TRAVELING IN STYLE : UP A CREEK : It’s Hard to Believe That a Place as Wild as the Sespe Outback Is So Close to the Urban Madness

DENNIS MCDOUGAL CLIMBED OFF his new mountain bike, knelt in the dirt and scratched a note to me on the hard-packed trail: “Hi, Bob. I hope you die.”

Looking back, I suspect he was hinting that I had erred in inviting him on the trip. He may have had a point.

When I first heard about this place, with its hot and cold running streams, I was a seasonal employee with the U.S. Forest Service, patrolling the dusty brushland in the mountains east of Santa Barbara. Whenever things got lonely, I would drop by a campfire, and it was there that the backcountry cognoscenti painted a picture of a secret spot they called “the Sespe” in my mind. Before I ever made it there, though, I was off on a decade-long series of city jobs. Then, three years ago, I glimpsed the landscape I’d clutched for so long like a mental oasis.

I was sleeping on a jet, heading home after a blind-rush business trip to Portland, when turbulence dribbled my head against the window. Snapping awake, I stared down through the scratched plastic at the sort of panorama that makes me long for a parachute. Oddly striated rock cliffs framed a wide, wild canyon. Through its center, a seemingly endless creek emerged from groves of trees, caught the sun and flashed semaphore skyward: wilderness, solitude, tranquillity.

Disoriented, I struggled to place this apparently far-off opposite of the urban intensity I called home. Southern Oregon? The Sierra Nevada foothills? Big Sur?

The pilot broke my reverie: “We’re preparing our descent into Burbank. . . .”

Before the landing gears clunked, gashes of new development appeared on hillsides, followed closely by the scars of suburbia. Rivers of cars spilled down the canyons, the air became visible and hundreds of blue swimming pools winked suggestively.

But by then, I was inattentive to that side of the California dream. I had just been seduced by the Sespe. People have accused me of an irrational zeal for the place ever since.

THE ROAD OUT OF OJAI tunnels through mountains, cuts crazy Zs up the sides of steep canyons and does pothole-punctuated whoop-de-dos through Rose Valley’s high plains before ending abruptly at Lion camp in the Los Padres National Forest. It was there, in the last week of April, that five of us launched a pilgrimage into the unlikely emptiness I had seen from above: the largest roadless area so close to a metropolis in the entire United States.

It was my third camping trip into the Sespe. The itinerary was simple. We would ride our mountain bicycles 17 miles downstream to where Sespe Creek and Hot Springs Canyon intersect, set up camp, spend the next day exploring and fishing the creek, and pedal back the following morning.

Set beneath the Piedra Blanca sandstone formations, Lion camp is a popular place for city folks to decompress. But many can’t make a clean break from the cacophony they’ve fled. By 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning, the sizzle of bacon on Coleman stoves was drowned out by dueling boom boxes.

Just a few yards down the trail, though, we were greeted by one of the Sespe’s finest resources: quiet.

“Yeah!” someone shouted, saying all that could possibly be said.

In the ‘60s, a dirt road ran down this canyon. Then the U.S. Forest Service turned its care over to Nature, which has a refreshing disdain for recreational amenities. Here and there, we passed a surviving picnic table, a rusting camp stove or a tin shed that past floods had sent tumbling. But the road itself soon disintegrated into a narrow trail, which recent rains had further assaulted with sharp rocks and landslides. That was OK by us.

There’s something about the Southern California chaparral that stirs up deeply buried frontier fantasies. On one trip into the Sespe, I ran into mountain bikers wearing cowboy hats. Where water bottles were usually fitted to their bikes, they had strapped six-guns.

We brought only fly rods. But the moment our posse’s tires hit the dirt, I think some of us reverted to our boyhoods, when the wild bunch rode Schwinn Sting-Rays. Forget that four of us are married, two have kids, one has a pregnant wife and most have sit-down jobs. Forget that some of us drifted away from serious workout regimens back when Jimmy Carter was President. As I shuddered along the trail, with the snow-encrusted Topatopa Mountains looming and my survival needs cinched firmly to my saddlebags, no one could tell me I wasn’t a modern rider of the purple sage.

I had invited friends into the Southern California backcountry before, only to have them confront me: Why had I cajoled them into hiking so far or pedaling so hard for a look at the emperor’s new clothes? Seen one way, this countryside is uniformly gray, the creek a glaring wash not unlike our own L.A. River. But the glorious subtlety of this landscape was lost on no one in this group.

