A Far Cry : Mile-High Lockwood Valley Is Almost a Hidden Outpost, and 3,000 Residents Apparently Want It to Stay That Way

Halfway up the dusty dirt road that winds past Drunkard’s Hill in Lockwood Valley, Bea Anderson gives a sharp yelp.

“George, there’s a rattler,” she says, pointing out the window of the couple’s carpeted, four-wheel-drive International Scout. “Did you bring your gun?”

Anderson, who is president of the Lockwood Valley Homeowners Assn., has left his rifle at their ranch-style mobile home. But quicker than you can say “Wild Wild West,” he leaps out of the Jeep and starts whacking at the hissing, slithering reptile with a wooden club.

Since the last grizzly bear in this area lumbered off to parts unknown some 80 years ago, 4-foot rattlesnakes are about the only lethal fauna faced by this mountain community of about 300 souls off Interstate 5 in the northeast tip of Ventura County.

Shoehorned between Kern County to the east, Los Angeles County to the south and the Los Padres National Forest all around, Lockwood Valley is the most remote outpost in Ventura County, more than a mile above sea level and light-years removed in geography and spirit from the rest of the county.

“What goes on in Ventura along the coastal area doesn’t affect us at all,” says Lockwood Valley resident Pete Liebl, who teaches third grade in nearby Frazier Park and moonlights as a turkey farmer. “What happens across the county line in Kern affects us much, much more.”

Lockwood Valley children go to school in Kern County rather than make the tortuous, 174-mile round-trip daily bus ride down California 33 to the nearest Ventura County school in Ojai. Lockwood Valley’s mailing address is Frazier Park, 13 miles away in Kern County. For big-ticket and agricultural items, many residents shop in Bakersfield, 68 miles north along Interstate 5.

Cycle Track

But whatever its civic leanings, Lockwood Valley doesn’t welcome the encroachment of civilization. And today, its residents are increasingly concerned that the revving of motorcycles may soon replace the sound of wind whistling through the pinon pines of their cherished valley.

Earl Smith, a Santa Barbara entrepreneur who founded the American Roadracing Assn., a private motorcycle racing club, recently bought 640 open acres in Lockwood Valley and wants to build a 1.5-mile concourse, a beginners’ off-road course, an RV park and a picnic area that would draw up to 300 people each weekend.

That’s 300 people too many, according to most locals.

“It’s a 2-lane road in and out of here, and Lord knows we have enough accidents already,” says Lloyd Richards, who moved to Lockwood Valley two years ago from Granada Hills.

Not only that, but a race track “would bring in a lot of bad elements,” reasons longtime resident Candy Card, who has a 6-year-old daughter and was drawn here by “the country atmosphere, clean air, mountains and trees.”

Smith, who owns a vacuum cleaner shop in Santa Barbara, doesn’t understand all the fuss.

“It will be a simple little paved race track,” says Smith, who plans to live on the property. “It will be hidden from view, and there will be sound limitations. I want it to be like a park setting.”

Development Criticized

The motorcycle maven says he plans to submit a proposal to the Ventura County Planning Department by month’s end, but already, opposition is brewing as residents circulate a petition against the race track and rally the support of County Supervisor Maggie Erickson, who represents the area.

In an interview, Erickson says she hasn’t seen a plan but doubts that a race track would be appropriate for Lockwood Valley. “It certainly isn’t something at this point that I would like to support,” she adds.

But Erickson agrees that the proposed race track is the biggest thing to hit Lockwood Valley since 1972, when the county flirted with the idea of allowing a developer to build about 5,000 houses there. The proposal would have sent 20,000 people pouring into the back lands of Ventura County and required the county to spend millions on roads, schools, sewers and water lines.

County officials and planning documents indicate that the subdivision failed to get off the ground because it wasn’t economically feasible and because the area lacked water.

Currently, residents must drill their own water wells before the county allows them to build. Most of the land is zoned for open or agricultural space and the county requires 2.5-acre minimum plots and steep fees for building, sewer, water well and other permits.

Ron Blevins, a real estate broker from nearby Gorman, says the pricey permits--which can run from $5,000 to $9,000--discourage many folks from building in Ventura County. Just a stone’s throw away in Kern County, however, the same permits run about $1,000.

Talk of Secession

That inequity, plus the general feeling of isolation from the rest of Ventura County, leads to a fair amount of grumbling. Occasionally, the discontent flares up and people get to talking about seceding from Ventura County and scooting over into Kern.

So far, the proposal remains just talk. Many residents say that when they look over the county line and see the sprawling development that Kern County allows, they conclude that slow-growth Ventura isn’t so bad after all.

Blevins says more and more people are displaying interest in buying land in Lockwood Valley. Two-and-a-half-acre lots fetch $12,000, and for $80,000 more, “You can put a real decent house up there,” Blevins says.

Interested in a larger parcel? Blevins also has 20-acre ranches that sell for $85,000.

If this sounds enticing, consider the following:

In winter, snow can pile up 4 feet deep and those lucky few with local jobs (with the U.S. Forest Service, county roads maintenance or Ridgelite Products, which mines lightweight aggregate used in construction) can cross-country ski to work.

About 20% of the homes lack telephones or electricity--relying instead on battery-operated CB radios and cast-iron, wood-burning stoves or generators.

The area’s 101 registered voters use absentee ballots--officials long ago stopped ferrying the ballot box 93 miles back to the county seat on election night.

Rural. Rustic. Remote. These are the three R’s that rule Lockwood Valley and they are what drew its fiercely independent, pioneer-minded people here in the first place. Residents take solace in the four measured seasons that ripple through the pine forests as predictably as the dazzling sunsets. They enjoy pitting their wits against the elements--far from the urban crime, grime and crowds.

