Park Outing Puts Focus on Past : Heritage: 4,000 gather at Anaheim’s Oak Canyon Nature Center to enjoy a mixture of unspoiled nature and local history.

“What’s that smell?” Emilio Molina, 5, demanded to know.

It might have been the pungent, unfamiliar aroma of sage, chaparral or oak leaves. Or maybe frying tortillas, or Irish stew being dished up over an open camp fire by volunteers dressed in historical costumes.

But before he could find out, the excited Fullerton youngster dashed off to see the vintage firearms, the birds and his favorite display--live lizards--at Sunday’s Heritage Day, which attracted Emilio and 4,000 others to the bucolic Oak Canyon Nature Center.

The 11th annual event, sponsored by the Canyon Hills Junior Women’s Club and the city of Anaheim, aims to teach locals some history of their city--the county’s oldest and geographically the largest--as well as to offer a rare glimpse of undeveloped landscape only blocks from homes and shopping centers.

“I’m so glad there are natural areas where people can go to explore and get a feeling of what California is and has been,” said organizer Gail Russell.

One reason the women’s club began the festival was to heighten the profile of the 16-year-old park, tucked between the Anaheim Hills Golf Course and the Riverside Freeway, she said. The little-known, 58-acre park contains six miles of hiking trails, a running stream and an interpretive nature center with permanent displays. Saturday, summer and evening programs are offered.

Suburbanites have become afraid of the local wilderness and some have become lost in the park, naturalists there said.

“Some people walk back and forth for an hour and they’re only 100 yards from the building,” said biology teacher Dan Jundanian, who was explaining snakes, butterflies and bugs to Sunday’s visitors. Some people, he said, refuse to enter the center’s building because of the native Rosy boa constrictor inside--even though it’s caged.

Venturing a few feet off the path Sunday, Fred Mack of Costa Mesa videotaped labeled patches of poison oak.

“It’s silly that you have to tell people in an urban society what it is,” he said, admitting later that he didn’t recognize the plant either. “None of us are outdoor people.”

Underneath canopies of spreading oaks, children took pony rides, made macaroni necklaces and clay pots. They tried nail pounding and cross-cut sawing. They learned about beekeeping and butter churning.

Adults as well as children swarmed around costumed members of Western Educators, Shooters and Troopers, amateur historians who had set up an authentic field kitchen, firearms display and old-time saloon of the frontier west. The men wore wool and buttoned clothing of frontier horse soldiers and civilians who were in California in the 1840s through 1880s.

“We want people to get the feel of what people were really like,” said Jesse Luna, a retired Santa Ana police officer dressed as Doc Holliday. Nearby, others were costumed to resemble such frontier characters as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp.

“Oh, no! Guns!” cried Emilio Molina, racing toward the rifles. “They kill people and animals. That’s not nice,” he glared at a soldier in costume.

“He’s into nature,” explained his mother, Susan Luevano.

Even though she and her husband, Al Molina, are both natives of Orange County, she said she discovered the park only recently as a birthday party site for her son.

“We fell in love with it,” she said.

The park reminds Luevano of the local canyons she hiked as a child, she said as Emilio tugged her toward the lizard displays.

Her husband nodded in agreement.

“You used to have trails in the hills surrounding your neighborhoods. Trails just like this.”