UP A CREEK : Canyon Dwellers Alarmed by Creeping Development of Once-Remote Rural Area

It is a warm Saturday afternoon in Silverado, and the fragrance of sun-warmed sage rolls down the brush-covered canyon walls.

Sherry Meddick, cup of coffee in one hand and cigarette in the other, trades small talk with a string of neighbors as she stands on a shaded walkway in the community’s commercial center--one small market, a restaurant, a cafe, a real estate office, a post office and a tiny branch library.

One neighbor engages her in a discussion of the pleasures of a particular brand of ice cream bar. Another arrives with a frisky black mutt, just abandoned by a “flatlander” along the two-lane road that winds through the steep canyon. The friendly newcomer provokes a noisy and irritated rebuke from Clyde, the aging chocolate-brown Labrador usually found dozing in front of the market.

The market door swings open and the cashier leans out. She wants Meddick’s help in stopping a neighbor from cutting down a centuries-old oak.

“I’m gonna get a gun,” the cashier says, with enough of an edge to make an outsider wonder whether she might be serious. “I’m gonna end up in jail, so you’ll save me a lot of hassle if you do this. . . . Someday, I’ll get in a lot of trouble over this tree.”

Meddick promises to take a look and do what she can. If more diplomatic channels fail, she jokes, “you can be chained on one side, I can be chained on the other.”

Sherry Meddick makes it her business to look after trees. When a growing oak split the foundation of her own home a few years back, she didn’t cut down the tree--she moved the house. “That tree is 300 or 400 years old,” she says. “It’s not a tree that’s replaceable.”

But while she still finds time for the small battles, her attention has turned increasingly from the welfare of single trees to plans that can affect hundreds, even thousands, of oaks, sycamores and alders.

The canyons of the Santa Ana Mountain foothills, home to rural communities such as Silverado, Modjeska and Trabuco, were once too remote for developers who carpeted the rest of the county with tracts of look-alike housing. But now, times are changing for the land that urban sprawl forgot.

“A lot of the more readily developed areas of the county, particularly the flatter areas, are already developed,” says Lynn Dosheery, chief of the land planning section for the county Environmental Management Agency. “People are looking into the foothill areas for development.”

Looking into them in a big way. The warning shot was Portola Hills, some of whose 2,500 tract units look down from a ridge top onto Cook’s Corner, the rustic roadhouse that sits at the convergence of El Toro, Santiago Canyon and Live Oak Canyon roads. The beer-and-hamburger joint, a converted World War II mess hall moved to the site in 1946, has long served as the symbolic boundary between suburban Orange County and the rural backcountry.

Housing projects are proposed for the area that stretches from Cook’s Corner and Trabuco along Santiago Canyon Road to Silverado. Projects in various stages of planning include Santiago Ranch (162 homes on 120 acres); Rose Canyon Ranch (1,550 homes on 589 acres); Holtz Ranch (347 homes on 318 acres) and Foothill Ranch (3,900 homes on 1,643 acres).

Also on the drawing board for the canyon areas are road-widening and building projects and commercial centers--and one project Meddick calls “enormochurch.” In August, Saddleback Valley Community Church filed for a permit to develop a site on Live Oak Canyon Road near Trabuco. Plans include a 6,500-seat church--that’s more seats than the Crystal Cathedral--an education facility, a day-care center and a 100,000-square-foot conference center.

This is a crucial time for the communities of Silverado, Trabuco and Modjeska, where many residents see the encroaching development as a threat to a cherished way of life. It is an area where tiny mountain cabins are tucked among the trees, where streets are named Thisa Way, Thata Way and Hunky Dory Lane, where residents boast of knowing every face in town and of not having to lock the doors at night.

It is, in short, an area where the life style bears little resemblance to that in the rest of the county.

“People from out of state stop in front of the market and say, ‘Gosh, we haven’t seen any place like this in Southern California,’ ” Meddick says. “Even people who have lived in the county for 25 years will suddenly discover us and say the same thing.”

