Northern California’s Lost Coast Finds Itself Mired in Controversy : Environmentalists, Off-Roaders Tangle at ‘End of the World’

There’s a beach 70 miles south of Eureka, a place not well known even to people who live nearby, that could be the most inspiring vantage for sea-watching on the entire coast.

At this point, midway on an uninhabited 23-mile stretch of shoreline, civilization is more than a day’s walk away in any direction. The Pacific Coast Highway, which clings to the shoreline as snugly as plastic wrap along much of the rest of the coast, detours inland here in deference to the King Mountain Range.

At the sea-watcher’s back rise steep, tangled peaks as high as 4,087 feet. They have discouraged settlers over the years at the same time they have sheltered bobcat, black bear, elk, deer and spotted owl.

An Unfettered Ocean

Looking west, the ocean appears more unfettered than when seen from a Malibu restaurant window. Gale winds, lashing rain and immense storm waves are not unusual here.

“You can get down on that beach, especially on a foggy, dreary day, and it’s like being at the end of the world,” said John Lloyd of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). “You can be as alone out there as you’d ever want to be. You just can’t find a coastline like that anywhere.”

By car about a 600-mile trip north from Los Angeles, it is the longest primitive stretch of shoreline in the state. Without roads, it has been essentially lost to human traffic and has come to be known as the Lost Coast.

Wilderness Road

But to the chagrin of the hikers, backpackers and environmentalists who wish to preserve the region, there is a road--albeit a rough one--into the very heart of the wilderness. On some days, the beach’s isolation is broken by the whine of motorcycles, jeeps and all-terrain vehicles which either sneak in along the beach or dodge a locked gate on the Smith-Etter Road and wind 16 miles down the dirt road to the beach. Although off-road vehicles are outlawed on all but three miles of the shore, enforcement is difficult in an area as remote as this.

Ban on Development

The Smith-Etter Road has become the focus of a larger controversy over management of the region: Will the Lost Coast be designated wilderness, with logging and off-road vehicle use outlawed (although grazing would be allowed to continue)? Or will none or only a portion of the area be made wilderness, an option which environmentalists fear would allow off-road vehicle use to continue unchecked?

Because the King Range was designated a National Conservation Area in 1974, there can be no residential or commercial development of the mountains or shore. At issue, then, is the purity of the area. If the wilderness advocates have their way, the Lost Coast will always have the feeling of a place time and progress has bypassed.

Protection of the Lost Coast is the top priority for the Wilderness Society in the state of California, according to regional director Patty Schifferle who called the area “the crown jewel of BLM’s proposed wilderness areas.” Sierra Club representative Sally Kabisch added: “We’re fighting very hard to keep the Lost Coast protected until such a time as we can get (declared) wilderness there.”

In a report now in the draft stage, the BLM is recommending that 31,640 acres--out of a total 54,000 acres of public land in the King Range--be made wilderness. Other groups are filing their own recommendations, ranging from the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors’ 14,000 acres to a number of environmental groups who would like to see the entire region designated wilderness.

An Excellent Chance

Lloyd said he’s not expecting a final determination on the area’s wilderness status from Congress for three to five years. Involved parties agree that at least some of the area stands an excellent chance to be deemed wilderness because of its unique properties. As Jim Eaton of the California Wilderness Coalition said: “We do not have a lot of wilderness coastline in California. There’s nowhere else the public can see a stretch of wild beach like this.”

In addition to their recommendation for 31,640 acres of wilderness, the BLM has filed a transportation plan that would open the Smith-Etter Road to within a one-quarter mile of the beach, where they plan to construct a primitive parking area. Five environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, have filed their opposition to the plan with the Interior Board of Land Appeals. The California Coastal Commission has also found the transportation plan inconsistent with their management policies.

Rancher Mary Etter views efforts to close the Smith-Etter road as an attempt to take something away that rightfully belongs to her family. Her great-grandfather began ranching here in the 1880s. The controversial road, now almost entirely on BLM land, was built in 1959 by Etter’s father and another local rancher. Etter owns 104 acres of grazing land within the King Range, and a two-bedroom cabin on the beach just south of the Smith-Etter road.

Ranchers like Mary Etter and other opponents of a Lost Coast wilderness regard the wilderness designation as a “lock-up,” a single use of the land that precludes other uses, said Lloyd, manager of the BLM’s Arcata Resource Area.

Bill Devall, a professor of sociology at Humboldt State University, has hiked the entire Lost Coast 10 or 15 times, sometimes taking along students. He believes the Lost Coast is most valuable in its wild state. He’d like to see the Smith-Etter Road closed to the public, and even eventually regraded and replanted so that all trace of it is erased.

40 Miles of Coastal Wilderness

Devall advocates making wilderness of the Chemise Mountain area at the southern end of the King Range (Chemise Mountain is included in BLM’s wilderness proposal), linking the King Range to another chunk of coastal wilderness, the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park in upper Mendocino County. This would create an unprecedented 40 miles of coastal wilderness.

Back-to-Basics Life Style

Coming down strongly on the environmentalist side, Cecelia Gregori, 34, is typical of the younger people who have moved into the Lost Coast area from cities, bringing with them values that sometimes clash with the area’s long-established ranching families. Along with her husband, Gilbert, and daughters Megan, 11, and Mariah, 8, Gregori lives a back-to-basics life style in a 70-year-old farmhouse with a view of the King Range. She believes the Lost Coast should be undisturbed, a remnant of the grandeur once found all along the California coast.

By opening the Smith-Etter road and allowing access to off-road vehicles, Gregori said, the BLM may degrade the area to such an extent that it will no longer be suitable for wilderness consideration.

