City Kids in the Wilds : Recreation: For a decade, a state-funded environmental group has bused tens of thousands of children from poorer neighborhoods to mountain parks.

In the waning days of summer, children from low-income areas in South Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley were introduced to some of the amenities of being a California resident when they took a two-hour romp Wednesday in a Malibu state park.

For a decade, a state-funded environmental group has bused tens of thousands of elementary school children from the city’s disadvantaged neighborhoods to half-a-dozen parks in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Although Wednesday’s visit to Solstice Canyon Park was among the last of this year’s summertime outings, nature hikes and forest games organized by the Mountains Conservancy are scheduled through the school year, said Amy Lethbridge, director of the conservancy.

State and national park officials developed the program to encourage public use of the recreational sites in Southern California. The plan was to familiarize children with park areas so they will press their parents into returning. The program primarily seeks children whose families are least likely to use the parks.

“We have to start out with the assumption that the children from the poorer neighborhoods have never been to a mountain park,” Lethbridge said. “They usually come off the bus scared. They ask a lot of questions about bears and snakes.”

Several children, she said, have been reluctant to leave the parking lot.

That proved not to be true with Wednesday’s group of third- and fourth-grade students from schools in Pacoima and Avalon Gardens. Though quiet at first, they quickly began adjusting to their woodsy surroundings, sticking their heads into tree trunks and rubbing their hands on a fragrant sage bush nicknamed Cowboy Cologne, according to one tour guide.

“Let me take my daddy a piece, please?” asked Bryan Adams, 8, a third-grader at Miracle Baptist Church School.

While sucking on purple sage seeds, they learned how Indians in the area used the flora for food and other practical purposes. Sticky leaves from the “monkey plant” were used to cover scrapes and cuts, like natural bandages. The sage seeds, which are supposed to taste like watermelon, were used by American Indians as a stamina food because they are high in protein, tour guide Lisa Ford said.

“They do taste a little like watermelon,” said Annie Bradford, 9, a fourth-grader at South Park Elementary. “Not mine, mine taste nasty,” said classmate La-Shia Ransom, 9.

It’s not unnatural that students react differently to outdoor experiences, said Lethbridge.

“Sometimes it is hard for the organizers to appreciate how different the outdoors must seem to someone who’s never been here,” she said. “But I think anyone would be a little intimidated by what they aren’t familiar with. I mean, these kids come from parts of the city that, frankly, we are a little bit scared of ourselves.” When asked why she was so quiet in the beginning, La-Shia said she was responding to a teacher’s admonitions to pay attention to the tour guides, not the fear of being in a natural setting.

As each tour winds down, guides ask the students who they think actually owns the parks.

“Some of them answer, God or the governor,” Lethbridge said.

When a tour guide put the ownership question to La-Shia, she paused and replied, “We do.”