Skeleton Cars Rise Up Again : Ortega Highway: Tow trucks retrieve vehicles that went over mountainsides in wrecks or were deliberately dumped and now pose hazards in forest.

On a map, this scenic route that meanders through the pristine Cleveland National Forest is known as Ortega Highway, or simply California 74. But paramedics and California Highway Patrol officers use different names for treacherous stretches of this 32-mile road, which they say is the most notorious two-lane thoroughfare in the state.

Ricochet Alley, for example, is a narrow succession of twisting curves cut into the rocky cliffs 2,500 feet above sea level. Speeding drivers who lose control on hairpin curves bounce off the mountainside like rubber balls, either slamming into an opposite wall or flying over the edge of a ravine and dropping 300 feet below--often to their deaths.

Just east of Ricochet Alley is Pushover Point, where junk cars are pushed over the side. An eerie collection of metal skeletons now lines this area of San Juan Creek, a graveyard for stolen and abandoned cars.

On Tuesday, U.S. Forest Service and CHP officers escorted an army of tow trucks to the area to retrieve about 70 vehicles, which authorities say leak hazardous materials that pollute the creek, kill wildlife and pose dangers to forest visitors.

It was the first time since 1978 that state authorities have removed junk cars from the area. The cleanup was expected to end today, after the CHP and Caltrans close a 2 1/2-mile stretch of the highway’s westbound lanes just west of the Orange-Riverside county line from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to allow tow truck operators to recover the vehicles from Ricochet Alley and Pushover Point.

“Some people don’t realize the damage they are causing when they dump their cars down there,” said Danny Johnson, a spokesman for the Trabuco Ranger District of the Cleveland National Forest. “Wildlife looking for scarce water in this drought die after drinking engine oil and transmission fluids that have leaked into the water system. And when rains come, these contaminants flow into everyone’s water supply.”

CHP Officer Gary Alfonzo said that at least five of the 19 vehicles recovered Tuesday had been stripped by thieves and pushed over the cliff. In fact, a gray Toyota pickup, among the first vehicles recovered Tuesday morning, had been stolen the night before from a restaurant parking lot in nearby Lake Elsinore, Alfonzo said. The vehicle’s stereo and ignition systems were removed before it was dumped, he added.

But many of the people who push their cars over the cliff then report them missing to collect insurance money, Alfonzo said. CHP officers said the operation eventually could lead to the prosecution of dozens of Southern Californians who have reported their cars stolen after dumping them in the ravine.

The two-day operation, which was expected to cost $70,000, had been planned 18 months ago, but state funds to remove abandoned cars like these have dried up.

So CHP and U.S. Forest Service officers asked four South County tow truck companies to volunteer for the project. The companies will be paid after investigators trace each recovered vehicle to its last owner and bill their insurance companies for the cleanup costs. Under state law, insurance companies must pay recovery costs for stolen vehicles.

People who dumped their own cars will get the bills themselves.

“A few people are going to get in trouble for this,” Alfonzo said. “You’d be surprised to find out how many people drive out here to collect a little insurance money. We have ways of telling, and some of (the culprits) are going to be in for a little surprise.”

Many of the wrecks are not deliberately cast off into the ravine.

Previous CHP and Caltrans studies have revealed that California 74 has four times the state average for fatalities on a two-lane highway. CHP Officer Ken Daily of the San Juan Capistrano-area office said at least 36 people have been killed in accidents on the highway during the last decade.

The most common cause for the accidents is speed, Daily said. Officers have clocked some cars at 90 m.p.h. on curves in 45 m.p.h. zones. Many of the fatalities are motorcyclists, who find the twisting curves challenging, he said.

“There was a rash of deaths in the early 1980s after a biking magazine suggested that Ortega was a great place for bikers to try out their machines,” Daily said.

Orange County paramedics made 92 trips to rescue people in remote ravines off Ortega in 1991, Orange County Fire Department Capt. Dan Young said.

“What is amazing is that a lot of people take their high performance cars up there to show their friends what their cars can do,” Young said. “In many cases, the cars don’t quite make it around the curves like the TV advertisements show. We’ve rescued people who’ve said, ‘Boy, that thing was doing real well until we hit that wet spot,’ or ‘It just didn’t hold when we hit the gravel.’ Many people live on the edge . . . stupidly.”

Diane Ritzman, who drives Ortega five times a week on her 50-mile commute from Murrieta in Riverside County to her job in San Juan Capistrano, said she plans to form a watchdog group to report speeding and abusive drivers to the CHP.

“Some drivers who are being pressured to drive faster pull aside for (speeders) to pass and sometimes go over the edge,” said Ritzman, a 28-year-old mother of two. “When you see this happen, your heart goes a mile a minute. It’s like watching TV, it’s unreal.”

The tow truck operators turned the cleanup operation Tuesday into friendly competition, each trying to outdo the others by finding more junk cars.

Operator Ronald Morton and his crew hoisted a motorbike and two rusted cars from a canyon 200 feet below the North Main Divide Road. Like most of the cars retrieved from the ravines, the skeletons were reduced to sieves from the hundreds of gunshots pumped into the metal body by enthusiastic shooters.

On a battered bumper of one recovered vehicle was a sticker that is a favorite among motorists who use this road regularly: “I Survived Ortega Highway . . . One More Time.”

Correspondent Len Hall contributed to this report.