Walks on the Wild Side: Milt McAuley Wrote the Book : Nature: The 72-year-old author has been named an ‘Environmental Hero’ for his work promoting and preserving the Santa Monica Mountains.

“Come along with me. . . . We’ll see spectacular waterfalls, travel challenging trails and savor the beauty of hundreds of acres of California lilacs. We will make our way across ridges, down into canyons and meet head-to-head the still wild land unchanged since the days Indians walked their trails. . . . You will discover what it is like to live with the wilderness in our back yard.”

--From “Hiking to Topanga State Park” by Milt McAuley

With paternal pride, Milt McAuley makes it his mission to introduce the Santa Monica Mountains to the world. He spends Saturday mornings leading groups on long hikes and short wildflower walks. On Sunday afternoons, he builds and maintains trails. He publishes guidebooks on the mountain range and shares his favorite secret hideaways. And he does it all at age 72--when many would just as soon take life a little easier.

For his work promoting and preserving the Santa Monica Mountains and other local wilderness areas, McAuley was named to the national roster of the Sierra Club’s 100 “Environmental Heroes.”

Attired in shades of khaki from hat to hiking boots, McAuley, a retired Air Force pilot, is ruddy and robust with just the hint of a paunch. Relaxing in his comfortable Canoga Park home while a ceiling fan peacefully whirs and a stereo plays soothing old melodies, he could be a favorite uncle. That is, if your favorite uncle tools around fire roads on a bike, keeps a compost pile in the back yard, farms a plot in a community garden, runs his own publishing company and hikes 20 or so miles a week.

But the hearty mountain man is surprisingly low-key about his passion for the environment. He refuses to preach, he says. He prefers to let his books, his deeds, his trails speak for him.

“I just take people out in the mountains,” he says. “People enjoy themselves on hikes, and they make up their own minds. If you get people out there, they will support the open space. And if we don’t have open space, the future is in trouble.”

Ed Rockie, a Pepperdine University business and management professor, joined a Learning Tree University hiking group led by McAuley. “Milt knows so much about all the flowers, plants, shrubs and trees, the different times they bloom and how they interact with each other and with animals,” he says.

“Milt talked as we walked, and I was fascinated. I began to appreciate the trails a lot more. I became willing to devote time to preserve the open space.”

After being inspired by McAuley, Rockie, of Westlake Village, became a member of a trail committee and chairman of an environmental task force for Conejo Valley conservation agencies.

McAuley has introduced thousands of people to the Santa Monica Mountains. For more than 25 years, he has led groups of 20 to 30 novices and veteran hikers on seven-mile Saturday morning hikes and easy two-mile wildflower walks. “For the last year or two, I have been the oldest one in the group,” he says.

He takes the role of “trail sweep” on Tuesday night Sierra Club hikes, staying in the rear to keep track of stragglers. “I can’t keep up with the real tigers,” he admits somewhat ruefully, referring to young club members who sprint up mountain trails. “I could be in a lot better shape.”

But he’s not doing too badly either. His blue eyes are clear and bright, his legs brown and muscular, his body strong. He strides along rocky trails, easily climbs steep hills and casually boulder-hops across streams.

“Hiking with Milt is a delight,” Rockie says. “I remember we took one hike in the rain and mud. Our hiking boots were four times as heavy in the wet clay soil, but Milt was always cheerful. He relishes every hiking experience. He is a very resilient, upbeat fellow who loves everything he does.”

Like a gracious tour guide, McAuley points out flowers and names plants along the trail, stopping to admire a wild orchid or to pick the sweetest blackberry off the vine for his companion to sample. A self-taught botanist, anthropologist and archeologist, he regales fellow hikers with tales of the days when the local mountains were inhabited by Chumash Indians.