Responding to Gregori’s charge, John Lloyd said in an interview at his Arcata office that his job is to ensure that nothing is done that would impair the Lost Coast’s fitness for wilderness status.

Lloyd, 43, said that opening the Smith-Etter road to within a quarter-mile of the beach and building a parking area there would not impair the area’s wilderness suitability because, “We would not be doing anything that couldn’t easily be rehabilitated by one person with a hand shovel.”

Locked Gate Installed

In 1985, due to problems with off-road vehicles and the protests of environmental groups, a locked gate was installed on the Smith-Etter Road at Telegraph Peak “a long four miles from the beach,” according to Lloyd. The gate will remain there until BLM’s new transportation plan is approved.

Lloyd said that no matter where they put the gate--whether it’s a short drive from the beach, or at the entrance to the Smith-Etter road, off-road vehicles will manage to infiltrate the area. That’s because BLM has only one ranger who is responsible for visitor enforcement in most of northwestern California, clearly an insufficient force to monitor vehicle violations in the Lost Coast.

Lloyd said he spends at least half his working hours on the increasingly heated Lost Coast situation. He used to go there for hiking and camping on his days off, he said, but as the region has become more of an albatross, it has lost some of its appeal as a personal get-away.

Mary Etter lives in a spotless ranch house just across the Mattole River from the country store that is the only apparent business establishment in Honeydew. At lunchtime on a recent weekday, young people drank beer and passed the time on the steps of the store.

Etter, meanwhile, was scraping paint from her house in the hot sun. Flecks of red paint covered her work-hardened arms.

Etter generically refers to the sort of young people who hang out at the store--and most anyone who hasn’t been in the area for at least a generation--as hippies. “Hippie-type people haven’t lived here long enough to understand,” she said.

Etter is only 44, but she has inherited the values of her parents and grandparents who have inhabited this valley bordering the Lost Coast for more than 100 years. Her allies are men like 80-year-old retired rancher Ken Roscoe who served on a committee in the late ‘50s opposing any form of wilderness in the Lost Coast.

Today Roscoe maintains: “I don’t think I’d favor wilderness myself. It (the King Range in its wild state) is a breeding ground for these predatory animals and they come and kill the sheep. We don’t particularly appreciate it.”

Roscoe’s cousin, George Roscoe, said that although they’ve been told that grazing could continue if the area was made wilderness, ranchers have already had problems trying to operate within the King Range. He said that a rancher using a Caterpillar tractor to haul some fencing into the range was threatened with trespassing charges by the BLM.

When she was still a teen-ager, Etter was enlisted by her father to write letters to various officials stating the local ranchers’ stand on management of the King Range, she said.

“Eventually, they just felt it was a losing cause,” said Etter of her father’s crusade.

Although resigned to the likelihood that at least some of the King Range will be designated wilderness, Etter is still writing letters in hopes that they can at least keep a few thousand acres outside the wilderness designation.

“Today, as in the past, we still think a certain amount of land should be set aside for all to enjoy, but with limitations and the best multiple use for all,” she wrote in one recent letter. “A great deal of this land is too steep for the recreationist, but it is ideal for timber growing.”

Impassable on Foot

Etter is not a hiker--she says she gets enough exercise doing ranch chores--nevertheless she has observed that much of the King Range area is so overgrown as to be impassable on foot. “People don’t know what they’re talking about,” she said, “if they think they’ll be able to have access to the area without roads.

“We can’t think of anything you can do in a wilderness area you can’t do with the land the way it is now,” she said. “But there are things you can’t do in a wilderness area that you can do as the land is now.

“You’re catering to a very few people when you make it a wilderness area,” she said. “When they make it a wilderness, no one will be able to use the property.”

As a small girl, Mary Etter often accompanied her father, mother, brother and sister to their cabin on the beach to watch after the sheep and cows. Their place was just south of the road end; the Smith cabin--which still stands--was to the north. (Ann Smith, the widow of rancher Paul Smith, lives at the entrance to the Smith-Etter Road. She declined to be interviewed, saying she felt that if locals talk about the Lost Coast it’s not going to be lost anymore.)

Lloyd said that the BLM would not condemn a landowner’s property unless ordered to do so by legislation, or if the landowner did something inconsistent with the management plan such as building a new structure on the beach. Yet, Etter feels that if the Lost Coast is made wilderness, her family’s land and her childhood beach cabin--now used mostly by hikers taking refuge from storms--will be taken away:

“They’ll condemn the property we have left. It’s just a matter of time.”

A few people clustered near the parking lot at the mouth of the Mattole River on a recent afternoon like explorers clinging to a final outpost of civilization. Just around the bend from here begins the Lost Coast.

A popular but rigorous way to see the Lost Coast is to begin hiking here and backpack along the beach to Shelter Cive, 23 miles away. Other than the Smith-Etter Road, there is no access to the beach for the entire distance.

According to Earl Curran, recreation planner for the BLM, it’s a spectacular hike if you have three days. Those who attempt the trek must be fit to trudge through the sand with a pack on, he said; and they should be prepared for squalls.

The mouth of the Mattole is as far as many people get, but even from here it’s possible to catch a scent of the wildness that lies beyond.

On a recent afternoon, a young pair of German tourists had rigged a plastic shelter against the wind that flecked the sea with whitecaps. They ate apples, watched their infant son run along the shore, and laughed at seals playing in the water.

Although they had not ventured far from the road, Ute Quante said they knew they were at the brink of an unusual stretch of the California coast because “the highways don’t come through.

“It’s a great area,” Quante said. “We would always come back.”