And the threat of change has been enough to turn some residents of the once-sleepy communities into activists. Meddick is president of the Rural Canyons Residents Assn., which draws most of its 350 members from Silverado and Modjeska. Bruce Conn and Ray Chandos head up the Rural Canyons Conservation Fund, which concentrates on the Trabuco area.

The fund began in 1983, when Conn heard about plans for a new, four-lane road through Trabuco that would connect the canyon community with the sprawling Rancho Santa Margarita development on the nearby Plano Trabuco. Rose Canyon Road would cut through a ridge directly across from Conn’s Trabuco home.

Conn stood at Cook’s Corner and handed out flyers to drivers heading into the canyon. About 50 people attended the first meeting, and the group was born.

One of the first and most active recruits was Chandos. “I moved here because of the rural character of the area,” he says, “and I want to see it preserved.”

It was too late to keep Rose Canyon Road off the county’s master plan of arterial highways, but the battle “got us into other areas.”

The group scored a victory in October when it got the courts to block a 10-acre shopping center approved by the county for property across from Cook’s Corner. It also got the Portola Hills project scaled back slightly--but not enough, Chandos says.

“We still think it’s too densely graded,” he says. “Maybe we raised some consciousness with that one, but it was a defeat.”

Chandos pulls no punches in the newsletter he edits for the fund. On the mimeographed sheets, he follows news items on local development issues with often-biting commentaries. In one recent edition, Chandos blasted some fellow members of the county’s Foothill/Trabuco Feature Plan Advisory Committee--which he heads--as “bulldozer-worshiping Philistines.”

In an earlier issue, in a commentary on plans to urbanize O’Neill Park, he took a sarcastic swipe at the county Board of Supervisors: “Unlike other spineless counties, they’ve avoided the quality of life, infrastructure, transportation, water supply and other frivolous issues, and focused on progress first. And that’s why things in Orange County just keep getting better all the time.”

“I tend to take kind of a vitriolic approach,” admits Chandos, who says even Conn sometimes takes exception to his writing. “The point is to get people riled up.”

Chandos is a self-taught expert on planning who spends most of his time pouring over environmental impact reports and other documents. The more gregarious Conn is the front man, the organizer. “Lack of fear” is what Conn lists as his main asset: “I guess I’m the arm waver.”

On a driving tour of Trabuco and the surrounding area, Conn stops at a wash that separates the different worlds of Trabuco and Santa Margarita and points to a sea of condominiums. “That thing was designed on a computer,” he says.

Turning back to the eclectic mix of ramshackle cabins and exclusive estates that makes up Trabuco, he says: “It’s an evolution. It has imperfectly, methodically evolved over 150 years.”

A loathing for tract housing is something Meddick shares with Conn. “We would like to see production housing, tract homes, eliminated out here,” she says. “Completely.”

Both she and Conn say they are not entirely opposed to further development, but they would like to see it proceed on a lot-by-lot basis.

One big fight she sees looming is Holtz Ranch. In the upper reaches of Silverado Canyon, the steep canyon walls provide a natural barrier to development. Most of the flat lots already have houses, including many small, wooden cabins that were built as weekend cottages as far back as the 1920s. Just a handful of homes have been built here in the last decade.

But where the canyon widens slightly, there is a large, flat area known as Holtz Ranch. Locals also call it the turkey ranch, because that is what it once was (weathered and collapsing coops still stand on the property). A mobile-home park was once proposed for the site but was never built. Now the proposal is for 347 single-family homes on 318 acres. There are 378 homes already in the canyon.

The county Planning Commission held a public hearing on the project earlier this month and plans another for Oct. 10. Meddick predicts a battle.

“I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the community would fund a lawsuit” if the project is approved, she says.

“It’s totally inappropriate. There’s never been a tract up here at all. All these (existing) homes were built at completely different times by completely different people, and they look like it.”

Meddick has lived in Silverado for 13 years. She has been a member of the Rural Canyons Residents Assn. since its beginnings in the late 1970s. “In the years (of) recession and . . . no construction, the organization wasn’t very active because they didn’t need to be,” she says. “It was great because you didn’t have to worry about anything.”

