BillinGlendaleCA
Malibu Creek State Park was established in 1976, protecting the watershed of Malibu Creek from the Malibu Dam to it’s mouth in Santa Monica Bay. In it’s previous life it had been a private club and then for 40 years the 20th Century Fox movie ranch. My father and I hiked in the park a couple of times in 1977 and there were still quite a few old movie sets dotting the landscape including a large Chinese structure, some sets for Planet of the Apes, and some western buildings including a fort. But the most interesting set was one that was still being used for active filming and that was the set used for the 1970 moving M*A*S*H and the subsequent TV series(1972-1983).
I headed back to the park in February and March of this year to see how it had returned to nature after 45 years and a few brush fires had swept through the area. My first hike in February started at the parking lot on the eastern side of the park and ended prematurely at a washed out bridge about 1/2 a mile from the old M*A*S*H production site. I decided to take a different route for my next hike, this time parking in the Malibu Lake neighborhood park and hiking east down in the the Malibu Creek canyon following the road to the production set.
The park has seating area where the mess tent used to be and informational boards about what used to be there when the area was actively used for the movie and TV series production. What I’ve attempted to do here is try and capture photos of the state park in it’s current state to match the photos that my father and I had taken in 1977. While I didn’t have copies of the old photos on my phone, I did get the correct location for the photos, if not the correct angle.
On The Road – ?BillinGlendaleCA – M*A*S*H 4077Post + Comments (38)
Rosie’s Bar in 2022.