“We don’t want everybody up here,” Anderson says. “You tell those people in L.A. there’s nothing here for them,” he advises a visitor.

Erickson jokes that she wears her flak jacket when she ventures out to Lockwood Valley for an occasional hot links and ribs barbecue or the community’s annual July rodeo, which features calf-roping, steer-wrestling and bareback bronc riding.

“They look at government with a certain amount of skepticism,” Erickson says. But she adds that “We don’t hear from them a lot. They like to be left alone.”

Residents talk of a survivalist mentality that permeates the place.

“It’s worth it if you don’t weaken,” says Richard Albright, a 20-year Lockwood Valley resident who lives alone, 2 miles from the nearest paved road on a path that has to be plowed out from November to March.

A creek slices through his 10 hillside acres. His power comes from a generator; his communication with the outside world is from a CB radio. The phone lines don’t reach his house, but Albright bows to the 20th Century with a telephone and answering machine that he keeps in a box strapped to a telephone pole on the community’s main road.

He used to drive 90 miles each way to his job as an aerospace engineer in El Segundo. Now, he works a little closer--a mere hour away--in Sylmar.

“During winter, there can be 2 feet of snow in my front yard and I drive down to L.A., and there’s clear sky and 70 degrees.”

Historic Feud

Sometimes, Lockwood Valley seems more like the Hatfields and McCoys than what Albright calls “that John Wayne thing.”

About 40 years ago, a now-forgotten argument sparked a lively feud in which two rival families took potshots at each other from their respective homesteads. It ended in the early 1960s when one family scion died and the other moved away, Anderson says.

But in general, the natives are friendly.

When locals see somebody pulled over on the shoulder, they slow down their cars and holler out “Are you all right?” before driving by.

Gone from the roads are the long-line, 20-mule teams that used to haul borax out of the Lockwood Valley mines to a processing facility in Lancaster.

Earl Tifft, an 88-year-old Lockwood Valley resident whose family was among the first to settle here, recalls those days and how Drunkard’s Hill got its name.

“The mule drivers would get good and drunk going back and forth from the mines, but the only time a long-line skinner ever tipped over on that hill he was sober,” Tifft recalls.

His wife, Joyce, is the great-granddaughter of the Valley’s first inhabitant, Irishman John Fletcher Cuddy. Mementoes of an earlier era adorn the couple’s neat living room: hand-tinted photos of stalwart men with handlebar mustaches, stern Victorian women with pursed lips in oval portraits, mule teams headed up to the borax mines at Drunkard’s Hill.

Spry and lean in his ninth decade, Tifft still sports cowboy boots and jeans held up by a weathered leather belt. His father was the area’s first Forest Service ranger in the late 1800s. Tifft built his own log cabin here around 1920 and worked as a Forest Service firefighter until 1965, when he retired.

Name’s Vague Origin

Today, Tifft laments that he no longer knows everyone in Lockwood Valley by name. “They used to be all friendly and the families had parties all the time,” he recalls.

One question he can’t answer is where the name Lockwood came from. Neither can historians.

“We always assume there was a Mr. Lockwood, but it goes way back, and we don’t have any records about it,” says Alberta Word, the librarian at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art.

The area’s history dates to 1853, when miners arrived to look for silver and gold. Although no significant quantities were ever unearthed, Ventura newspapers from that time printed breathless predictions of coming wealth.

One 1887 account spoke of “a mine bigger than the Comstock, and possibly as rich.”

Historical records show that from 200 to 2,000 miners swarmed here at one time.

In 1887, according to Charles Outland’s historical book “Mines, Murders and Grizzlies, Tales of Ventura’s Back Country,” a town called Lexington was planned for the junction of Piru and Lockwood Creeks.

But that soon fizzled and few precious metals were ever found, despite repeated rumors that the legendary Lost Padres Gold Mine might lie somewhere near Lockwood Valley.

Ads for Cabins

In the 1930s, a different breed of speculator touted Lockwood Valley, first as a hunting spot (where mountain lions, fox, lynx, bear, deer, coyotes and fish abound) and then as a resort area (“The Catskills of Southern California,” “A primeval wilderness”). A tourist brochure from that era hawks Lockwood Park cabin sites for $50 ($2 down plus weekly payments) and heralds a soon-to-be-constructed 200-foot-high dam, and a “boulevard” that would connect Bakersfield to the Ventura beaches.

Neither was ever built, and Lockwood Valley has never threatened Big Bear as a resort area. The mines closed in the 1930s. In the 1960s, the Forest Service dynamited the entrances so people wouldn’t wander inside.

Today, satellite dishes dot the Lockwood homesteads, and VCRs abound. The Wild West days have evaporated into history, and the Lockwood Valley county deputy sheriff, who lives in the well-tended county compound that also houses the roads maintenance department, says he spends most of his time arbitrating disputes over water rights and property lines and making routine calls.

“I can go a month at a time without taking a crime report,” says Deputy Sheriff Frank Underlin, who is on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

One exception occurred three weeks ago, when Underlin arrested a man who had manufactured $50,000 worth of methamphetamine in a lab under his house.

But for the most part, things remain placid, which suits residents just fine.

Says Liebl, the teacher and turkey farmer: “A lot of people come up to Frazier Park for the snow, but most of them don’t know about Lockwood Valley. And that’s good.”

OWL’S BARN: The homey bar is the sole commercial establishment for miles around in Lockwood Valley. Page 4