“Milt is extremely knowledgeable about everything to do with the mountains,” says Jim Kenney, a Pacific Palisades dentist, nature photographer and fellow Sierra Club member. “If there is a rocky outcrop, he will explain its geology and how the Indians used it. He took me to the old stagecoach trail in the Santa Susana Mountains and showed me the wagon wheel ruts and holes in the rock where dynamite was used to blast through rocks. He knows all of that fascinating history.”

McAuley, who was born in the rural Northern California town of Dunsmuir, spent much of his life exploring the wilderness. As a Boy Scout growing up in Klamath Falls, Ore., he was already leading hiking and backpacking trips. He studied forestry at the then-Oregon State College in Corvallis in preparation for a career as a ranger. But instead, he joined the Air Force and spent 21 years as a pilot.

After retiring from the military in 1961, McAuley worked for an aerospace company, obtained high school teaching credentials in engineering, physics and math, sold insurance, and taught adult education courses in organic gardening and jewelry making. He spent every spare hour hiking in the mountains.

Then in 1979, he had an idea. Why not compile various trails of the area in a guidebook for hikers? He talked it over with a publisher, wrote the manuscript and submitted it.

A publisher who liked the idea was at the point of negotiating royalties with McAuley when the hiker-writer received a rejection letter. The company had reviewed the finished work and found that the “writing was of insufficient professional quality,” the publisher said.

“It really burned me,” McAuley says. Determined not to give up, he presented his manuscript to an English teacher hiking buddy who showed him the errors of his prose. “I didn’t know what a passive voice was,” McAuley admits. “I still don’t know what a split infinitive is.”

Then McAuley--who had no previous writing or publishing experience--rewrote his manuscript, bought a typewriter and created his home-based Canyon Publishing Co. With the assistance of his wife of 49 years, Maxine, he produced his first book, “Hiking Trails of the Santa Monica Mountains.”

McAuley developed his own unorthodox distribution method. Armed with a boxful of books, he stopped at every book and backpacking store on Ventura Boulevard, vowing not to return home until he had sold 50 copies.

“Store managers didn’t think I was for real,” McAuley says. But his guidebook proved to be surprisingly popular, and soon he was receiving orders. Twenty-five thousand copies have been sold in the 11 years since the book, now in its fourth edition, was first published.

Since then, McAuley has written and published seven books describing the trails, wildflowers and wildlife of the Santa Monica Mountains.

“Through his books, Milt has opened the parks to many people,” says Dan Preece, superintendent of the state park system’s 40,000-acre Santa Monica Mountains District. “His guides are essential to people who want to make sense of the trail system and know what it is they are looking at.”

In fact, Preece says even he relies on McAuley’s trail guidance. “Every time I go on a hike, I have one of his books with me,” he says. “On every single hike.”

McAuley is now working on guidebooks on plants in the area and is writing a day-to-day almanac of local wilderness experiences.

He is also writing a book on how well-meaning people inadvertently destroy wildlife and wilderness. The idea came to him in Caballero Canyon when he saw dozens of dead birds floating in a watering hole built for wild animals. The chaparral-dwelling birds came for a drink and, unused to deep water, they drowned. “Animals survived for centuries without man’s intervention,” McAuley says. “Now man is causing new problems for them.”

Despite the seriousness of his message, McAuley can be lighthearted, even flip. When he meets up with hikers referring to his guidebook along a trail, he will say, “If you use that book, you’ll get lost.”

McAuley also publishes works by other authors. Many are slightly offbeat, such as the guidebook on flint knapping (“the art of making stone tools”), a book of 365 daily devotionals and “The Appalachian Tale,” poetry inspired by the 2,138-mile, Georgia-to-Maine trail. (A sample poem: “Twenty mile day today/ Atta way to go/ But what my feet are screaming/ You wouldn’t wanna know.”)

“That publisher did me a favor,” McAuley says of the rejection years ago. Canyon Publishing has made a profit every year since its inception in 1980. Today, the publisher’s rejection letter is framed and hung in McAuley’s office for inspiration as he happily combines his retirement avocation with his vocation: promoting, preserving and protecting the Santa Monica Mountains.