Residents Stroll to a Less Hectic Beat in County’s Rustic Canyons

Silverado and Modjeska canyons are wooded retreats in Orange County’s Santa Ana Mountains where birds sing and dogs bark, where men silently hand-carry heavy concrete blocks, one at a time, to build houses on rocky slopes so steep that earthmoving machines are rendered useless.

The canyons are quiet back-eddies that have been left largely untouched by the great wave of construction and development that is washing over the rest of the county with strict CCRs--conditions, covenants and restrictions--that dictate such choices as the color paint an owner can use on his home and the kind of trees that he can plant in his yard.

“There are no CCRs up here,” Jim Antrim, Silverado Realtor and longtime resident, said with a chuckle. “As long as we stick by the county’s (building and safety) code, we can build to suit our fancy.”

So there are homes and cabins made of field stone, logs, concrete block, wood or brick. Their shapes, more often than not, are dictated by the windings of the creek bed or by the presence of huge boulders or old oak and sycamore trees.

Signs of a Life Style

They can be decorated by cow skulls over the front door or old wagon wheels on a wall. Horses graze in front yards, and no neighbors object to such hand-painted signs as “Slow. Adults at play,” or “Slow. Kids and dogs everywhere.”

The struggle to maintain such independence has gone on for as long as anyone in the canyons can remember. Residents recall the celebrated case of the late Charlie Cramp, who in the 1970s battled county animal control authorities because they insisted he get rid of his African pygmy goat. The authorities said it was an exotic animal, rather than a domestic one, and that Cramp didn’t have the proper permits.

“On his deathbed, Charlie was convinced he had won his fight,” said Bob Morris, who now owns and lives in Cramp’s Silverado Canyon home which is marked by a small sign, El Dumpo. “He never knew that while he was in the hospital, the goat was taken in by friends over in Riverside County.”

There have been other campaigns, Antrim said, such as the one a few years ago when a mobile home park of several hundred units was proposed on the 120-acre Hope Ranch, a defunct chicken farm near the mouth of Silverado Canyon.

Concern About Development

“That plan petered out, mostly because of opposition raised by canyon residents,” Antrim said.

When talk of a foothill transportation corridor began about 10 years ago, dwellers in Silverado, Modjeska and Williams canyons organized an ad hoc committee to make sure they were kept abreast of developments that might affect their way of life.

Now it appears that the corridor “wouldn’t impact us too much” because it would run on the far side of a ridge that parallels Santiago Canyon Road, the thoroughfare that connects Silverado and Modjeska to such communities as Orange and El Toro, said Maryann Brown, who has lived in the hills since 1968. She is president of the board of the Santiago County Water District, which serves about 1,800 residents in Silverado, Modjeska and Trabuco canyons, 1,200 of them in Silverado.

In fact, Brown and others believe that the proposed corridor would relieve traffic on Santiago Canyon Road, where increasing numbers of vehicles race along at freeway speeds.

“I think the canyons are escaping the kind of development that is going on in the rest of the county partly because the residents don’t want it to happen, and partly because of the terrain,” she said.

The terrain, both in Silverado and Modjeska, is dominated by steep canyon walls rearing up on either side of creek beds, with dramatic outcroppings of rock and dense chaparral and trees. Since the problem of the mobile home park development has been resolved, “I can’t think of anything that might threaten the life style of the canyons in the near future,” Brown said.

Except fire.

“Our biggest concern is and always has been fire,” said Morris, a captain in the Volunteer Fire Department. “It’s the big worry. Like one feller said, we’re afraid that a grasshopper rubbing his legs together could set off this brush.”

Five Killed in Station

Morris was in the Silverado fire station on Feb. 25, 1969, when torrential rains inundated the canyon and sent tons of rock and debris down a hillside, killing five refugees from flooding who were in the station. But he still worries more about the damage that fires can wreak.

He’s not alone in his concern.

Charles L. Cron, general manager of the water district (and also a volunteer fire captain), said the district’s board of directors last month approved special assessments to raise funds for reserve supplies of water to fight fires.

He also said the district recently completed a 500,000-gallon reservoir in Williams Canyon, using a $560,000 low-interest loan from the state Department of Water Resources, to back up smaller reservoirs in Silverado and Modjeska canyons.

“The county fire marshal has called the canyons an extreme fire hazard area,” Cron said. “On top of that, we’re actually in a drought year, with only 12.12 inches of rain for the season that started last Oct. 1, as against the average season up here of about 45 inches.

“Also, California will be losing 500,000 acre-feet a year of Colorado River water to Arizona starting in 1987, and that’s our district’s prime source because our local supply depends entirely on rainfall.”

Focal Points

Traditionally, volunteer fire departments in the canyons have been focal points for much of the social as well as service activities in the communities, and both men and women respond not only to fires but to such events as the 15th annual Silverado Country Fair, scheduled for Oct. 5 and 6.

Capt. Lou Furst, information office for the Orange County Fire Department, said Station 14 in Silverado has 24 volunteers, and Station 16 in Modjeska has 19.

Both are authorized for a maximum of 30 firefighters, but Furst said that although more recruits are being sought, “what we have is adequate, and we don’t consider we’re undermanned.”

“We’ve never had a gross problem in recruiting,” he said. “There’ll always be people who want to be firefighters.”

But Maryann Brown sees it differently.

“I think the shortage of volunteers is an indication of the changing personality of residents up here,” she said. “We’re getting a different kind of person, yuppies, I guess you’d call them, instead of the redneck cowboy types.

“And the county now requires more rigid training (for firefighters) and some of the new, younger residents don’t have that kind of commitment.”

Professionals Coming

A number of others, including Realtor Betty Hannis, agree that more and more young professional people--doctors, lawyers and engineers--are moving into the canyons.

She and Bob Morris have watched the change to what they call “a more affluent” population, people who can meet the rising costs of real estate. Small vacant lots start at $45,000, and some estate-like homes go for several hundred thousand dollars--prices that are two and three times what they were a few years ago.

But the life style of most canyon people remains intact. The Canyon Market, Victor’s Silverado Inn, the Pali Cafe, the country store in Modjeska, still are there, and Lucille Cruz, librarian at the county branch library, points to the three white crosses on a high hill behind the post office.

“They were put up there many years ago, when there was a church where the post office is,” she said. “They’re still used for Easter sunrise services and weddings.”

It’s the kind of life that brought Katie MacMahon from the city of Orange to Silverado just four months ago.

“I moved here because this is what Orange was like 30 years ago,’ she said. “Quiet and slow.”