Our Man in the Catalina Conservancy

Doug Propst was going home a couple of weeks ago, driving along one of the inland roads that crisscross the tall rugged mountains of Santa Catalina Island. Doug and his wife, Joan, live at Middle Ranch in the center of the 75-square-mile island. The Propsts work grueling hours but they don’t seem to know it.

Doug is president of the Catalina Island Conservancy and Joan raises horses, teaches riding and is a Pony Club director. They have found the ideal life, living with animals and nature and setting their clocks to the rhythm of the winds, the pounding of the surf and the songs of birds.

On his way home, Doug saw a small animal out of the corner of his eye. He slowed his pickup truck and saw that it was a Catalina Island fox, no larger than a big house cat, with the crisply pointed ears and pointed muzzle of the larger mainland fox. She was silver gray with a tawny blend and had a black muzzle tip and creamy white cheeks. She looked back at Doug and then he noticed that she had a pup beside her.

The next day, Doug slowed as he went by the spot and there was the proud mother again. This time she had three pups with her. She shooed them back into an old water pipe that was sticking out of the ground. Then the pups’ curiosity took over and three small faces poked out of the pipe and watched Doug, who left quietly so as not to upset the family. That’s one of Doug’s small rewards, to talk to the animals.

Doug Propst became president of the Catalina Island Conservancy in 1975. Three years before, members of the William Wrigley family who had purchased the island of Catalina from the Bannings, a pioneer California family, established the conservancy as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation and preservation of the island. Mr. and Mrs. Philip K. Wrigley and Dorothy Wrigley Offield, through the Santa Catalina Island Co., deeded 42,135 acres of the island along with almost all of the coastline.

There are several trees and plants that only grow on Catalina Island. One of these is the ironwood tree that grow in groves in the steep canyons and on the north-facing mountain slopes. It has a shaggy red bark and a canopy of dark green leaves. The conservancy’s native plant horticulturist, Janet Takara, has established an nursery at Middle Ranch to help restore the groves.

Doug showed Joan and me the Tarqua Cave, a great rock mountain with sides scooped away by weather or shifts of land. It was a shelter for Indians, near the ocean for fish, rich with plant life. UCLA has been doing an archeological dig there and signs show that the Gabrielenos and Chumash may go back 10,000 years.

Not Honey Bee. She goes back 30 years, which is a very long time if you’re an Arabian mare. The girls in the Pony Club, which is a part of a national group of young riders, had a birthday party for the gray lady, complete with a birthday cake. Grunt the pig, and Geraldine, the donkey who hates men, watched the party with appreciation.

We stopped by a pasture when a foursome of beautiful Arabian horses galloped wildly with manes and tails flying across a green carpeted paddock. Doug said, “See that old Arabian leading the pack. He runs like a yearling and if you put a saddle on him, he’ll droop and stand like the oldest horse in the world.”

Surely, Middle Ranch is not only a wonderful place for the Propsts to live and to have raised their daughters but it’s paradise for elderly horses.

As Doug and Joan and I were going along a steep mountain road, we passed a Catalina Island Co. tour bus. The driver rolled down his window and said, “Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?”

Doug said that he did that every time they passed and they were often the only two cars in the back country.

On top of the island at the airport, the conservancy is building a nature center with walls holding paintings of animals, plants, archeological finds and geological wonders of Catalina Island. The biologist in charge has discovered a kind of cricket indigenous to the island. He gave it a proper Latin name and then added propsti. Doug is the only man I ever knew who has a merry cricket named after him.

It is gentling to the spirit to know there is such a place as the Catalina Island high country and people like Doug Propst who hold it in trust for campers, hikers, riders, fishermen and just people who need to know such a place exists, just there, at the edge of the world.