$100 Gate Fee : Skyline Drive No Longer Dirt Cheap

Motorists who want to use Skyline Drive, a scenic dirt road winding through the northern Santa Ana Mountains from Corona to the Orange County line, soon will have to put up $100 each time they exercise that privilege.

The Riverside County Road Department expects to install a heavy metal gate blocking the roadway in the next two months, Road Commissioner LeRoy D. Smoot said last week during a “town meeting” at the foot of Skyline Drive in Corona.

Keys to the new gate will be sold at cost--about $25 each--to landowners who rely on Skyline Drive to reach their property.

But recreational users, who account for at least half of the road’s use, will have to check out keys during business hours at the Riverside County Administrative Center in downtown Riverside, about 16 miles away.

A public-access plan unveiled last week by Smoot and his staff would require a user to leave a $90 deposit and pay a $10 administrative fee each time a key to the public road is checked out.

“You’re telling me I’m going to have to pay $10 every time I go up there?” Marvin Laird, of Corona, asked at the meeting. Laird is an amateur photographer who said he frequently drives up Skyline Drive to photograph “spectacular sunsets” and mountain wildlife.

‘Discourage Use’

“It sounds like the scheme is being hatched to discourage recreational use entirely,” said Ken Croker, the Sierra Club’s coordinator for Cleveland National Forest. “Not too many of us carry $90 or $100 around in our pockets when we go out to the mountains; that’s going to require some planning ahead.”

After hearing complaints last week, the road commissioner said he would reconsider details of the plan.

The Riverside County Board of Supervisors voted last February to gate the road, in an attempt to reduce the county’s exposure to financial liability for traffic accidents on its narrow, winding surface.

Insurance Costs

A recent out-of-court settlement, in a lawsuit stemming from a 1982 death, cost Riverside County only $200,000, but its insurance company will have to pay $3.5 million. Smoot fears that future accidents could cost a great deal more.

Six people were killed on Skyline Drive in 1981. Two have died there since.

Much of the support for closing the road came from area property owners, who view the gate as an answer to their chronic complaints about vandalism and illegal shooting in the remote canyons.

Skyline Drive provides the only year-round, public road access to the steep hills and rugged canyons in the northern end of Cleveland National Forest. Other roads into the area already are blocked by locked gates:

- In Orange County, Maple Springs Road is closed at its foot--the eastern end of Silverado Canyon Road, and Harding Road is closed at Modjeska.

- Two gates block Black Star Canyon Road before it even enters the national forest. They are open for only a short time each spring, between the rainy season and the fire season.

- The North Main Divide Road is gated where it enters the forest.

- In Riverside County, three roads enter the national forest through canyons south of Corona, but all are closed.

The closure of Skyline Drive will leave Ortega Highway as the lone public route from Riverside County into the national forest’s Trabuco Ranger District, a 161,633-acre reserve straddling the Santa Ana Mountains from Santa Ana Canyon south to Camp Pendleton in San Diego County.

Strong Plea

The U.S. Forest Service made a strong plea for unrestricted public access in written testimony to the Board of Supervisors in February, said Bill Pidanick, public information officer for the Trabuco District.

Lacking that, Pidanick said, the planned gate is better than the option Smoot originally proposed--closing the road altogether.

Bob Miller, a Corona resident who backpacks on trails that begin a mile above the gate’s location, disagreed. “The casual user will not drive to Riverside, pay the deposit, come back and use the road,” he said.

“The casual user is not going to have the access to Skyline Drive--forget Skyline Drive--to Cleveland National Forest, because that’s what’s really at stake here. Access to the casual user is history.”