Trail’s End : Path to Eternity Is Paved With Generosity and a Little Grousing

Someday, Richard E. Danielson will return for good to the 5,500-acre ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains that he sold to the state for use as a wilderness preserve.

In exchange for selling the property for half its estimated value of $8.4 million 10 years ago, Danielson, who now lives in Santa Barbara, required the state Department of Parks and Recreation to agree that he and his immediate family may be buried there.

“It’s very beautiful, very isolated and very quiet,” said Danielson, 74.

The burial grounds are on one acre about a mile south of Newbury Park, in eastern Ventura County.

Hikers Protest

When Danielson got around to a neglected bit of business last week, clearing an existing two-mile road leading to his family’s burial grounds, some hikers in the Bony Mountain wilderness area of the Point Mugu State Park protested. Danielson hired a bulldozer operator last week to clear a 10-foot-wide dirt road along a portion of the Old Bony Trail, a right he retains under the terms of the land sale, said state Parks and Recreation spokesman Ken Leigh.

“All we could do was work with him and minimize the amount of earth that was moved,” Leigh said. “He has a right to maintain the road and retain access to the burial plots.”

After inspecting the work Monday, park ranger Laura Van Etten said the bulldozer did little damage to areas outside Danielson’s easement.

In the 10 years or so since Danielson last graded the road, it had narrowed to a foot trail through natural processes, said Dave Brown, chairman of the Santa Monica Mountains Task Force of the Sierra Club.

“My personal feeling is that it is totally inappropriate to grade a road in a wilderness area,” Brown said.

Still, Brown conceded that Danielson had a right to perform the work and that the bulldozer operator did minimum damage. “There’s no villain here; it’s just not going to sit well with a lot of people who use the trail,” he said.

Danielson said he heard complaints from Sierra Club members.

“Every time you clean up something, people claim that it’s a violation of the environment,” he said. “I don’t think it is very greedy of me; there probably will be no more than a half dozen people who will be buried there--me, my wife and three children.”

State law requires that Danielson maintain the road because it is the only access to a state-certified burial site, he said.

Danielson said he had put off regrading the road for several years because his burial site “is something I don’t like to think about too much.”

The burial plots are beside a shady grove of sycamore and oak trees, near the remains of a cabin where Danielson and his family would often stay, he said.

He decided that he wanted to be buried there several years after buying the horse and cattle ranch in 1947, he said. Born in Chicago, Danielson said he gave up a law practice to become a rancher after visiting the mountains while serving in the Navy during World War II.

When he decided to retire in the 1970s, Danielson said, he sold the property to the state at half price because “it was just too beautiful for any one man to own.”

Although he is not looking forward to returning to his former ranch for the last time, Danielson said, “It should be a very restful spot.”