Residents of Canyon Struggle to Preserve Rustic Life

There are no malls, movie theaters or cafes at the mouth of San Francisquito Canyon. It’s scrubland--dried grasses and cactus.

Drive into the canyon, past where the Butterfield stagecoach once ran, and you’ll probably see horses grazing behind wooden corrals. This canyon has a markedly Western feel.

And the people here want to keep it that way.

But as housing development is getting a kick-start from a recovering economy, canyon residents are hearing the groan of tractor engines and watching hillsides be flattened into housing pads.

“My horse traveled the trails here so many times, I could just drop the reins,” said Judy Reinsma, the owner of Sycamore Hill Farm. “Now many of these trails are going to be lost.”

The community also wants to preserve the wildlife and the historical sites. They want to save an endangered “singing” toad, a stickleback fish and a plant that only grows wild within the canyon’s narrow corridors.

The ruins of a once-mighty dam lie here too--the St. Francis Dam, which collapsed almost 70 years ago in California’s second-worst disaster ever. Some of the 450 people who were carried off that night by the torrent are buried in the canyon’s cemetery.

Like Reinsma, many residents also want to preserve their rustic lifestyle, or at least some semblance of the solitude they sought out and found here. “This place used to be a haven for us,” said Reinsma. “I like malls. I just didn’t want to live next to one.”

The canyon seems forever to be marked by the events of March 12, 1928.

At a few minutes before midnight, the force of a landslide strained the St. Francis Dam’s eastern end until the massive concrete structure cracked open.

Built by William Mulholland as a backup reservoir for Los Angeles County, it was three miles long and 180 feet deep. It took an hour to drain.

When the dam broke, a six-story wall of water gushed through the Santa Clarita Valley, on to Piru, Fillmore, then Santa Paula and Ventura--all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Among the state’s disasters, it ranks with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which killed 452 people.

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Today, it takes a rigorous 20-minute hike to reach the ruins. Iron pipes and metal cable twisted by 12 billion gallons of water jut out of slabs of concrete. Pieces of the once smooth and finished parapet, where the night watchman made his rounds, can be made out among the rubble.

Perhaps a more heart-wrenching reminder of the dam’s collapse lies four miles south of the ruins. In a small family cemetery, barely the size of a tennis court and located on a private ranch, there are numerous headstones with March 13, 1928, engraved as the date of death.

Six members of the Ruiz family, ranchers who owned much of the land inside the canyon, were killed in the flood.

“Everyone who lived in this community lost someone in their family,” said Frank Rock, the resident St. Francis Dam expert for the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society. “Most people today have forgotten about it, but back then it was an enormous and tragic event.”

Joyce Ponton, owner of the property where the cemetery sits, says she would like to see the area left alone by builders.

“I think it would be a sin to ever sell this place out to a developer,” Ponton said, standing over the grave of a boy whose body was recovered but never identified. “It would just be a sin. This is one of the worst disasters in state history, and these graves should be allowed to stay here forever.”

The canyon stretches 11 miles from Santa Clarita’s northern border to the mountain hamlet of Green Valley. The walls of the canyon are lined in brush and copper-colored grasses, the canyon’s creek bordered by cottonwood, willow and mulefat trees.

The northern half of the canyon lies inside Angeles National Forest, while the southern portion falls mostly in unincorporated territory of Los Angeles County.

Although the U.S. Forest Service restricts development in the national forest, the county has historically shown great cooperation with builders.

Once zoned primarily for rural and agriculture use, the lower canyon was rezoned for residential use in 1990, according to George Malone, a planner for the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission.

More than 7,000 housing units have either been approved--some are under construction--or are being considered for approval by the county, Malone said. Newhall Land & Farming Co., the largest developer in the Santa Clarita Valley, is building just under 6,000 units, while Newport-based Evans-Collins is seeking approval for its 1,789-unit Tesoro del Valle Project.

Malone said that nobody should be surprised by the building.

“The Santa Clarita Valley has been the subject of hundreds of projects and hearings since 1980,” Malone said. “The development here is not news. There was a change to the plan amendment [governing the area], and residents here have every right to object to it. We know it might be upsetting, but the county will do everything to mitigate the impacts.”