On one sweeping green plateau, we rode with views down to the creek and up to the snow-packed cliffs. My knobbed tires slooshed over the dirt, spitting rocks. Lizards and horned toads sprinted ahead, then disappeared into the annual grass. Overdosed on clean air and the sharp scent of sage, I stopped, crouched on the trail and watched my sweat drip into the dust. Gradually, my huffing faded, replaced by the hum of bees and the soft flick of moths dogfighting over the buckthorn.

The chaparral is also known as the elfin forest. Like a cranky dwarf in some twisted myth, it demands that you stop and stoop to learn its secrets. That’s the moment when the barrenness opens to reveal a hidden luxuriance. The ecosystem bustles with rodents and reptiles, bugs and birds.

THE HILLS ALONG Sespe Creek had toughed it out through some hard, dry seasons. Now the belated March rains brought the wildflowers out for a manic block party. Purple gilia, orange monkey flowers, larkspur, hyacinth, Mariposa lilies, yellow fiddlenecks and all sorts of sage and thistles humpty-humped and watusied in the hot spring breeze. The lupines were so bright blue that they caught the eye like a finger-fired rubber band.

At every bend in the trail, we were ambushed by extravagant color. Not that we were always in the mood for flower gazing. With the temperature in the low 80s and our bikes overloaded with camping gear, the ride into the Sespe was no cruise down Coast Highway.

The trail rises and falls through the mountains as it follows the creek downstream. Many of the climbs forced us to dismount, dig our sopping boots into the dirt and wrestle our bikes over rocks and scree. And every time the trail crested on some searing ridge, it meandered back to the creek. More often than we liked, we sloshed into the bracing current and picked our way through the shallowest sections, the swollen waters lifting our panniers like pontoons.

By the time we set up camp, on a sandy beach at the mouth of Hot Springs Canyon, everyone was hot, saddle sore and ready to die in a fistfight over some bit of sports trivia. That was the moment swarms of bloodsucking gnats launched Operation Sespe Storm, flying thousands of sorties into our arms, ears and legs.

Before long, though, the wind blew the gnats to oblivion. Moving between two backpacking stoves, Paul Vandeventer, a management consultant from Eagle Rock and organizer of a river-rafting group we call the Danger Boyz, cooked Thai-style spicy rice, green beans and sea bass steaks that he had marinated in lemon butter and frozen at home. George Uribe, an Orange County backhoe operator, pulled a magnum of Sauvignon Blanc from the creek. Our irritation went the way of the gnats.

That evening, we hiked in the twilight a mile and a half up the side canyon, winding through groves of cottonwood, sycamore, bay, alder and oak. Sespe Hot Springs steams up from a rock fissure in the mountain. In the canyon below, its hot water converges with a cold stream pouring down from above. Picking our way through the boulders, we were like the three bears testing porridge. One pool was scalding. Another was lukewarm. Between them, we found a big, knee-deep pond. Just right.

The full moon, usually shrunken and beige over Los Angeles, rose huge above the mountains and blazed white in the pure air. Sitting there in the wide-open freedom, I felt so subversive that I expected to hear the voice of 20th-Century Authority from behind this cosmic cop spotlight: “Attention! You have exceeded the responsible distance from cellular reception!”

But the moonlight proved friendly, sparkling from the fool’s gold in the boulders and illuminating the stones and sand at the bottom of the pool. Salt cedar branches cast flailing shadows as a soul-chilling wind caterwauled down the canyon like some crazed Chumash god. Submerged to our chins, we passed around a bottle of tequila and drank in the night.

“Ah,” someone said, a small waterfall of hot water washing over his tired muscles.

“Hmmm,” someone else interjected.

BEFORE DECIDING TOjoin us on the trip, Dennis, a Times staff writer, had mentioned obligations that might require him to leave early. I guess I didn’t believe him. But Sunday morning, he packed his panniers and, despite our pleas and earnest warnings, hit the trail.

The rest of us left our bikes in camp and hiked down the creek into the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. Since leaving Lion camp, we had seen perhaps a dozen hikers, mountain bicyclists and horseback riders. Hiking down the canyon, we didn’t see a soul.

Here, stands of pine trees spill out of lush side canyons and connect to the cottonwood groves. White boulders, sculpted by some elemental Henry Moore, shepherd the stream into tempting pools.

George and Kirk McKoy, a Times staff photographer, stopped to fish a big hole but eventually took to whittling, their sharp knives laying curls of wood at their feet as their brains shifted to the purposeful pace of another era. Paul and I continued farther down and then moved apart.

