Due to their similar names and intersecting paths, it is easy to confuse Conover Fire Road with
Conover Street. In conjunction, starting from Foothill and
Conover Street, the two access roads provide a path into the Ebey Canyon area that doesn't require passage through private property.
Conover Fire Road starts tucked into the gated neighborhood accessed by Oro Vista Ave, off of Ebey Canyon Rd, and contours the hills above the Big Tujunga wash in a southwesterly direction. Near its westernmost point, it intersects
Conover Street as both begin to climb up to The Hog Farm. Whether you approach from the Fire Road (east) side or the
Conover Street (west) side, you'll want to stay on the dirt road that is Conover Fire Road for the coming climb. The paved
Conover Street climb is brutally steep and commonly used by service trucks requiring forest access.
As the climb begins in earnest, stay to the right past two driveways. At the second driveway (a gate clearly marked private) the fire road narrows to a singletrack use path that climbs steeply to another intersection with
Conover Street. From here, the street and the fire road join and climb together to the intersection with
Doty Road just below the Hog Farm.
The Hog Farm was initially, go figure, a hog farm. After that it was an early homebase of one of the first American intentional hippie communities, or communes. The Hog Farm peacenik clowns are well-known for their involvement in the Woodstock music festival and for their hallucinogenic drug use. Nowadays the site is utterly decrepit, replete with mounds of building materials, a gigantic truck in disrepair, and a partially-disassembled PT Cruiser. The junk is junky, but the plateau offers fantastic views of the Big Tujunga valley, Mount Lukens, and the Verdugo Mountains.
Ebey Canyon and Oliver Canyon form a big figure-8 network of fire roads that ring the canyons and meet at Larsen Flat. Each canyon also features singletrack trails that generally criss-cross the canyons, so many combinations of fire road climbs and singletrack descents can be strung together depending on how long you want your ride to be.
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