Work has begun on Newhall Land’s 2,500-unit Northpark Project. Entire hillsides have been removed, views and vistas have been altered, traffic and riding trails have been diverted.

John Evans of Evans-Collins says his Tesoro del Valle project will include horse trails that will be open to the public. He said that canyon residents may enjoy their local trails, but noted that many of those trails run across private property, not public parkland.

Newhall Land, which also promises to provide public horse trails, is leaving some of its property open to equestrians while construction takes place.

The promises of new trails do not please many canyon residents, who note that some old trails will be lost to development. They also worry about what will happen when thousands of new residents drive the canyon’s lone entryway, a two-lane highway.

Lt. Steve Dolan of the Sheriff’s Department said that whenever there is an accident on San Francisquito Canyon Road, it often is a bad one. “Whenever we answer a call out there, it’s usually a head-on collision or someone has gone over a cliff,” he said.

Many of the 65 families in the lower canyon have banded together to oppose Tesoro del Valle, which the Regional Planning Commission is scheduled to consider this month. Their protests--and objections from an environmental group and the city of Santa Clarita--have already had some impact. Evans-Collins originally proposed 3,000 units, but scaled back the request after commissioners questioned the size of the project.

But many residents acknowledge that some growth will come.

Ponton says she will miss the canyon’s solitude. “My late husband was a fireman for 31 years,” she said. “We got sick of it, the traffic, the crime. It’s not perfect here--you trade breaking someone into your car for a coyote breaking into your chicken coop. But it’s much more peaceful.”

The traffic noise already bothers one of the canyon’s smaller residents--the Arroyo toad, which possesses a unique trill and will not sing unless it is absolutely quiet. “It doesn’t sound like other frogs,” said Ian Swift, a biological consultant. “It’s a hum, much more melodic then a normal grunt.”

The toad, a gray, fat, stubby-limbed, squashed-looking amphibian, hums like the “phaser” gun from the “Star Trek” TV show. The male toad fills a sack under his chin and blows out air to make his trill, which is really a call to attract female toads. If all is not still, he will halt his performance.

Frank Hovore, a member of the county’s significant ecological areas technical advisory committee, says that all the development will have serious effects on both the toad and the unarmored three-spined stickleback, another endangered species.

Hovore says that a combination of increased pollution, things like fertilizer, motor oil, even normal water runoff into the canyon’s creek, could change its temperature and destroy the animals’ environment.

Although the proposed development is not in the heart of toad or stickleback territory, it would be built nearby. When San Francisquito Canyon Creek dries out during the hot months, the toads bury themselves in the alluvial sands, and the stickleback swim farther up the creek past the old dam or down the creek into the Santa Clara River. Development, Hovore fears, could trap them.

Evans says his company has designed a natural filtering system for the Tesoro del Valle project to absorb the high toxic runoff. The company will create lakes that will be planted with vegetation to absorb toxins. Periodically, the toxic-laden vegetation will be trimmed and hauled away, while the remaining plants will continue to clean the water.

One of the canyon’s oldest acquaintances appreciates the past but sees some benefits in a future of change. He is Jack Ameluxen, who started visiting the canyon 50 years ago but now, retired, lives in Green Valley.

The 73-year-old Ameluxen can remember when the canyon was truly remote, during World War II, because it was simply beyond most people’s reach. “Nobody could spend the gas rations,” he said.

Ameluxen, a former tennis coach, has written a book, “Discover Green Valley,’ about his town of 400 people. He is now writing a book on the canyon.

He believes that there is nothing better for young people than to get outdoors and explore the wilderness. That’s what national forests are for and, luckily for San Francisquito Canyon, part of it falls under the forest’s protection. Perhaps the canyon can somehow survive in two worlds, the rural and the urban, at the same time.

“I think Newhall Land has done a good job building down canyon,” he said. “I don’t think it’s possible to stop progress. So people have to work to help us maintain our community, and we can provide a place to go for a Sunday afternoon picnic.”