A 20-Year Uphill Battle to Save the Mountains : Santa Susanas: A group toasts the progress it has made toward setting aside open space for a park that would stretch to the ocean.

For most of the 100 million years since the Santa Susana Mountains were pushed up out of the ocean, the craggy hills needed little from man.

But 20 years ago, Chatsworth resident Janice Hinkston decided that the hills around her home were in danger of being bulldozed into housing tracts, so she and some friends formed the Santa Susana Mountain Park Assn. Their dream: to protect the mountains from encroaching development and to create a wildlife corridor that would stretch from the Santa Clarita Valley to the Pacific Ocean.

This great Santa Susana Park is still just a dream, but about 75 people turned up Sunday to celebrate the association’s accomplishments over two decades--which include setting aside 600 acres of parkland and lobbying successfully for initiatives to protect open space.

“We are desperate to take care of them,” Hinkston said of the mountains, where she leads members of the public on monthly hikes.

In 1970, when Hinkston and her group set out to create an uninterrupted corridor of wild land from the Santa Clarita Woodlands near Magic Mountain to the ocean, people laughed. It was an impossible task, Hinkston was told. Why not settle for something less ambitious?

Hinkston would not. And still will not.

It may take another 20 years to realize her dream, but Hinkston--a retired kindergarten and first-grade teacher whose car license plate reads SUSANA--is not discouraged.

“We knew it would take a while,” she said Sunday.

In the last 20 years, the association has finagled a variety of public agencies into purchasing hundreds of acres at the mountains’ rugged base in Chatsworth. None of the land belongs to the association. Instead, members introduce legislators and parks officials to the land, explain their cause and let others do the actual buying.

“We expose the potential of this land to different government agencies,” said Zelma Van, former president of the association.

Members lobbied heavily in 1988 in favor of Proposition 70, a statewide parks bond initiative to raise $776 million for acquisition and restoration of parkland, some of which is expected to be used to purchase land in the Santa Susana Mountains. They also lobbied this year on behalf of Proposition 117, which banned sport hunting of mountain lions in California.

In 1973, the association persuaded the federal government to place the Santa Susana Stage Coach Trail on the National Register of Historic Places. The trail, which winds through Santa Susana Pass south of the Simi Valley Freeway, was the main commercial overland route between Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1861 to 1874. The 400-mile trip took about three days.

The stagecoach trail, lengths of which are still visible, followed the Indian foot trails and paths used by people making their way between missions in San Fernando and Ventura.

Aside from the ultimate goal of connecting the Santa Clarita Valley and the ocean with uninterrupted open space, the association wants the Legislature to declare land already set aside as a state park.

In the meantime, Hinkston and her group said they will work to clean up areas in the mountains scarred by graffiti and illegal dumping, as well as defend them against development.