Cabin Fever : Rustic Life Leaves Them With Warm Feeling

An hour from downtown Los Angeles, with its glittering skyline and futuristic high-rises, lie the 80 tiny cabins of the Big Santa Anita Canyon where, each night, residents step back in time.

While most people flick on fluorescent lights and click on VCRs as dinner heats up in the microwave, these cabin-dwelling commuters in the Angeles National Forest stoke wood-burning fireplaces, light kerosene lamps and cook dinner over propane stoves.

For them, “roughing it” is a way of life, made possible by a 6 1/2-mile drive up a twisting mountain road, a one-mile hike and a wade through ankle-deep streams to their cabins.

“Why it stays so nice is because you have to walk in,” cabin dweller Marta Anatra said. “People that are going to take that hike are a little different.”

The U.S. Forest Service, which leases the land for these privately owned cabins, discourages year-round living. Yet a handful of cabin owners manage to spend most of their time in their homes in the forest. Calling themselves “regulars,” they make up a unique community: self-reliant, hard-working, cooperative and protective of their secluded mountain retreat.

Anatra, 36, is a relative newcomer to this tiny community, having inherited in December a cabin owned by her father. She moved in with her 7-year-old son, Evan, who must hike out each morning to attend nearby Highland Oaks Elementary School in Arcadia. Sharing their cabin is Jeff Pickens, 32, with whom Anatra operates a beauty supply store in nearby Monrovia.

“The only reason we bought the business and came to Los Angeles was because of that canyon,” Anatra said. “I don’t know of any place like that in the immediate Los Angeles area.”

Anatra said she left behind a secure, career-oriented, suburban existence in the Silicon Valley in Northern California to simplify her life after the deaths last year of her brother in a traffic accident, and then her father.

“I just started thinking that life is so short,” she said, her eyes tearing. “It was time for a change.”

The big draw is the peacefulness of the rustic cabin life style, Pickens said, although he observed that it is “no piece of cake” to lug in supplies and make the daily trek on foot.

The cabin dwellers, whose structures line the Santa Anita Creek for up to four miles into the forest, are linked to the outside world by a hand-crank phone system along the canyon trails. In emergencies, forest rangers can unlock the gate to the fire road and drive down to the canyon trail head, within half a mile of the first cabin, or call in helicopter search-and-rescue teams.

When occasional winter rains swell the creek to waist-high levels, some cabin dwellers are forced to use an alternative cliff trail.

The only disturbances come from the occasional “yahoos,” Pickens said, rowdy youths or young adults who drink and party in the forest and sometimes vandalize unattended cabins.

One of the more enthusiastic residents of this cabin community is Leia Morning, 39, an actress, Renaissance music scholar, harpist and substitute teacher who bought her cabin for $2,000 nine years ago. Most of the canyon dwellers know her by her stage name rather than her real name, Nancy Beagle.

“This is all my place; this is the estate,” Morning said on a recent weekday afternoon as she led a visitor up a slight rise on the trail that leads to her dwelling.

Below stood a small green cabin, a tiny work shed beside it and an English-style garden with irises, tulips, 110 rose bushes, a settee swing and stone pathways.

She landscaped much of the grounds in 1985, Morning said. After finishing her doctorate at Stanford University in early music, she decided to take a break from scholarly pursuits.

“I just moved rocks,” she said. “All these rocks were brought up from the stream and I cleared that hillside . . . I took down the mountain because I needed more space and I moved the trail over there.”

The years of heavy work and the daily hikes have given Morning a fast, powerful stride. She moved quickly through her yard, removed two locks on the door and disarmed a generator-powered burglar alarm. The cabin had a pungent, smoky odor that betrayed frequent use of the wood-burning stove.

Built in 1916, the original one-room structure measured 10 by 16 feet, Morning said. A screen porch was added in the 1920s or 1930s. Thanks to her labor and that of friends, the cabin now boasts a kitchen with a terra cotta tile floor that she laid and grouted herself, a sunny library with a bay window overlooking the creek and an attic with twin skylights.

Her library, about the size of a large walk-in closet, surrounds a huge granite boulder that Morning found too large to unearth. She plans to build stone steps from the boulder to the attic for what she called “a little Hobbit stairway.”

