The call of the river wild

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY

By the time the Santa Ana River reaches Huntington Beach, it has been

channelized, urbanized and engineered into almost total submission.

It’s hard to really call it a river. The waterway, as it flows

through our area, bears no hint of the lovely wilderness in which it

originates.

This past weekend, we visited its headwaters in the San Bernardino

Mountains to see it cascade free and wild down granite boulders,

flowing as a river should.

We left early Friday for Angelus Oaks on Highway 38, about halfway

up the mountain from Redlands to Big Bear.

Vic likes to bird an area in advance of his bird class, to check

the status of the roads and scout for the best spots to stop. Some of

his more dedicated birding students like to tag along, so Bobbie

Miller, Mary Joseph, and Fred and Lorelyn Koehler joined us on Friday

afternoon. Most of the rest of the class would meet Vic in the

evening for an owling foray, then everyone would bird until early

afternoon Saturday.

Personally, I had photography on my mind. Last week, our son Scott

sent me a new Canon EOS 20D digital camera, a model I’ve been

coveting for over a year. On this trip, I was more interested in

photographing wildflowers, babbling brooks and mountain scenery than

birding.

The new camera couldn’t have arrived at a better time. During bird

class the weekend before, I left my trusty Minolta Dimage 7 digital

camera at the U.S. Forest Service research station in the San Dimas

Experimental Forest, where we had stopped for lunch. I set it down

and neglected to pick it up again.

Fortunately, it is a gated and locked facility, and a forest

service employee found the camera right where I had left it. My

Minolta is making its way slowly down the mountain, being handed off

from one forest service employee to the other on his or her way to

and from job sites.

There is nothing like losing an expensive camera to make you feel

really dumb, but having it found and returned to you restores your

faith in humanity.

But enough about my mental lapses. Our Big Bear trip was a feast

for the eyes, ears and nose, and a restorative to the soul. Mountain

wildflowers bloomed in colorful profusion. Brooks tumbled noisily

over boulders in their haste to reach the ocean, and the calls of

Steller’s jays, mountain chickadees and pygmy nuthatches echoed

through the woods.

The air was filled with the wild scent of pine and cedar, plus a

little DEET and citronella as we took steps to repel mosquitoes and

black flies. Everyone stuck his nose into the cracks in the bark of

Jeffrey pines to inhale their faint vanilla aroma.

While Vic and his fellow birders hiked a nature trail at the Civic

Center in Big Bear Lake, I ducked into Wheeler’s Rock Shop, only a

half a mile away. I was in the market for some abalone shells for

Shipley Nature Center. The shells had been gathered by Mrs. Wheeler’s

father in the 1930s for the button industry, but when button

manufacturers switched to plastic, the mother-of-pearl shell buttons

couldn’t compete. The Wheelers still have fabulous specimens of red,

black and green abalone. I selected one of each for Shipley’s

exhibits and picked up a large red one for the Bolsa Chica

Conservancy.

Most of the class gathered for dinner at The Oaks Restaurant in

Angelus Oaks. After dinner, several of us retired to our quaint rooms

at Whispering Pines Cabins across the street, while Vic took the more

hardy students on a nighttime exploration of the dirt roads along the

Santa Ana River. They searched for owls and whippoorwills in the

moonlight, and found some of both.

Early Saturday morning, the group gathered outside the restaurant

as the sky began to hint of the sun’s arrival. Stops at Jenks Lake,

Heart Bar Campground, and the South Fork trailhead yielded plenty of

birds for the class and great photo opportunities for me. The sun

beat down on us at the 8,443-foot Onyx Summit, but crystalline blue

skies dotted with drifting cotton clouds provided a colorful canopy.

We stopped at Stanfield Marsh near Big Bear City for a picnic

lunch, and were pleased to note there are plans for restoring the

marsh. The interpretive displays there reminded us that the San

Bernardino Mountains and associated Mojave Desert comprise one of the

world’s biodiversity hotspots, with many endemic species. A stop at

the Discovery Center near Fawnskin completed our birding day and the

class disbanded.

On Sunday, Vic and I explored a bit more, bouncing along dirt

roads that paralleled the Santa Ana River near Seven Oaks. We stopped

at a bridge and were rewarded with a good look at a juvenile dipper,

a jaunty robin-sized bird that dives into mountain streams in search

of insect larvae. Satisfied with our weekend in the mountains, we

headed home.

Good news greeted us when we arrived home. We learned by e-mail

that the State Lands Commission and Hearthside Homes had finally

reached agreement on the sale of the so-called Fieldstone property.

This was the last parcel of the Bolsa Chica lowlands that remained in

private ownership. The sale is a done deal, and treatment of the

PCB-contaminated soil can begin. We couldn’t be happier.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.