The High Road : A Mountain Path Opens the Pristine Wild to Those Who Hear the Call

Los Angeles is notorious as a world-class smog-hole, and less appreciated as a city with a mountain range, the Santa Monicas, close to its very heart.

The mountains offer wildness and solitude just this side of gridlock. To better enjoy them, a rugged footpath--the Backbone Trail--is being punched along the spine of the range from Will Rogers State Historic Park in Pacific Palisades to Point Mugu State Park in Ventura County.

Eventually, backpackers will be able to traverse the trail’s 65 miles without getting in a car. Even now, with nearly 50 miles complete--cobbled together from existing trails, fire roads and freshly cut sections--the trail provides challenging day hikes and overnight trips unspoiled by litter or crowds.

Crossing four state parks and National Park Service land, the trail climbs in and out of canyons and over wind-swept ridges, offering panoramic views of the ocean and inland valleys. Stately oaks and wildflowers paint the hillsides, turkey vultures ride the thermals and coyotes pad through the brush. Bird song drowns out traffic. Despite development, bobcats far outnumber fat cats.

A reporter recently spent five days hiking the completed sections. A shifting cast of park officials, naturalists and trail builders drifted in and out of the hike.

Day 1

Start: Will Rogers State Historic Park

Finish: Dead Horse Trailhead

Distance: 11.5 miles

On his way up Rogers Ridge, Dan Preece stopped to dab on sunscreen and drink in the surroundings. Behind him was the ocean, ahead Temescal Peak, to the east the green splendor of Rustic Canyon. And there above the canyon wall, like the Golden Calf, stood a monstrous home.

But it was a lovely day in the mountains--a day to be philosophical and upbeat. And Preece, deputy regional director of the state Department of Parks and Recreation, quickly seized the upside. Such mansions belong to business and entertainment moguls, Preece mused--people with influence in America and beyond. Living here might “sensitize these people to the environment or lead them to a better appreciation of nature,” he said hopefully.

Few other man-made intrusions marred the hike from the trail’s eastern terminus--the former ranch of cowboy humorist Will Rogers.

Preece was one of two parks officials who hiked this day. Tall and boyish-looking at 45, Preece heads the state parks’ Santa Monica Mountains District, including the four parks--Will Rogers, Topanga, Malibu Creek and Point Mugu--traversed by the Backbone Trail.

For Preece, the hike was a reality check. He’d learned that parks officials “have got to be careful that they don’t spend all their time in offices and boardrooms and elevators” like everyone else.

The other hiker, Tim Thomas, is a ranger and wild-land habitat specialist with the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park Service. Thomas, 41, knows a bird by its song and if a clump of grass is Stipa pulchra or Avena barbata. A blunt and passionate defender of the mountains, he came by his interest naturally enough. Thomas grew up in the flatlands of Encino, the son of a cop who walked a beat in Van Nuys and played clarinet in the police band. The elder Thomas also hiked, hunted rocks and gems, and ran canoes down wild rivers. By the time Tim was 8, he was climbing peaks in the Sierra. At age 13, he and his dad hiked 200 miles of the John Muir Trail, eating food from caches they hid along the way. For a while, he studied computer science, then switched to resource conservation. “This isn’t for me,” he had decided. “I can’t work indoors.”

With its polo field and sweeping lawns, Will Rogers park is the outdoors at its most manicured and benign. The scene changed abruptly as the trail climbed north on a fire road, past California sage, laurel sumac and giant wild rye grass. It had entered what has been called The Big Wild--a 16,000-acre swath of public lands from Will Rogers and Topanga parks to Sullivan and Rustic canyons and the Encino Reservoir.

Starting about 400 feet above sea level, the trail climbed gradually for about five miles to the 2,000-foot summit of Rogers Ridge, the long divide between verdant Rivas and Rustic canyons. Within a mile, it crossed the southern boundary of Topanga State Park, said to be the largest state park within an urban area in the United States.

Soon the trail reached Chicken Ridge, a slender strand of earth between sheer cliffs that plunge to the canyons below. Acrobatic swallows wheel above the chasms, making hikers gingerly crossing the bridge seem all the more cloddish.

The trail wound upward past evening primrose and everlasting --whose green foliage and showy white blossoms leave a lemony smell on the fingers. Deer tracks etched the trail, along with coyote droppings--gray-white with the fur of prey. Bending mercifully into the shade of a north-facing slope, it passed a grove of fragrant bay and walnut trees and a frighteningly dense jungle of poison oak.

Reaching the top of Rogers Ridge, the trail overlooked the floor of Temescal Canyon, bristling with bleached limbs of sycamore trees. Stretching out to the north was the Mulholland Crest; beyond, the San Fernando Valley poked through the haze. Mostly level and downhill walking lay ahead.

