the hills began taking shape late in the twentieth century as large tracts entered permanent conservation, culminating in creation of the Puente Hills Landfill Native Habitat Preservation Authority in 1990. The resulting protected lands joined Turnbull, Sycamore and Powder canyons with other surviving habitat across an east-west wildlife corridor that continues toward the Chino Hills. County ecological boundaries now encompass major remaining habitat from Whittier Narrows and Sycamore Canyon through Turnbull, Powder, Brea and Tonner canyons to the San Bernardino County line. Puente Hills consequently carries an unusual physical sequence in which former ranch ground and petroleum terrain now coexist with one of the largest surviving concentrations of native habitat amid the urban communities of southeastern Los Angeles County.

How to fold Puente Hills into your trip.

Puente Hills works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting the first residence of Whittier's founding Quaker community, among the largest Buddhist complexes in the Western Hemisphere and a former refuse site undergoing conversion into a vast hilltop park.

Begin at Historic Bailey House, whose original wood-framed core was built 1868 by Joseph F. Gerkens and later became the home of Jonathan and Rebecca Bailey. Chicago Quaker financier Aquilla Pickering organized the Pickering Land and Water Company after selecting nearby ground for a new Quaker settlement, purchasing the Thomas Ranch for $69,850 and naming Jonathan Bailey president of the enterprise. The Baileys moved into the ranch house in May 1887, and ten people gathered on its porch four days later for the settlement's first Quaker meeting. Religious services continued there until a dedicated meeting house appeared four months later, and the residence simultaneously functioned as a center of early business and social activity. Jonathan directed development of the young community from the property, including efforts to secure water, before the couple left the house in 1894. Preservation work beginning during the 1970s retained the modest residence on its original site as a rare physical remnant of Whittier's founding period. Continue to Hsi Lai Temple, completed in Hacienda Heights in 1988 after a decade-long effort led by Fo Guang Shan founder Venerable Master Hsing Yun to create an American center for Humanistic Buddhism. The complex occupies fifteen hillside acres and follows architectural principles derived from Chinese Buddhist monasteries, with tiled roofs, courtyards, ceremonial gates and multiple halls arranged along a strong central axis. Its name translates as “Coming West,” connecting the California institution with Fo Guang Shan's origins in Taiwan and Hsing Yun's effort to expand Chinese Buddhist teaching internationally. The temple subsequently became the North American headquarters of the Buddha's Light International Association, placing the Puente Hills within a transpacific religious network whose growth paralleled the late twentieth-century expansion of Chinese and Taiwanese communities across the eastern San Gabriel Valley. Conclude at Puente Hills Landfill Park, where a radically different piece of the hills is being recast after nearly six decades of refuse disposal. The Puente Hills Landfill operated from 1956 until 2013 and became the nation's second-largest landfill before its closure. A park plan approved in 2016 envisioned conversion of the immense engineered landform into public recreational, educational and cultural ground, using the site's scale and elevated topography as central design conditions. The progression moves from the domestic center of Whittier's nineteenth-century Quaker settlement through a major center of Chinese Buddhism and culminates atop a former landfill being remade as public landscape, revealing three dramatically different human uses of the hills surrounding the San Gabriel Valley.

MAKE IT REAL