Homes, Homes on the Range : Progress Is a Discouraging Word to Horse Owners as Trails Fall Victim to Sprawl

Two caballeros were riding across the tawny-colored mountains under a clear autumn sky, hawks playing above them. Their horses, a small pinto and a palomino gelding, splashed through a running brook and continued up the side of a hill.

Stopping at the crest, the men looked east and saw late-afternoon haze settle into the valleys. The only sounds reaching them were water gurgling from below and a woodpecker drilling a cottonwood.

Then they looked west and saw dark gray peaks outlined against the dying sun. When they looked south. . . .

At this point in a Louis L’Amour Western, a band of renegade Indians would come swooping out of a gully, but what the men saw was something equally as terrifying--the Simi Valley Freeway engorged with rush-hour traffic.

These riders of the purple sage weren’t on a treacherous journey across the Sierra but on a weekday trail ride into the Santa Susana Mountains just north of Chatsworth.

Within sight of the San Fernando Valley’s great sprawl, they were being transported back in time to an untamed California, when the rugged countryside seemed forever resistant to civilization. Those were also the days when a horse could be ridden from here to there without encountering a barbed-wire fence or a traffic jam.

Dwindling Facilities

Today, horses haven’t vanished from the Valley area--there is even some evidence that their numbers have begun to rise recently after years of gradual decline. But places to ride, keep and even rent horses are continuing to dwindle as rustic areas increasingly give way to housing tracts and business centers.

For example, the Pickwick stables in Burbank became Pickwick condominiums, with stalls only for condo owners’ horses. And the Harry Warner Thoroughbred Farm turned into the bustling Warner Center in Woodland Hills.

Thirty years ago, there used to be dozens of places to rent horses in the Valley area. Now there are three, all of them in the East Valley only a short trot from the Equestrian Center in Griffith Park.

In the Griffith Park area, which once provided the most trails and stables for miles around, efforts are under way to preserve the few remaining horse facilities. But stable operators and horse owners alike are growing almost panicky in the wake of recent closings and threatened closings.

The plight of the Griffith Park-area stables is not unique. In urban areas nationwide, horse associations report that commercial stables are closing in alarming numbers as owners realize their land can produce more profits if apartments or shopping centers are built on them. Steep liability insurance, about $900 a year per horse, has also driven many rental stables out of business.

Not Very Lucrative

“Frankly, it’s not the most lucrative business in the world,” said Mike Nolan, director of administration for the American Horse Council, a national trade group based in Washington, D.C. Nolan said the council keeps no records on how many stables close nationally each year, but said he is inundated by letters and phone calls from stable owners and managers who say they are selling out, or are being forced out of business because they can no longer afford insurance.

In Los Angeles, the number of commercial stables has dropped by almost two-thirds in 11 years, according to Robert I. Rush, general manager of the city Department of Animal Regulation. The department issued 75 stable permits in 1975. This year, it issued 27.

At the same time, the horse population has risen. Gwen Allen, president of Equestrian Trails Inc., a nationwide group dedicated to preserving trails and encouraging horse-keeping, said there are between 100,000 and 130,000 horses today in Los Angeles County, up from 80,000 in 1966. As urban stables close, many horse owners are forced to board their animals in outlying rural areas because nearby stables are full or near capacity.

And Ron Wechsler, director of the equine program at Pierce College, said his classes in riding, maintenance and care of horses have enrollments of more than 400. Although wide-open spaces are dwindling, owning a horse as a recreational hobby is said to be increasing, especially among women. In the past 15 years, Wechsler said, the horse population in the United States has risen from 6.2 million to 8.5 million.

In the Valley , he said, there are an estimated 20,000 horses--most of them kept in backyards--and perhaps only 40 miles of riding trails, where there used to be only wide-open spaces.

Legacy of Ranches

The pioneers who settled the Valley area left behind a legacy of horse ranches and seemingly endless miles of riding trails. Even after the advent of the automobile, the Valley remained horse heaven, glamorized by ranch-owning Hollywood executives and movie stars. And for three decades after World War II, the Valley was home to many of the state’s best thoroughbred-breeding farms.

But most of the horses in the area were owned privately by people of more modest means and were usually kept in backyards and converted garages. In the late 1940s and early ‘50s, there were nearly 40,000 horses in the Valley, or one for every 10 people. Although a lot of suburban cowboys owned and raised horses in rural neighborhoods like Sun Valley and Agoura, it wasn’t hard to find a horse grazing on lawns in such upscale communities as Encino and Tarzana.

