What the $78 Million Will Buy : Irvine Co. executives and environmentalists join together for a tour of Laguna Canyon, a place few residents really know.

The narrow hills of Laguna Canyon look much as they did when Gabrieleno Indians hunted there.

Although the main road through the canyon to the beach was paved in 1914, there are no strip malls, no enduring structures. Six decades after the road went in, the golden grass and dusky sage vistas were still so unspoiled that one wag pronounced the place “more soothing than a three-martini lunch.”

For the past decade, environmentalists have staved off development of the land, acre by acre. And now, under an agreement reached Sunday, Laguna Beach voters will be asked to help purchase and preserve 2,150 acres of canyon known as Laguna Laurel with a $20-million bond issue on the Nov. 6 ballot.

Few Laguna Beach residents, however, have ever seen more of the serene canyon than the narrow strip visible from Laguna Canyon Road.

On both sides of the road, the soft mouths of canyons are laced shut with barbed wire, punctuated with No Trespassing signs and frequented only by grazing cattle and patrolling Irvine Co. deputies.

Only the most intrepid hikers, bikers and fishermen have admired the small lake for which Laguna was named, the huge sandstone formations just out of sight of California 133 or the panoramic view out to Catalina Island from a ridge top.

“The natural beauty of it until now most people have experienced only from behind their steering wheels,” said Paul Freeman, who was hired by the city and the Irvine Co. to forge a compromise on the fate of the canyon and who will manage the campaign in favor of Measure H, the bond issue.

“There’re sycamore groves and walnut groves and wetlands and really lush areas,” Freeman said Monday. “There’re incredible caves where Indian artifacts have been found. . . . There’s just lots of wildlife. . . . And in the winter there are parts, particularly back in these canyons, where the wildflowers are just like an English garden.”

The Irvine Co. on Sunday agreed to sell the land to Laguna Beach for $78 million over a five-year period, abandoning its controversial plans to build a 3,200-unit development there. Company executives and environmentalists joined together on Monday for a tour of what the public would be getting for its money.

Among other things, the purchase would create an unbroken swath of greenbelt stretching to the Aliso Viejo Dedication Area to the south, the Irvine Coast Dedication Area and Crystal Cove State Park to the west, and to open space set aside by the city of Irvine to the north.

“This greenbelt is like an emerald necklace, and this is the diamond in the middle of it,” Freeman said as he surveyed one of three lakes on the property.

Two of the lakes, the only natural ones in Orange County, are bone dry. The third, which abuts Leisure World is clogged with reeds and algae. But in the past it has been home to catfish, feral goldfish and carp, and is frequented by people fishing illegally, said Bill Gartland, director of land development for the Irvine Co.

Environmentalists say the land is also home to a number of rare and endangered plants, animals and birds, among them the San Diego coast horned lizard, the orange-throated whiptail and the California black-tailed gnat catcher.

The land is also covered with coastal sage scrub, which provides shelter to two species of rare lizard and a number of birds, said Elizabeth M. Brown, a biologist and president of Laguna Greenbelt Inc., a conservation group.

“Coastal sage used to be very widespread, but because there’s so much development on the coast it’s becoming endangered,” Brown said.

Past the barbed wire, the flat lands of the canyon mouths show the scars of nearly a century of intensive cattle grazing and of years of drought. Parched tufts of grass poke through clods of dried earth. On some trails, the hoof marks in the dust are three-quarters of an inch deep.

“You’re seeing it at its saddest--four long, hot, dry summers,” Brown said.

Low sweeping elderberry, live oak, sycamore, sage and prickly pear dot the landscape, but no tree saplings were in evidence Monday. Those that survived the drought, Brown explained, would be devoured by cattle.

Turning the parcel into parkland instead of subdivisions would avoid an estimated 36,000 daily car trips on Laguna Canyon Road, Freeman said. Still, at mid-afternoon, the traffic at the junction with El Toro Road was deafening.

But a five-minute hike away from the highway, the sound of traffic fades and signs of wildlife become unmistakable. In an unnamed canyon just south of the better-known Laguna Laurel Canyon, Brown pointed out the tracks of quail, raccoon, mule deer, a western fence lizard sunning on a log, and the holes showing where a family of acorn woodpeckers had tormented a sycamore tree.

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