Marge Feinberg’s 1974 Master’s Thesis envisioned a wilderness trail encircling the San Fernando, La Crescenta, and Simi Valleys and adjacent mountain ranges, helping lead to a California law establishing the Rim of the Valley Trail Corridor in the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy Zone. Her more than twenty-five years of volunteer efforts encouraged the formation of an interlinking system of parks, trails, open space, wildlife habitat, and recreational opportunities within the mountain areas. In 2000, State Senator Sheila Kuehl introduced legislation naming the backbone of that system and the thread intended one day to tie it together the Marge Feinberg Rim of the Valley Trail. The Rim of the Valley Trail Corridor is the Conservancy’s jurisdictional boundary encircling the edges of the San Fernando, La Crescenta, and Simi Valleys to the south, and large portions of the Santa Clara River from its headwaters by Palmdale to the Santa Clarita Woodlands by the City of Newhall. Integral with the protected lands and trail systems of the Angeles National Forest, the corridor has as its core the San Gabriel, Verdugo, and Santa Susana Mountains and the Simi Hills. Narrow connections under or over freeways still allow wildlife to move between these ranges, and these vulnerable wildlife corridors are critical to the long-term presence of larger animals including the bobcat, American badger, mule deer, grey fox, long-tailed weasel, and especially the mountain lion.
