Big Santa Anita Canyon is located in the “Front Country” of the San Gabriel Mountains above the cities of Sierra Madre and Arcadia, California. The multi-forked watershed was known historically as The Big Santa Anita and is currently referred to by it’s many frequenters as simply “The Canyon“. It is home to 81 rustic cabins, a working pack station, a historic mountain camp, and a waterfall. The canyon is best described by the following excerpt a the 1920’s short story by Charles Francis Saunders:

Sturtevant Falls
Sturtevant Falls

A beautiful trail is this of Sturtevant’s, passing from shadow to sunshine and from sunshine to shadow again, its higher stretches companioning the tumbling waters of a foamy, energetic mountain brook, the Big Santa Anita, called Big, as I take it, not because it is really big, but because Little Santa Anita is less. Clinging to the slopes of the gorge, in the cool twilight cast by Big-Cone Spruces, Bays and Water Maples, are the cottages and cabins of city folk who thus take their mountain air with a dash of home comfort. These are sometimes clustered so thickly as to seem a sylvan village, and perched about as they are amid the crags, with the musical waters cascading below and a waterfall of respectable dimensions close by, they have a touch of the alpinesque. For the itinerant, two or three boarding-camps, as Sturtevant’s, Roberts’, and Fern Lodge, display the bush of hospitality at a price, their supplies brought up on burro-back from the mountain’s foot. Woodwardias, most regal of Southern California ferns, crowd the stream borders, and in favored situations rise in graceful fountains of five feet or more…

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    • Provide information for visitors
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