Three years ago, she built her adjacent work shed and furnished it with a piano, chairs and her foreign doll collection. When forest service rangers, who must approve all additions, questioned her about the lack of tools in the “work shed,” she said she told them, “It depends on your definition of work.”

Like most of the cabin dwellers, Morning does without a phone, electricity and indoor plumbing. Her outhouse stands on a nearby hill. Heat is supplied by a wood-burning stove that over time has blackened the ceiling. Kerosene or propane-fueled lamps give light. Sponge baths provide daily hygiene.

Food, drinking water and all other supplies she wheels in on a dolly. Trash is carried out the same way. Large items, such as her piano or Victorian cabinets, are carried down the trail by hired workers or packed in by mules at 18-cents-a-pound from the Chantry Flats pack station.

Some days, Morning said, she would rather skip having to wash her hair in an icy stream or lugging her dolly up the road. But she wouldn’t trade her cabin life for that in a Beverly Hills mansion.

“It’s nice to wake up in the morning and hear the stream and the birds,” she said. “I’ll probably grow old and die here.”

While more than 600 privately owned structures dot the 797,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest, the cabins of the Big Santa Anita Canyon are are among the oldest. The earliest date from 1898 and others, such as Morning’s cabin, were built between 1910 and 1920, said John Bennett, U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officer for the Chantry Flats area.

The cabins are also the largest group reachable only by foot trails. About two-thirds of the national forest cabins are surrounded by roads leading nearly to their doorsteps.

The Big Santa Anita cabins also are remnants of the early 1900s conservation movement, which sparked intensive interest in the San Gabriel Mountains, Bennett said. Los Angeles residents paid a nickel to ride the electric Red Cars from downtown to the Sierra Madre turnaround, Bennett said.

From there, they walked to resorts such as Fern Grove and Roberts Camp, whose ruins can be seen in the forest today. Dances and July 4 celebrations at the resorts attracted hundreds of visitors who hiked the numerous trails and spent the night in more than 300 structures that at one time stood in Big Santa Anita Canyon.

Forest Service policy eventually emphasized converting the land to a more natural state, and the rules governing the cabins changed. Structures destroyed by fires, floods, slides and other natural disasters cannot be rebuilt, Bennett said. Thus, the Big Santa Anita Canyon structures are a limited commodity.

They now range in price from $10,000 to $25,000 and vary in construction. Some are made of stone, some are supported by thick logs and others are built of thin lumber with no insulation and tar paper roofs. Owners must secure 10-year leases from the federal government that cost up to $235 a year and they pay property taxes of less than $200 yearly, Bennett said.

Under U.S. Forest Service rules, cabin owners must stay at least 14 days a year in their structures but are not supposed to use them as permanent residences. An exemption exists for about three long-term cabin users, Bennett said, including one man known as Louie the Hermit.

In his 70s, Louie lives alone, reads extensively, is fluent in many languages, dresses in Bermuda shorts and shirts held together by safety pins and has been known to chase off or ignore unwanted visitors, Morning said. That same weekday afternoon, she hiked about a mile to Louie’s place under a shady grove of giant oak trees uphill from the stream.

“Louie! Louie, are you home?” Morning shouted and pounded at his cabin door. Smoke curled from his chimney. But no one answered.

Undaunted, Morning then tramped off to visit another neighbor, 77-year-old Dimce Spirov, a Yugoslavian who left his communist-dominated country in 1969 for the United States.

“He’s our master stone mason,” Morning said, pointing to the stone steps he built from the stream up to his cabin.

Spirov, happy to show off his handiwork, gestured to the Alpine-style carving and paneling in his 1912 cabin.

“Completely. I,” he said, as he struggled in his limited English to explain he had done the work. He then broke out a bottle of whiskey and offered a toast.

“Any time, you come,” he said. “I like people. No problem color. No problem nationality. One problem, communists.”

Since the death of his wife three years ago, Spirov now spends five days a week working at the cabin, he said. His children and grandchildren are frequent visitors on weekends but during the week, Spirov’s companions are his two tiny dogs, Rita and Mece. The forest reminds him of his former mountain home in Yugoslavia, he said.

Raising his arms eloquently to embrace the forest path below, the sky above, his cabin and the hillside behind it, Spirov added, “I like. Perfect.”