Modern Trails Seldom Retrace Those of Chumash Indians

Hiking in Santa Monica Mountains backcountry, it’s easy to imagine you’re retracing the ancient journeys of the Chumash Indians. On trails and switchbacks, you marvel at the tenacity and skill of Indians who lived in the mountains for thousands of years before the first white man landed in California.

And as this earthen Indian legacy bonds you with the past, you wonder, How did they do it? How did a hunter-gatherer society build switchbacks down steep slopes and wrap trails to the top of peaks? You go tripping through a wooded glade, Technicolor bluebirds chirping around you, Roy Rogers singing “Happy Trails” in your head.

Snap out of it. Contrary to popular belief, the Chumash had virtually nothing to do with the current trails in the Santa Monicas. Most Indian trails have been lost or usurped by developers. Today’s trails were either built by modern man, evolved voluntarily through use by equestrians and hikers or were bulldozed for fire roads.

“Most of the trails we use now have no relationship to Indian use,” says Milt McAuley of Canoga Park, author of popular trail guides to local mountains.

The small sections of Indian trails still believed to exist are a closely guarded secret to preserve them and keep souvenir hunters away. “It’s our policy not to tell the public where these trails are,” said McAuley, who is president of the Ventura County Archaeological Society.

There is a notable exception to the policy: the No. 1 trail in McAuley’s “Hiking Trails in the Santa Monica Mountains” is the Chumash Trail, also known as the Old Indian Trail, in Point Mugu State Park. The Indians used the trail to reach the Pacific Ocean from La Jolla Valley, a sprawling mountain meadow.

The lower trail head is located along Pacific Coast Highway a short distance north of the La Jolla Canyon parking lot. Although the Indians went straight up the steep mountain, an elevation gain of about 1,000 feet, today’s hikers are aided by switchbacks--but the climb up is still arduous and state rangers don’t usually recommend it.

McAuley believes that the Chumash Trail “is the oldest trail in continuous use” in the Santa Monicas, which means it may have come into existence even before the pyramids of Egypt. “We believe the Indians have been in the mountains about 9,000 years,” McAuley said. “Most surely for 7,000 years.”

Most Chumash trails were not designed by tribal engineers or made a community project but were established through usage. “Indians just walked the trails for hundreds and hundreds of years,” McAuley said. The Indians usually followed ridge lines and streams and probably established canyon trails after natural fires cleared out the vegetation.

Although the Chumash didn’t usually use tools to make trails, McAuley believes he found a trail where they did. “It goes for about 400 or 500 feet across a solid rock face,” he said. “It’s chipped out, three or four inches wide, on sloping rock. It was probably a crack to begin with that sloped in the direction they wanted to go, between two villages.”

The Spaniards who colonized the Los Angeles area were at first guided by Indians across a network of trails that linked the L.A. Basin with the San Fernando Valley. The Spaniards didn’t build any trails in the mountains--although they created some by riding horses--but they did establish El Camino Real, the royal road, a horse trail that connected missions throughout California.

“It wasn’t a constructed highway,” McAuley said. “But on occasion, the Spaniards would get out pick and shovel to make it possible to bring wagons across.”

By the mid-1800s, wagons were able to ride from L.A. to Newbury Park on El Camino Real, following the route that has become the Ventura Freeway and is still a long, perilous journey with many delays, especially during rush hour.

The man who could give the Spaniards a lesson with pick and shovel is Ron Webster, a Santa Monica resident and professional trail builder. Webster, who works for the Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council, estimates that he has built or helped build 50 miles of trails in the Santa Monicas during the past 20 years. Unlike the Chumash, however, he must operate under the watchful eye of environmentalists and ecologists.

“The Chumash followed the natural ways through the mountains,” Webster said. “They didn’t have constraints that a trail had to be on a 10% grade, which puts my trails for the most part on the sides of mountains.”

Webster’s digging is so far removed from where the Chumash would have been that he doesn’t worry about having a project stopped if Indian artifacts were unearthed. “The Chumash were too smart to go where I build my trails,” Webster said. “I never have run into their stuff.”

But Webster does have something in common with the Indians: Like them, he’s built up an immunity to the omnipresent poison oak. When he first began building trails, rashes would cover his body. Now, he can wade into a thicket of poison oak and not be affected.

“People say the Indians were immune because they used mugwort,” he says, referring to a perennial in the sunflower family. “But Indians were immune for the same reasons I am: They were exposed to poison oak on a regular daily basis.”