Drifting from stone to stone like a sycamore leaf on the creek’s current, I reached a volcanic extrusion of purple rock. Here, the creek gathers force, charges and topples over waist-high waterfalls into a pool with deep caves and ominous eddies, then spurts through big boulders into a long, deep pond. For a while, I stood on the pebble beach, casting a caddis fly into the current, hoping a big trout would rise to the temptation. But the sun was so hot that I began to envy the fish.

Pulling off my sweaty clothes, I dived in. The water, sweet with the scent of the chaparral, drained the heat from my body quickly. I scrambled up over the warm boulders and wedged myself beneath a small cascade, where I looked out at the canyon through the miniature falls. The sky was a flawless blue, the pond translucent green. When I finally crawled out, the wind reversed its role from the night before, quickly baking off the water’s chill. A handful of goldfinches chattered softly. Cliff swallows snagged bugs in midair. Cottonwood leaves flickered.

Just 70 miles to the southeast, a few steep ridges away, people waited irritably for parking slots at look-alike mini-malls. But here, the vast emptiness had a palpable power. There was a moment as I wandered back toward camp alone--fishing through cascading riffles, slogging up the center of a wide, straight stretch of creek, absorbing the details of lichen on rocks and finding new flowers--that I looked up and realized I had lost my bearings. Had I stumbled up a side creek? Passed my camp? A quick thump of panic hit my chest, and not until I was reoriented did I come to an almost joyous realization: There is still a place, this close to home, so big and wild that it can swallow a person whole.

THE IDEA OF ALLthat wildness gives some people transcendent comfort. It makes others squirm. The Sespe is the last free-flowing river of note in Southern California. For years, there has been talk of including it--all 55 miles of it--in the federal Wild and Scenic River system and declaring 335,000 or more acres of the Sespe watershed official wilderness. But there are lots of people who can’t abide a stream that doesn’t contribute its fair share to the California dream they’re determined to expand. So there are also those who want to see the Sespe tamed.

As I sat back in camp, as stress-free as a creek turtle, I wondered if I might not have inadvertently nudged someone into the dam builder’s side of the debate.

Dennis is a backcountry aficionado. He did not need me to convert him. But mountain bicycling is a unique mode of travel, requiring skills that take time to learn and muscles specific to the sport. Just a few hundred yards into our ride, I knew it was a serious mistake for Dennis, who had bought his bike only the night before, to attempt a trip of such length and difficulty. For him to turn around and ride out alone was an act of both guts and hubris.

In fact, just a few hours into his marathon exodus, Dennis was approaching heat exhaustion. Often, he later told me, he let his heavily laden bike topple, crawled lizard-like under a swatch of manzanita shade and said: “OK, God, take me now.”

For the last two hours of the ride, Dennis said, he amused and inspired himself with visions of me as Augustus McCrae, in the final pages of Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove”: He saw me struggling futilely to push my bike up the Sespe trail, with both legs amputated above the knees.

The next day, the rest of us pushed ourselves, riding out in about six hard hours. As we approached the trail head, I had my own vision of Dennis arriving the day before and smashing the windshield of my car. But then I remembered that I had left an ice chest of frigid beer in his trunk. So, instead, we found a note.

“The beer is the perfect touch,” Dennis wrote. “I stopped hating Bob halfway through the bottle.” He added (halfway through a second bottle perhaps): “Sespe in the moonlight made all the unnecessary cardiopulmonary exertion worth it.”

GUIDEBOOK: SESPE CREEK

Getting there: From U.S. 101, take California 33 about 15 miles past Ojai, turn right on Rose Valley Road and follow it 6 miles to the trail head at Lion camp. Fire road No. 6N31 becomes trail No. 20W13, which crosses trail No. 20W12 at Hot Springs Canyon.

Camping: Park in the day-use area at Lion camp. There are several primitive campgrounds along Sespe Creek. Camping is also allowed throughout the area. Campfire permits are required during fire season. There are no fees.

What to take, precautions: Prepare as you would for any wilderness trip, packing plenty of water and a water-filtration device. Summers can be uncomfortably hot. Check with the U.S. Forest Service about potential fire danger. Mountain bicyclists are urged to follow backcountry ethics and etiquette.

For more information: For maps and inquiries, call the U.S. Forest Service, (805) 646-4348. Mickey McTigue’s “Mountain Biking the Coast Range” (Guide No. 4: Ventura Country and the Sespe), available at most bike and outdoor shops, is a good guide, but it should be supplemented with topographic maps and a compass.