At the Edge : As City Encroaches, Forest Service Crafts Plan to Manage Wilderness

As branches slapped him head to toe, George Duffy fought his way through a thicket of brush lining a narrow creek that angled into the wilderness.

Duffy, on a six-mile hike in the San Gabriel Wilderness of Angeles National Forest, emerged from the brush and leapfrogged over a gin-clear pool to stand at the base of a granite cliff. A veil of water, filling the air with a richly cool fragrance, cascaded at his feet.

“You’d never know man’s been here. But what blows me away,” the 55-year-old Duffy said, “is you could get in your car not far from here and be in the Los Angeles Civic Center in one hour.”

That is the riddle Duffy faces as the head of an effort to determine how the U.S. Forest Service should manage two vast areas of the Angeles forest that are set aside as wilderness reserves not far from Southern California’s 14 million people.

Under the federal Wilderness Act of 1964, 100 million acres in America are designated as places “where Earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

In many ways, these two pieces of the Angeles fulfill that description.

Covering close to 80,000 acres, the San Gabriel Wilderness and the Sheep Mountain Wilderness, along California 39 north of Azusa, abound with flora and fauna. Below mile-high peaks, winding streams course ice cold through severe canyons. Only the hardiest of hikers can traverse much of the terrain. You are as likely to hear a songbird or rattlesnake, or see a deer, coyote, or bighorn sheep as to encounter another human.

Compared to the rest of the Los Angeles area, they are places of solitude.

Yet the crushing presence of urban life intrudes. Visitors hack live trees for firewood. Weekend gold miners gouge out stream beds. Mountain bikers violate the ban on mechanized vehicles. And at the portals of the wilderness, litter abounds.

Now, after years of an essentially hands-off policy, Forest Service officials say they want to develop a specific plan for the separate wildernesses.

The Forest Service has little presence in the wilderness because no rangers are assigned there full time. Officials say they do not even know how many people visit the areas. The Forest Service, environmentalists and outdoor groups agree that management of the wildernesses is problematic because they are so close to an urban area.

“We’re trying to . . . manage those wildernesses . . . so that the only trace of man is footprints,” said Michael J. Rogers, Angeles supervisor. “We’d like to accommodate as many users as we possibly can without detracting from the wilderness.”

Rogers, complaining of budgetary restrictions, acknowledges that the wildernesses have been “minimally managed.”

A Forest Service booklet on the wilderness planning project acknowledges as much. “Education of forest visitors regarding wilderness values, ethics and behavior has been virtually nonexistent,” it says. Consequently, “The wilderness is being used in ways which leave significantly more evidence of human presence than is appropriate and may cause disruption of wildlife behavior.”

To look at these issues, Angeles forest officials last fall began a process designed to produce a written plan by December. This month the Forest Service is holding a series of workshops in locations from La Canada Flintridge to Palmdale, Wrightwood and Glendora. The next workshop will be from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday in Glendora at Sellers School, 500 N. Loraine Ave.

In an attempt to solicit involvement, the Forest Service last fall mailed 1,500 booklets to those who had expressed interest in the wildernesses. The booklet asked for comments.

Responses have come from groups as different as the Forest Preservation Society, the Sierra Club and the California Off Road Vehicle Assn.

The Forest Preservation Society asserted that the problem is not overuse but overall encroachment of the Los Angeles megalopolis.

“If you go into the interior of the San Gabriel Wilderness or Sheep Mountain Wilderness, you could spend a week there and not see anybody,” said David James Sr., society chairman.

But, he said, what cannot be avoided is the city’s impact. “You can feel the city, see the city, hear the city, taste the city.”

James lives on the edge of the Sheep Mountain Wilderness in a turn-of-the-century structure, built on private land on a homestead established before the Angeles was created.

He cited a litany of problems: Smog. Light pollution. Jets buzzing overhead. More and more cars, trucks and motorcycles in and around the forest. Encroaching housing development.

“In many areas, you find communities building right up against the forest and into the forest. The agency is ill-prepared to deal with it,” he said.

The Forest Service, he said, has failed to address this with its new plan.

“What they’re doing is just going through the motions of checking off all the appropriate boxes on the Manila folders, in order to get their funds,” he said.

Likewise, off-roaders are critical of Forest Service management, saying that hikers are overusing the wilderness and that the problem might be alleviated by tighter regulations such as fees for hiking.

“The areas need to be managed to a much higher degree,” said Kurt Hathaway, a Tujunga resident and secretary of the California Off Road Vehicle Assn.

Hathaway complained that the Forest Service over-regulates off-road activities but under-regulates hiking and camping in the wildernesses.

“Reducing another person’s recreation is not the heart of the issue,” he said, “but rather that all users of public lands get the same fair and consistent treatment.”

Joyce Burk, who is chairwoman of the Sierra Club’s Southern California Forest and Wilderness Committee, said she agrees with off-roaders on this point. “We both need to get out of the riparian areas,” she said.

As for a solution, she said she favors creating more hiking trails away from streams and up on ridges.

Where George Duffy hiked the other day, along the canyon bottom where Bear Creek flowed waist-deep from winter rains and snow melt, there was no trail. It had washed out. Where he had turned, on instinct, to look for a waterfall on a tributary, there also was no trail.

Black beetles ambled underfoot. A water snake slid into the underbrush. Not far away, prints of a doe and her fawn marked the sand, and there were boulders as big as Volkswagens.

After Duffy let the spray of the waterfall wet him, he made his way back to Bear Creek. Then the ranger, who has hiked all over the world from the Adirondacks to the Himalayas, said, “Boy, that was a gem.”

Plan for Wilderness Area Covering close to 80,000 acres, the Sheep Mountain and San Gabriel wilderness areas consist of deep, steep canyons coursed by winding rivers and mile-high peaks accaccessible only to the hardiest hikers. Mechanized vehicles are forbidden. But pressure on the wild areas are building from the surronding metropolis of Los Angeles. After years of “minimal management”, the U.S. Forest Service is now developing a plan on how to balance public use with preservation of the wild state.