UCLA’s Arrowhead Camp Meets Many Needs

A snowball fight was the first item on the agenda when the California division of the American Cancer Society met here at the UCLA Conference Center last week.

“When they got here, we had snow for them. We try to please everyone,” said Nancy Noble, the center’s assistant director.

“A typical winter day, even with snow, gets up to around 45 or 50 degrees,” she said. “We play tennis all winter--in between the snow storms.”

One conferee at the Cancer Society meeting said the conference center’s appearance “redefined my definition of beauty.”

Noble describes the 40-acre facility on the north shore of Lake Arrowhead as having “15 developed acres, 25 acres of virgin forest and four seasons” about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

The conference center caters to a variety of groups, including faculty, student, alumni, charitable, corporate, labor and special interest organizations that have educational goals.

Don Findley, who manages the center, estimated that half its reservations are made by several Southern California universities and UCLA-affiliated groups.

Other gatherings are sponsored by such groups as hospitals, local government agencies, Internal Revenue Service offices and the Society of Interior Decorators.

Fees for the conference center are $65 a night for double occupancy and $80 for single occupancy.

Some parts of the year are difficult to fill with reservations, especially the weekend of the UCLA-USC football game. “We had only 26 guests on Nov. 22, the weekend of the big game,” he said.

Christmas can also be a quiet time, so Findley is planning some special lures for this month, such as hay rides and gourmet feasts.

Two three-day sessions begin Thursday, Dec. 26, and Sunday, Dec. 29. They will feature activities initiated last summer, such as the All-Downhill Hike, which allows guests to tramp down an easy slope to be picked up by vans for the uphill trip back to camp.

There also is an easy hike up Bruin Mountain in the undeveloped forest acreage of the property. Findley said that when hikers reach the top of the crest their heads are exactly one mile above sea level.

When the University of California acquired the Lake Arrowhead facility as a gift in 1957 it became a UC Extension center until 1982 when UCLA took direct control.

UCLA enlarged and remodeled the facility, planning to continue its winter use as a conference center, while starting an alumni family camp on the property during the summers.

The camp, called Bruin Woods and run by the UCLA Alumni Assn., opened in June.

More than half the 378 families who visited the camp last summer have made $100 non-refundable deposits reserving vacation space for 1986.

The family camp offers 10 one-week sessions that can be attended by about 60 families each. Charges are $375 per session for adults and from $50 up for children, depending on their ages.

Findley said Bruin Woods costs the same as the UC Santa Barbara family camp, less than Stanford’s and more than UC Berkeley’s Lair of the Bear, which is a more primitive mountain facility.

As the former executive director of UCLA’s Associated Students Assn., Findley knows young people. He has established a “Finicky Eaters Table” in the dining room. There, children and teens who spurn the resort’s gourmet items, such as chicken Florentine, can dine on peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches made with white bread, the Wonder Bread label prominently displayed on the table.

Each session also features one adults-only luncheon. Camp counselors lead all the children off to a hot-dog cookout while their parents are served delicacies that youngsters usually dislike, such as poached salmon with hollandaise sauce.

Findley described his summer weeks as filled with “families with kids and sometimes the kids’ kids.” He said one family with seven children paid $5,000 for a family vacation with their relatives, but the average family group has 3.8 kids.

Some atypical family units are composed of youngsters accompanied by only one parent. One family divided the week with the children at camp seven days while each parent stayed at the resort 3 1/2 days.

Findley is proud of a safety record marred only by one guest’s broken nose when he dived into the wrong end of the swimming pool.

Visiting children are managed by the center staff, which includes 36 students who also stock the wood fireplaces in guests’ rooms and wait on tables in four luxurious dining rooms. The students, mainly from UCLA, include natives of Australia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, France, Nigeria and Singapore.

“We even get USC people as guests and one USC student was on our staff,” Findley said, “and that’s just great with us.”

Once known as the North Shore Tavern, the family camp/conference center has been viewed by more people as a film setting than as a mountain resort or conference center. It was used as Camp David in “All the President’s Men” and recently was the background of a Trapper John television episode.

The pine forests also have appeared as Switzerland, Alaska, the Ozarks, Vermont and the Canadian Rockies in films and television.

Tradition comes naturally to the alpine retreat, where the main building, Findley said, “is the granddaddy of all the lodges at Arrowhead. It is the area’s oldest and certainly the most celebrated building.”

The structure started humbly as housing for workers building the dam that changed Little Bear Creek to a lake. First development of the area began in 1893, Findley said, when a group of businessmen planned a hydro-electric facility in the area to produce power for Southern California. The project stopped when courts ruled the creek waters could not be diverted, and a few years later the recreational plans began.

In 1946 the Los Angeles Turf Club, operators of the Santa Anita race track, acquired the facilities and offered the resort center to both UCLA and USC, but got turned down because of anticipated operational costs.

A decade later UC Extension accepted the property and called it “the newest campus of the university.” It was run as a site of adult educational seminars from 1957 until 1982 although it was such a financial burden the university seriously considered selling off the prime lakefront property.

Instead of selling, the university began planning and remodeling for the conference center and Bruin Woods. Financed by a $6-million bank loan, the remodeling costs will be repaid by guest fees.