Previously, the mountain was known as Sister Elsie Peak. It has been said that she was a Catholic nun who died while caring for the sick during a smallpox epidemic.

If you have the current Angeles National Forest map, you might notice the words Sister Elsie next to the peak. Before the peak was renamed for Lukens, Sister Elsie Peak honored a beloved Roman Catholic nun, who was in charge of an orphanage for Indian children located in the La Crescenta area.

In the ’20s Lukens was honored with a peak of his own, a 5,000-foot mountain standing high above the Crescenta Valley, whose previous name of Sister Elsie Peak was nebulous (no one knows who Sister Elsie was). The naming of this peak after a man who was deemed “the father of modern forestry” carries great irony. The heavily forested slopes of Mount Lukens had been clear-cut in the late 1800s and have never grown back. But the future of Mount Lukens is being shaped in a way Theodore Lukens himself would approve of. Volunteers have planted hundreds of trees – native big-cone Douglas firs and oaks – snaking up Dunsmore Canyon in Deukmejian Wilderness Park on the slopes below Lukens’ peak. Lukens’ challenge of reforestation is being met today, right here in the Crescenta Valley