Banking sharply west, the trail continued toward a giant rock resembling a gnarled fist. Passing below the base of Eagle Rock, a huge mass of conglomerate, the trail began a southwesterly descent into the heart of Topanga, past morning glories, purple nightshade and wild cucumber vines. Towhees and scrub jays flitted through the brush, and fuchsia-flowered gooseberry showed off its glossy foliage and extravagant red blooms.

A loud kak-kak filled the air. Thomas identified it as a Cooper’s hawk long before spotting the bird at the top of a tree. “It’s nesting season,” Preece remarked. “He’s trying to get some action.”

The trail crossed a meadow sprinkled with red maids, then dropped through groves of chamise and manzanita to a bridge over a crystalline stream.

The hike soon ended at Dead Horse Trailhead. As we drove back to Will Rogers to pick up cars, two deer browsed nonchalantly along the entrance road. On a long hike through wild country, the biggest game was spotted through the windshield of a car.

* Parking is available at the Will Rogers lot and in Topanga at the Dead Horse or Trippett Ranch parking areas on Entrada Road, just off Topanga Canyon Boulevard. There is a walk-in campground at Musch Ranch in Topanga. The trail is incomplete from Dead Horse west to Saddle Peak.

Day 2

Start: Saddle Peak

Finish: Malibu Creek State Park

Distance: 9 miles

Ron Webster was meant to help others. This much he knew. But as he playfully told the tale, he was unable to answer destiny’s call, being almost too poor to help even himself.

Then one day while hiking in the mountains, Webster came upon a bush engulfed in flames. An ethereal voice commanded: “Ron Webster, lead the middle class into the Santa Monica Mountains!”

“And that,” Webster said with a chuckle, “is what I’ve been doing.”

Maybe it wasn’t divine intervention, but Webster’s rebirth as master trail builder did have an element of luck.

A machinist for nearly 30 years, Webster suddenly found himself laid off at 51 with a retirement pension too meager to support him.

A volunteer trail builder for the Sierra Club, Webster lost his job at the same time the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy was funding a grant for a full-time professional trail builder. Webster was chosen and, well into middle age, moved up from a job to a calling.

A spare, gray-haired man of 57, Webster has a way of flailing his arms when he speaks, John Madden-style, as though uncomfortable without an ax or mattock.

He has designed and helped to build about 35 miles of trail in the Santa Monicas and other local hills and mountains. Where others see only impassable thickets and rocks, he can envision a path. He has another priceless asset: immunity to poison oak.

Trail-building is mostly weariness and grime, but now and then it’s the stuff of adventure.

Recently while alone near Rocky Peak in the Santa Susana Mountains, Webster spied a mountain lion watching him while lying close by on the trail. At first he thought, “I’m so blessed!” to see a creature that usually flees from humans. Suddenly it occurred to him: “This is a demented lion!” Too unnerved to work with the beast in his midst, Webster brandished his ax and it padded away.

Parts of the Backbone Trail were built under Webster’s supervision. On Days 2, 3 and 4, he came along to revisit his work.

It was a lucky thing, too, because at times he was the only one who knew where he was going. At the start and near the end of the second day’s hike, the trail all but vanished, and there were no signs to point the way.

From the junction of Stunt, Scheuren and Saddle Peak roads, the trail climbed moderately for less than a mile to the top of Saddle Peak--actually a pair of peaks with a dip, or saddle, in between.

Descending to the north, the trail dropped among dramatic sandstone boulders and nearly vertical, honeycombed walls bristling with flowers and shrubs.

It continued west through sumac and oaks, circling beneath a high wall of Saddle Peak that glistened with silvery seepages of water.

Bending southwest, the trail reached a perfect lunch stop on a rocky overlook. From Monte Nido, a community nestled in the valley below, a rooster’s crow and a dog’s bark rose on the breeze. Beyond the community, the Goat Buttes, Castro Peak and Boney Mountain formed an impressive skyline. The snowy Topa Topas and incongruously green Calabasas Landfill appeared to the north.

From there, the trail dropped 800 feet in less than a mile to the bottom of Dark Canyon, where a stream flowed through a shady glen of alders and wildflowers.

Across Piuma Road, a trickle of water fell 50 feet into a ravine. Hugging cool, north-facing slopes, the trail passed under bay trees and oaks. At the confluence of Malibu and Cold creeks, it seemed to vanish, and stayed unmarked and hidden through Tapia Park.

“Nobody who’s not in the know can figure out how to go through Tapia Park,” Webster said.

