Paradise Preserved : Prop. A Funding Secures Forested Oasis in Santa Susanas as Parkland

Ascending the dramatic slopes of the Santa Clarita Woodlands on a sunstruck day, Rorie Skei can barely contain her affection for the place and what lives there.

“Aren’t you a pretty thing,” she murmurs to a rare Cooper’s hawk that has lighted in a barren tree alongside the old oil road toiling up the flanks of rugged Pico Canyon.

Near a stream that spills through Rice Canyon, a slender valley oak has strewn the footpath with acorns the size of a large man’s thumb. “The trees are so vigorous,” Skei exclaims as she gathers a handful. “They’re so happy to be in parkland.”

The happiness quotient of trees is debatable, but no one can dispute that the trees--and the hawk, stream and everything around them--are definitely in what is and will be parkland for many generations.

Whatever else it accomplished, last November’s election guaranteed park status for most of the biologically unique Santa Clarita Woodlands, a high, wet and lushly forested oasis in a Los Angeles basin known primarily for dryness and scrub.

In passing the parks bond issue known as Proposition A, Los Angeles County voters handed a gift to Woodlands preservationists like Skei, a division chief for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

The gift was $2.45 million for the conservancy to finish buying 2,184 acres that form the trunk and vital organs of the proposed 7,000-acre Santa Clarita Woodlands park on the north slope of the Santa Susana Mountains.

The Woodlands are a quilt-work of vegetation uncommon to the Los Angeles area--forests so dense they form canopies overhead; rare stands of mixed conifers and hardwoods such as ash; entire forests of valley oaks, a species of tree that is the subject of intense preservation efforts elsewhere in California; chokecherry trees, which don’t grow in the Santa Monicas, the San Gabriels, or even elsewhere in the Santa Susanas, and California needle grass, the state’s most important native grass.

The conservancy agreed to buy the land from Chevron Corp. for $4.9 million--at about $2,000 an acre, a bargain--in April 1995. Chevron also donated 851 acres of Pico Canyon.

The conservancy gave half of the $4.9 million as a down payment, and had five years to come up with the remainder or perhaps lose the land. Thanks to the passage of Proposition A, a check for the second half is expected to be issued early this year by the curiously named Los Angeles Open Space District, which administers the $319 million generated by the bond issue.

The conservancy opened the bulk of the Chevron lands to the public in early 1996. Pico Canyon, which includes the 19th century ghost oil-town Mentryville, a prime candidate for development as an historical attraction, has been open on a limited basis since last May.

The area encompassing the Woodlands park runs along the west side of the Golden State Freeway, just north of the Antelope Valley Freeway interchange. Administered by an arm of the conservancy, it now is composed of about 4,000 acres of public open space, including about 500 acres owned by Los Angeles County. At its southeastern edge it abuts Los Angeles’ O’Melveny Park.

For all its beauty and importance, the Chevron acreage is not the apex--scenically and geologically--of the expansive park that proponents envision. That distinction belongs to about 3,000 acres along the crest and upper north slope of the Santa Susanas--including 3,747-foot Oat Mountain--that remain in private hands.

“The park that we have now, most of it is pretty low,” says Don Mullally, a retired teacher and naturalist who was an early proponent of a Woodlands park and has written extensively on its natural characteristics. “It comes halfway up the mountain range. We’ve got the lower half, and now we need the upper half, and we don’t have any of it. That’s the part that bugs me the worst--the fact that we don’t own it, and that’s some of the nicest up there.”

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The Santa Susanas separate the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys. Viewed from the floor of the San Fernando Valley, the pale, grassy south slopes of the mountains provide little hint of what lies on the other side.

But over the ridge line, the north slope is so deeply green, it might be mistaken for a Central or Northern California woodland. “It’s the finest example in our zone of true forest wilderness,” Skei says.

On its upper reaches, stands of pointy, serrated big-cone Douglas fir trees strain skyward. They, as well as abundant canyon live oak, are unusual at such elevation.

“To find the Douglas firs elsewhere, you’d have to go up to 10,000 feet in the Angeles National Forest,” Mullally says. “Here they come down to about 1,400 feet. Canyon live oak also comes down to its lowest elevation. We don’t know if it’s the environment, or if it’s a special genetic type of the oak. Usually this type of tree is a high-mountain tree; it grows up in the mountains where it snows a lot.”

Mullally speculates a number of natural forces converge to make the Woodlands unique. Its relatively high elevation--which makes for some of the most stunning vistas in Southern California--keeps it 10 to 15 degrees cooler than the valley floors. Light snow is common above 2,500 feet, and average rainfall is about twice that of the land below. Numerous waterfalls and year-round streams traverse the area’s canyons, which fold in complicatedly on one another.

Also, the Santa Susanas emerged from beneath the ocean much later than the Santa Monicas or the San Gabriels, Mullally says. Consequently, their rock is made up of crumbly marine sediment that holds water well and allows tree roots to penetrate deeply.