“But the Valley has changed dramatically in the last four decades,” said Wechsler. “The population has gone way up, the land has increased in value. People who owned large amounts of land have sold them off for great sums of money. All this has had an impact on people owning and riding horses.”

The remaining horse owners are not ones to give up easily, and they are doing whatever they can to cling to their special life style.

“Horses are part of the heritage of the Valley,” said Ken Porter, vice president of Equestrian Trails. “Progress is progress, but it has to stop somewhere. Kids will be the real losers if we don’t preserve horses and trails for future generations.

“A lot of us will fight until we drop,” Porter said.

The fights haven’t always been against developers or City Halls--some came with the changes in once-rural communities and pitted new neighbors against old ones. That is what happened to spur Equestrian Trails’ Gwen Allen into action.

In places like Allen’s neighborhood in Sylmar, newcomers discovered that they didn’t like to wake up in the morning and smell the manure. They were irritated by the prospect of flies with their coffee and dust on their station wagons. So they got the neighborhood rezoned and put up a lot of fences.

“When I moved to Sylmar in 1951, I could ride all over the place,” she said. “But now I can’t go anywhere without putting my horse in a trailer. I just don’t have access to the trails anymore. But all it would have taken was a little cooperation. They could have put variances through all those new housing developments.

“The thing is, those people moved to Sylmar because it was a rural area, then they decided it was too noisy and too smelly because of the horses and tried do away with the things that made it rural in the first place.”

Some Victories

There have been some victories along the way. A group of Hidden Hills equestrians recently staged a protest against an inadequate crossing over a two-lane bridge, and got the City Council to consider their plight. And horse lovers in the Griffith Park area have formed a group to lobby for protection of the remaining facilities by area City Halls, primarily through zoning ordinances.

The recently created Backbone Trail in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is available for equestrians. And the Los Angeles City Council has passed ordinances to ensure that traditional horse areas, such as the northern sections of the Valley, are protected, said Councilman Hal Bernson, whose district includes several horsekeeping areas in Chatsworth and the hills of Northridge.

Equestrian Trails is also working on a project that will someday link the Backbone Trail with the Valley’s northern mountains to make the Rim of the Valley Trail, which will take days to ride.

“There’s a place in the Valley for everything,” Bernson said, “including a rural atmosphere.”

Horse lovers aren’t so sure that politicians can keep promises like Bernson’s. They point to Santa Monica Mountains barriers, erected to keep out motorcycles, which had the same effect on horses. The trails were opened only after the equestrians objected. And they cite a fenced-off new housing tract in Chatsworth that they say was supposed to be open for bridle trails.

Joy Snyder, who owns the 10-acre Browns Canyon Equestrian Center in the Chatsworth Hills, remembers how it used to be before housing tracts chewed the hills into tiny parcels.

“You used to be able to ride from Chatsworth clear over to Magic Mountain,” Snyder said, “but now the gates are up.”

Meanwhile, back in the Santa Susanas, despite the absence of roaming buffalo, the two caballeros were feeling right at home on the range. Surrounded by gently sloping hills, they cantered across an expanse of level land that resembled a mini-version of the Argentine pampas, after leaving a lush canyon and passing a small waterfall.

Headed for the ridge of a distant point, midway, they reined in their steeds and proceeded at a pace more suited for conversation. Jereme Scott, the man on the pinto, closed his eyes, lulled by the rhythm of his mount. Like most riders, he’s fanatical about horses, gets up before dawn to tend to them, treats them like one of the family. He said he feels when he’s out riding that he “wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”

The two began the descent into the Valley, urging their sure-footed horses down a steep hill. Civilization was closing in. They passed a rusty, abandoned car and began hearing the drone of freeway traffic. Below, almost at the foot of the hill, was an embryonic subdivision.

“We used to be able to ride down there,” Scott said, as they walked their horses on bulldozed dirt where poured-concrete curbs only suggested streets. There was no sign of life. Wooden skeletons of future homes made the place seem like a ghost town.

In a few months, the streets will be alive with kids and cars, and developers, running out of land, will no doubt begin looking north to the mountains.

Times Staff Writer Denise Hamilton contributed to this story.