As the trail entered Malibu Creek State Park, a stocky man with a shovel was working on a washout. A member of an equestrian club, he was fixing the trail for an upcoming ride. For a while, he bent Webster’s ear, then asked his name.

“You’re Ron Webster!” he exclaimed. “Look at this mess I’ve got here, and I’m talking to the supreme trail builder!”

* This is mainly a downhill hike from east to west, uphill west to east. Parking is available at Malibu Creek and Tapia parks, and on shoulders near the junction of Stunt and Saddle Peak roads. There is camping at Malibu Creek Park.

Day 3

Start: Piuma Trailhead

Finish: Kanan Dume Road

Distance: 13 miles

On a hot, dusty fire road heading relentlessly uphill, the bright, daisy-like flower was a balm to the eye.

What was this pretty thing? A native plant, said Tim Thomas, adding sarcastically: “Native to South Africa!”

The little plant, a gazania, had been sentenced to death.

Non-indigenous plants like this take root in the mountains, often competing successfully with native species. So plant experts like to kill the aliens on sight.

The gazania may have blown here as a seed. Perhaps a bird expelled it while flying overhead. No matter, it had to go. It was nothing but a “gaudy, bright thing that looks like it should be around a condominium,” Thomas said.

It was bad enough for the luckless flower to be caught by Tim Thomas. But it also had been spotted by Suzanne Goode, a plant ecologist with the state parks department. As a child growing up in Virginia, Goode would snatch the hearts from the Sunday dinner chickens and put them in alcohol, intending some day to create a chicken Frankenstein.

Against these two, the gazania hadn’t a chance. It was torn from the hillside and flung down on the road. “Die!” chortled Goode as she stomped it for good measure.

Jill Swift, a conservationist from Tarzana, had joined the group for the longest and hardest day of walking, which included four significant uphill sections.

The Backbone Trail crosses Malibu Creek by either of two alternate routes. The one we didn’t take cuts through the heart of the park. The one we did traveled more fire roads, but rewarded a steep scramble to the top of Corral Canyon with sensational views of the ocean, inland valleys and nearby mountain ranges.

From the Piuma Trailhead off Malibu Canyon Road, the trail climbed southwest past crowds of purple filaree, everlasting and fuchsia-flowered gooseberry. A bright yellow bush poppy, exuding the fragrance of melon, served up the day’s first nature lesson. Ants like the oils stored in a bump on the seed, Goode said. The ants store the seeds in the ground, and some of them sprout.

Past the base of a steep, shady draw, the trail climbed through a grove of walnut and oak. At the ridgeline, the trail truly resembled a backbone bulging from the skin of a huge animal at rest--with its right flank flaring into Malibu Canyon, the left into Corral.

Curling north, the trail reached the point where the gazania met its doom. Oat Mountain in the Santa Susanas was prominent in the distance, and the San Fernando Valley spread west to east before disappearing in a bank of smog.

Soon the trail was littered by hundreds of small, calcified corkscrews--the fossilized remains of turritella snails that were millions of years old. “These snails didn’t live in these latitudes,” Thomas said, but rather “in the tropics.” They were deposited when the mountains moved “northward over 20 degrees of latitude and then . . . rotated 90 degrees clockwise,” he said.

Bending west, the trail passed a meadow and then a complex of boulders carved into eerie shapes by the wind. Finally, it reached Corral Canyon Road, about six miles from the start.

Abandoning fire roads, the trail dropped into the headwaters of Solstice Canyon. Johnny-jump-ups and milkmaids grew along a creek that circled an oak-filled meadow and a shady spot for lunch.

From there, the trail climbed in and out of canyons--first into a tributary of Newton Canyon, then up to Latigo Canyon Road and back down into another arm of Newton.

At the parking area along Kanan Dume Road, the hike ended with a smorgasbord of soft drinks and beer. The best hiking was still ahead.

* Parking is available at Piuma Trailhead on Malibu Canyon Road and along Corral, Latigo Canyon and Kanan Dume roads. Public property ends just short of Kanan Dume and the last few hundred feet cross private land. We encountered no trouble, but it may be wise to ask the Park Service (818-597-1036) about the status of this trail, or end your hike at Latigo Canyon Road. An 11-mile gap in the trail begins west of Kanan Dume.

Day 4

Start: Circle X Ranch

Finish: Danielson Camp

Distance: 9.8 miles

“Isn’t God neat!”

Amy Thomas of Lubbock, Tex., was feeling reverent as she entered these words in the log at the summit of Sandstone Peak.

Another hiker, touched by the poetic muse, scribbled this: “With walking stick and knees that creak--I made it up to Sandstone Peak.”

A log book is a nice diversion, a chance to rest, reflect and entertain hikers yet to come. A quick scan of the past month’s entries in the Sandstone log noted that visitors from nine states and three foreign countries had trudged to the 3,111-foot summit.