Then things changed, with such projects as Portola Hills, Dove Canyon and Robinson Ranch, and Meddick began to assume leadership of the group. These days she runs her small word-processing business in the evenings, is a waitress two nights a week at the Silverado Inn and gives weekend piano lessons--which leaves her weekdays free to attend hearings and haunt the county Planning Department.

“I have the pleasure of knowing almost all the planners,” she says, with a laugh. “Actually, for the most part, I really like the planning staff. I frequently disagree with them, but as individuals, I can’t think of many I don’t much care for. Most of them are very nice.

“I’m not wild about the Planning Commission’s decisions, for the most part. I think they’ve been very insensitive in some cases for the foothills, but recently they seem to be getting better.”

One event that will have an impact on the future of the canyon areas is the adoption in August of the county’s Growth Management Plan Element, to be added to the county’s General Plan. The document, a response to the countywide slow-growth initiative that failed on the June ballot, adds some protection for the foothills.

For one, it upgrades the Foothill/Trabuco area to a specific plan--a development blueprint with more regulatory bite than the feature plan it supersedes. Also, it has provisions for rural transition zones and for open-space buffers between communities and along transportation corridors.

According to Dosheery, chief of the county’s land planning unit, there are some wrinkles to be worked out. One is how to deal with the flood of development permit applications while the specific plan is completed, a process that will take about a year.

Also, she says, “We need to define what (rural) really means.”

She has some ideas on that already: “I don’t know if tract housing in the traditional sense would be appropriate in Foothill/Trabuco. If we allow that sort of development, such as Portola Hills, I don’t think we’re going to get where we want to go.”

Overall, Dosheery is optimistic: “I think there is a lot of potential for preserving the significant natural features of the area and (retaining) the rural character as well.”

Meddick, meanwhile, is taking a wait-and-see attitude. “I think the next six months are going to be very interesting because of the implementation of the Growth Management Plan and how that will affect the future of the area.”

Lecil Slaback has a black-and-white photo, taken in 1906, of his yet-unmarried parents and another couple taken on Holtz Ranch. The ladies are seated in a horse-drawn carriage, the men standing in front, with a house and windmill in the background. The structures can still be seen from Silverado Canyon Road.

In those days, an excursion to Silverado from Santa Ana was an all-day affair over rough and unpredictable roads. After they married, the Slabacks would take young Lecil to the wooded canyon, where he would play and fish in the year-round stream.

After World War II, Slaback bought some property in the canyon, where he would take his own sons on weekends and spend the night in a tree house that still stands.

“Nobody wanted this property then,” Slaback recalls. The only cabins in the canyon were owned by weekenders, mostly from Long Beach.

Twenty years ago, after buying some adjoining lots, Slaback built a house on his 1 1/2 acres and came here to stay. A wooden bridge, shaded by towering sycamores and alders, crosses the stream he played in as a child and leads to his property.

He has seen changes. The weekenders were replaced by renters, who were then replaced by professionals who commute to the cities below the canyon. Tiny cabins that sold just 15 years ago for less than $20,000 might sell for $100,000 now. But for Slaback, the charm remains.

“Believe me, I’ve enjoyed my retirement,” says Slaback, who worked as a court reporter in Santa Ana. “We’ve got a top-notch fire department. We’ve got a top-notch post office. We’ve got a swell library branch--they really cater to the people here.”

There’s no mail delivery, but Slaback sees that as an advantage too--the post office is where the locals meet and exchange small talk, where birth announcements and other news are posted in the window.

But Slaback cuts the reverie short: “I don’t want to wax too enthusiastic. We’ve got enough people already.”

“The common bond we all have,” 17-year Silverado resident Betty Hannis says, “is none of us can stand to live in a metropolitan area.”

That is also what drives Conn to commute 112 miles round trip each day to his company in El Monte in Los Angeles County. His monthly bill for a car phone: $600.

“It’s not everybody’s cup of tea to unwind this road twice a day,” Conn says. His Trabuco home, sitting on five heavily wooded acres with a view across the canyon, is the prize waiting at the end of each day’s long road. And it is a prize, he says, that is worth the hours he puts into his battles with development.

“It’s part of the price you pay to live in a nice area,” he says. “It’s not a one-time battle. It’s an ongoing battle.”