Most of the Woodlands have an understory of cool-burning grass, rather than the hot-burning chaparral that is more typical of Southern California. The Woodlands’ trees thus readily survive wildfires and grow to locally unusual old ages.

The stands of trees, broken by grassy meadows, provide cover and foraging ground for mountain lions, black bears, bobcats, deer and other wildlife. The lands of the proposed park, Skei says, are vital to the conservancy’s plans to establish a long-term wildlife habitat linking the various mountain ranges in the region.

“The linkage now runs from the Los Padres National Forest over to the San Gabriels and the Angeles National Forest,” Skei says. “As long as we keep the habitat flowing south--the Simi Hills, the Santa Susanas and the Santa Monicas--we guarantee the survivability of large mammal wildlife. Otherwise, the various populations become isolated and inbred. You can have lots of pretty, open area and still have a desert, biologically speaking.”

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The conservancy’s strategy in creating the park has been to buy parcels that block access to scenic acreage that otherwise might tempt developers.

In 1989, it acquired for $500,000 145 acres in Towsley Canyon--an area now known as Ed Davis Park--and effectively stymied the possibility that the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts would open a garbage dump in the canyon.

A year later, the conservancy bought 22 acres at the entrance of East Canyon for nearly $5 million--nearly $240,000 an acre. The purchase, though costly, blocked commercial access to the scenic canyon, which was owned by Chevron, and decreased access to the rest of the Chevron property.

The purchase of the Chevron land in 1995, in turn, tightened the access noose around the 3,000 acres of privately owned high ground the conservancy covets for the park. Its purchases effectively have blocked access from the north side of the mountains. The Southern California Gas Co. storage fields at the end of Tampa Avenue in the San Fernando Valley block access from the steeply pitched southern side.

Skei is optimistic about the conservancy’s prospects for acquiring the remaining lands.

“I think we’re in a good position. I don’t think it’s going to be expensive. There are a number of very willing sellers who have been knocking on our doors for years, but they may have a value in mind that may not be supported by appraisal. It’s more a matter of matching willing sellers to available funding.”

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About 1,200 of the most beautiful remaining acres exist on what is known as the Orcutt Ranch, owned by various members of the family founded by Union Oil pioneer William Orcutt.

William Guasti, one of the owners, says family members “want to see the land preserved in the pristine manner that my grandfather envisioned when he bought that land almost 100 years ago.”

That doesn’t mean, however, the family is eager to sell to the conservancy, he says.

“I don’t think the family at this point would be interested in that for the simple reason we’ve preserved the place up there for many, many years at our expense. There’s been no income to speak of from that ranch, and we’ve paid taxes and insurance and everything. We’ve been grazing cattle up there for some time, but can only run about 100 head at a time, which is all that land can usually support. I think the family is more interested in keeping the land in the condition it’s in.”

Park or no, it is unlikely that the scenic high slopes of the Santa Susanas will ever be given over to expensive home sites, as has happened in the Santa Monica Mountains, Guasti says.

“We don’t have anything in mind like that at all,” he says. “The land’s got a problem with ingress and egress. It’s got very severe slopes. By the time you got roads and bridges and pumping stations up there, it would be an awful lot of money. Just grading that land would be a humongous task.”

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The high ground is unsuitable for development for another reason--its unusual vulnerability to earthquakes, Don Mullally says. The Santa Susanas rose an estimated 16 inches during the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently reported the area has risen an additional 6 inches since.

“The strongest effects of the Northridge earthquake were felt up in those Santa Susana Mountains,” he says. “They had huge numbers of rock slides and earth slides, tremendous erosion. It would be a very dangerous place to live. After the earthquake you could go up on those ridges and see where they were split and soil was actually thrown out of the ground. If you had a house up there on those ridges, your house would be thrown right up in the air. Earthquakes tear the hell out of it.”

It would seem the conservancy can afford to play a waiting game in regard to the remaining acreage. In the meantime, Skei says, it can take pride in what it’s wrought so far in the Santa Clarita Woodlands.

“Sometimes you read our brochures and press releases, and we use the words ‘exceptional,’ ‘invaluable,’ and so on, but with this property, we really mean it,” she says. “You can’t save everything, that’s why you’ve got to concentrate on the best.”

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Access to Woodlands The main entrance to the proposed Santa Clarita Woodlands park is at 24255 The Old Road, Newhall, a quarter mile west of the Calgrove Boulevard exit from the Golden State Freeway. The entrance is marked by a sign reading Towsley Canyon Park.

Information on trails leading to various canyons in the Woodlands is available at a visitors’ center inside the main entrance.

The Woodlands park is open from sunrise to sunset daily. The park’s Pico Canyon, which includes the ghost town of Mentryville, is open only the first and third Sundays of the month, from noon until 4 p.m.