I have always had a strangely strong relationship to places. It’s difficult to verbalize, but having a deep familiarity with a locale has been a fundamental way I relate to the world. This extends into mapping fantastic places I’ve read about upon the physical world.

For example, when I spent some summer months of my tweens on the Gulf Islands near Vancouver, the archipelago became Earthsea in my mind. Around that same timeframe, I lived near Altadena. When I “discovered” Tolkien’s works, Middle-earth started imprinting upon the local terrain.

The San Gabriel mountains formed an excellent stand-in for the Misty Mountains. In winter, the clouds sit on the peaks, in Spring, the “June Gloom” does the same, and in the summer, the mountains were nearly hidden by the swirling smog of the late 70s.

The area is filled with places that mapped across those worlds. There’s a windy road above a tributary to the Arroyo Seco that goes through forests of oak and deodar, and in the early evening when the sky grows dark the lights in the windows of houses on the lower slope twinkle mysteriously. It was exactly what Rivendell looked like in my mind’s eye.

As I’d read, local places would overlay. The craggy entrance to Colby Canyon with its guardian trees, the steep drop-off ridges around Mount San Gabriel, the rough-hewn tunnel just down the trail at Eaton Saddle, the rustic cabins among the bright streams and white alder groves in Sturtevant Canyon, the high forested ridges above Ice-House Canyon — all mapped to places within the Lord of the Rings for me.

Decades later, when the blockbuster movies came out, I opted not to see them. The images in my head and the mappings to places I know were too important to be overwritten by Peter Jackon’s vision.

(Disclaimer: this photo has been digitally altered beyond just adjusting color and exposure. I removed telephone poles, a power pylon, and a lot of wires.)