Newhall unincorporated, CA

The Newhall Pass is where Interstate 5 and Highway 14 squeeze through the hills into the Santa Clarita Valley, and unincorporated Newhall, a thin Los Angeles County band, lines the frontage road on the valley side of that gap. A mobile home community along The Old Road holds most of the households, and the rest are scattered houses on slopes and canyon mouths, each one its own situation. There are no blocks to compare, so the variation is simply between the busier land by the freeway and the quiet parcels tucked back toward the hills. Santa Clarita Woodlands Park spreads across thousands of acres of the Santa Susana range, with Towsley Canyon's loop trails starting minutes from the frontage road, and East and Rice Canyons just up the road, where tar seeps still ooze up from the ground. For a night out, Old Town Newhall is a short drive east. Main Street there has a Laemmle movie theater, the Canyon Theatre Guild's stage productions, and a spread of restaurants, pubs and wine bars. Groceries and coffee are closer, in the shopping centers along The Old Road in Stevenson Ranch. The tradeoff is that unincorporated Newhall has no center of its own. There is no park with a playground, no library and no main street inside the area, so every errand means borrowing someone else's town, and the steady drone of trucks on the 5 is part of the backdrop at home. The upside is that the commute and the trailhead sit almost on top of each other. Someone living here can be on the freeway toward the San Fernando Valley in a few minutes or be alone on a canyon trail in about the same time.