Hikers make 2 fairy-tale forest finds

There are places in the woods where nature and civilization intersect to create a mystery.

How else to explain the ceramic storybook bunny village that Mike Hazzard and Ed Schlegel discovered in the Santa Ana Mountains? Here, where there should have been nothing at all, was a scene the two experienced hikers found delightful and bizarre.

“It’s eerie,” said Hazzard, 49, an environmentalist and outdoorsman for most of his life.

Then it happened again; they learned of a similar find just 10 miles away.

Was southern Orange County in the early stages of a strange epidemic of toy towns popping up in its forests and fields?

“I have no explanation,” Hazzard said. “It’s just so weird.”

The pair’s journey into nature’s nether zones began in 2004, volunteering with the conservation group Trout Unlimited.

They were bushwhacking through chaparral in search of endangered southern steelhead trout when they came across a small clearing in the San Mateo Wilderness north of Camp Pendleton, about 15 miles east of San Juan Capistrano and near where Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties meet.

Nestled neatly under the sage, in a hard, flat area choked with dust, was a tidy village of ceramic houses and bunny figurines. The eight houses stood 5 to 7 inches tall and featured chimneys and steep roofs of gleaming green, yellow and pink. Scattered among them were 11 miniature bunnies.

“I just looked off to the side,” recalled Schlegel, 65, a retired Los Angeles County fire captain who spotted the village first, “and there were the little ceramic houses like gingerbreads. I thought, ‘This is strange’ -- it was definitely placed there, but who knows with what intent?”

Noting its exact location on a map, the friends returned to their hidden “Bunnyville” several times over the next few years, and each visit gave the mystery new depth. They noticed that the toy village was well maintained; the foliage surrounding it neatly clipped and the ceramic houses polished and cleaned. Once they found footprints.

“Obviously somebody holds it in high regard,” Hazzard said. “It’s definitely someone’s secret spot.”

At social gatherings they’d talk about the bizarre ceramic village with their friends.

Then one night Schlegel told the story again.

“Sounds kind of like something I saw,” one man replied.

What he saw, it turned out, was another miniature ceramic village, this one with more of an alpine theme, in the same forest, atop a mossy rock ledge.

“I was amazed,” said John Kaiser, 67, leader of the Sierra Club team that had come upon the alpine village more than a year before.

Like the bunny village, the alpine hamlet consisted of several miniature buildings inhabited by tiny figurines. Instead of glistening chimneys, however, its houses featured snow-covered roofs. And this one was occupied by horse-drawn carriages bearing children and a pickup full of Christmas trees.

Schlegel and Hazzard have no theories regarding the villages’ origins or what they represent.

Their sheer eeriness, however, has found its way into his dreams, said Schlegel, who admits to harboring visions of enormous bunnies bearing smirks.

Yet the nightmares haven’t stopped him from keeping an open mind.

“Who knows what we’ll find next?” he said. “Perhaps it’ll be giraffes.”