Our party, which included Ron Webster and Russ Guiney, Malibu sector superintendent for the state parks department, paused at the top on the fourth day’s hike, which covered some of the Backbone’s wildest and most spectacular country.

From the north side of Yerba Buena Road, the trail climbed steeply on a fire road that baked in the morning sun.

To the north, on the far wall of Carlisle Canyon, a huge, elliptically shaped boulder named Balanced Rock stood on its toe, looking as though a breeze could topple it into the great gulf below.

In partial shade on the north slope of the peak, the trail went on climbing past stands of red shank, prickly phlox and bush lupine. After a little more than a mile--and an elevation gain of 800 feet--it reached a side trail for a final scramble to the top.

Sandstone Peak is part of Boney Mountain, a sort of mini-range with several summits of which Sandstone is tallest. From the peak, the trail continued west along high, exposed tablelands as ravens and turkey vultures drifted lazily overhead.

It crossed a badlands of huge, wind-sculptured boulders--one resembling an elephant, another a tapir. Some 2.5 miles from the trail head, the corridor passed the site of a backcountry camp and began a gradual descent through thickets of chamise to a lunch spot by a stream.

A short distance beyond, the trail left National Park Service land for the Boney Mountain State Wilderness, part of Point Mugu State Park. The trail then crossed a narrow neck of land through a tunnel of red shank and manzanita.

Behind us, Sandstone Peak had faded to a dot on the horizon. Ahead, two scenes of amazing symmetry spread out side-by-side. The blue Pacific stretched endlessly, broken only by the dark hump of one of the Channel Islands. And the Oxnard Plain appeared immense and flat but for a dark hill rippling its surface.

The trail descended in a series of switchbacks to the bottom of Blue Canyon, where a noisy stream fell over a ledge.

Just ahead, at Danielson Camp, the hike ended in the shade of ancient oaks.

Much of this had been new trail, nonexistent a year ago. Now hikers would visit the Boney wilderness for generations to come. Webster seemed proud, but a little ambivalent.

“I’ve shrunk the mountains. I’ve taken some of the mystery out of them. But there’s still some mystery,” he said.

* Parking is available at Yerba Buena Road near the eastern side of Circle X Ranch. There is no parking at Danielson Camp, except for renters of the group camp there. Leaving the Backbone at Danielson means hiking another three miles north to Rancho Sierra Vista Satwiwa or five miles to the mouth of Sycamore Canyon at Pacific Coast Highway. Camping is available at Circle X Ranch, at the backcountry site near Sandstone Peak and at La Jolla Valley walk-in campground 3.5 miles from Danielson.

Day 5

Start: Danielson Camp

Finish: Ray Miller Trailhead

Distance: 7.1 miles

The shortest and last day began at Danielson Camp, green and inviting in the morning air.

Heading south along the bottom of Sycamore Canyon, the trail skirted lush grasslands dotted with sycamores and oaks and sprinkled with flowers. Far ahead, something large and tawny rippled through the grass--perhaps a coyote or a deer. Farther on, in the shade of oaks, a coyote gazed at the intruders before trotting away. Judging from his lustrous coat, he’d had little trouble finding meals.

The trail swung west into Woods Canyon, climbing gently through a shady glen where a woodpecker was drilling.

Then two miles of effortless walking along verdant, gently rolling bottom lands suddenly, and cruelly, came to an end. Veering onto a fire road, the trail ascended 700 feet in three-quarters of a mile. Wildflowers, exploding on the sun-battered slopes, were little consolation.

Finally reaching a saddle, the Backbone merged with the Overlook Trail for the march southward to the sea. To the west and below, Sycamore Canyon was a long, green furrow, with Boney Mountain rearing up behind it. Soon, whitecaps flashed on the ocean and the roar of surf swept up the ridge on a damp sea breeze.

Descending toward the beach, the trail crossed an area burned over in the Sycamore Canyon fire of December, 1989. The fire had set the stage for a wildflower show. Among the blackened stubs of chaparral, shooting stars and morning glories, lupine and popcorn flowers, mariposa lily and Phacelia parryi created a gorgeous display of blues, pinks, yellows and whites.

It was a scene that said something about the Backbone Trail. Just as the scarred hillside brimmed with flowers, a region known for a blighted environment possessed a core of wildness and one of the world’s great urban recreational trails.

The trail isn’t finished, of course--but that’s not all bad. When the last links are completed, it will be time to hike it again.

* Parking is available at the Ray Miller Trailhead on Pacific Coast Highway. Camping is available at La Jolla Beach and Sycamore Canyon and La Jolla walk-in campgrounds.