Forest Service, Cabin Owners at Loggerheads Over Land Use

To the fraternity initiate who found himself blindfolded and freezing in the mountains above Altadena, Marie Belle Moore must have appeared like the good witch in a fairy tale who rescues youths who have lost their way in the woods.

The small, buoyant grandmother of seven came upon the student cowering in the bushes by her mailbox one night several years ago. He was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. Trembling, he told Moore that he didn’t know where he was and that he’d like to call his mother.

Unafraid--because, after all, this was her canyon--Moore assured the fellow that he was safe and drove him down the mountain to his home.

Keepers of the Forest

Moore, 69, and her neighbors consider themselves to be keepers of the forest. They spot wildfires, fight floods, scare off vandals and aid the helpless.

“They are the last vestiges of the pioneers in Los Angeles,” said Karin James, a photographer who has documented privately owned cabins on public lands along with her husband, David. The Jameses, who live in Altadena, contend that cabin dwellers like Moore are a valuable social resource, serving as models of determination and self-reliance.

But, because they lease their land from the U.S. Forest Service (permits average $250-300 annually), the occupants of 743 cabins in the Angeles National Forest are in conflict with another resource: the forest itself.

The Forest Service has recently initiated changes in its policy regarding recreation residences (as they call the cabins), which some residents believe will ultimately be used to rid the forest of its inhabitants, some of whom have been there since the cabins were built in the 1920s.

‘Assault on the Forest’

“They (the Forest Service) think the cabins represent a basic assault on the forest and eventually will represent increasing urbanization,” David James said. “They really don’t need these people anymore. Or they think they don’t need these people.”

The conflict between public and private uses is not restricted to the Angeles National Forest. There are about 15,000 cabin dwellers on Forest Service land nationwide, according to Charles Cushman, executive director of the Sonoma, Calif.-based National Inholders Assn., which represents permit-holders on federal lands.

“The only thing we’re arguing about now is when they’re going to get rid of the residences, not if,” Cushman said.

Conditions have changed since the Forest Service originally issued permits for residences in the ‘20s and ‘30s, said Larry Marlow, assistant recreation officer for the Angeles National Forest. “It was a long trip from the population centers to the forest then,” he said. At that time, forest dwellers were encouraged because they watched for fires and generally monitored the sparsely peopled canyons. In the ‘40s, the residences helped ease the wartime housing shortage.

Since then, however, the city has crept to the very edges of the mountains. Ken Myers, assistant director of lands for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington, said the population pressure on national forest lands is so great--particularly in California where about half the recreational residences are located--that his agency intends to ease the cabins out of existence over the next 20 years or so in areas where the land is needed for “a higher public use.”

The Sierra Club supports the gradual phase-out of the cabins, said Southern California director Bob Hattoy, although it does not advocate eviction of current occupants.

The Forest Service has initiated a study to determine whether the cabins interfere with uses such as hiking, picnicking and fishing. The first residences to be reviewed in the Angeles Forest are the 18 cabins in Millard Canyon, where Marie Belle Moore lives.

If the study (due to be completed on all tracts in the Angeles Forest by 1995) concludes that recreational residences are no longer appropriate, owners would be given 10 years’ notice, at which time they would have to remove the dwellings at their own expense, Marlow said.

New Guidelines

In addition to the use study, the Forest Service is implementing new guidelines for existing residences in the Angeles Forest. Millard Canyon resident John Grancich said that the new regulations will “almost preclude” residents living in the canyon in the manner they’re used to. (The recreation residences are intended to be part-time dwellings only, but over the years a number of residents have turned them into full-time homes. Marlow said the Forest Service is developing a strategy to deal with this problem.)

Guest houses, garages, fences and dog houses are among the features that will be forbidden or severly restricted under the new rules. The new guidelines limit cabin size to 1,200 square feet, even though some existing cabins are twice that size.

The new Forest Service guidelines specify that the cabins are not to be a dominant feature of the forest: “The feeling should not be of a housing tract with trees.”

Photographers Karin and David James argue that the cabins are not an intrusion, but are in fact as natural a feature of the landscape as the boulders and alders. “We always thought of the cabins as being an integral part of the forest, not apart from it or separate from it,” Karin James said. (The James’ exhibition of photographs of forest dwellings will be at the Altadena Public Library through October.)

Cabin owners fear that the new guidelines will be used to hasten the termination process. But Marlow, who sympathizes with the cabin dwellers, said this is not the intention, and that that the Forest Service would terminate permits because of guideline violations only as a last resort.

A Worrisome Thing

Yet the prospect of termination is a worrisome thing for residents.

“The cabin means a lot to me,” said Grancich, a 44-year-old general contractor who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. “I’ve been here a long time (16 years).”

Grancich’s son, Mischa, now 6, was born in his cabin. Both his son and daughter, Danica, 11, can identify the local plants and explain what uses the Indians put them to in the past, Grancich said. “They have the ability to scamper and climb beyond their peers.”

Grancich and his wife Anita know their neighbors and the history of each cabin in the scenic, wooded canyon. Millard residents rely on each other for tasks such as sandbagging, fording flooded streams and repairing the communal water system, Grancich said. “And one thing that always brings us together is the Forest Service trying to get us out.”

Harold and Helen Jackson made San Dimas Canyon their home in 1962; they had weekend cabins there as early as 1948. There was no thought that they would ever be asked to leave.

A lover of the mountains, Jackson said that when he retired from the Los Angeles County Fire Department 10 years ago, he never considered moving out of the canyon. The family’s home--formerly the Pomona Moose Lodge--on Angeles Forest land was as good as a retirement retreat high in the Tetons to him.

On a recent afternoon Jackson, 62, was seated comfortably on his couch, a Louis L’Amour novel on the side table and his doting Dalmatian at his feet. From where he sat, Jackson admired the familiar view of the steep canyon. The curtains fluttered as afternoon breezes stirred through the canyon.

During the years while they were raising their three sons in the canyon (each of the sons now has his own cabin in San Dimas Canyon), the Jacksons invited rangers to parties at the house and gave showers when the rangers’ kids got married, Helen Jackson recalled.

Less Secure

About 20 years ago--about the time the Forest Service shifted its position to one of discouraging permittees instead of encouraging them, according to Washington-based Myers--the Jacksons began to feel less secure in their canyon home. Their relationship with the rangers became cooler.

“It bothers me,” Harold Jackson said of the current situation. “I hate to be an adversary to the Forest Service. But we’ve lost a good line of communication. I’m sure we’re in for a big change.”

If the Jacksons were forced to leave the canyon, “It’d be such a shock to us,” he said. “We really intend to stay here as long as we live.”

Marie Belle Moore has developed a more philosophical attitude to threats to her home--she almost lost the cabin in a fire in the mid-60s, she said; then it nearly washed away in the flood of 1969.

“I don’t worry about anything now,” she said. “If they (the Forest Service) closed me out, I would say, ‘My boys (she raised two sons alone in the cabin) had a wonderful experience here; I had a wonderful experience here. I had a lot of fun.”

Jim Brockett, a wild animal trainer who lives part-time in Millard Canyon with his wife, Gina, spoke for his neighbors when he said, “All we want is the same opportunity Marie had--to live here 30 years.”