Rocked Out : 3 Months After Slide, Isolation Still Takes a Toll on Lockwood Valley

Even in the Lockwood Valley, where life’s ebb and flow has always tended toward the languid, the past three months have been interminable.

Residents of the remote area, 60 miles northeast of Ojai, say that since a winter storm sent hundreds of tons of rock plummeting onto California 33--blocking the area’s main link to the towns and cities to the south--the pastoral valley has taken on an unnatural quiet.

And the cattle ranchers, alfalfa growers and shopkeepers in the Lockwood Valley and throughout much of the rest of northern Ventura County are not happy about their isolation.

Even though many of the 1,000 or so people who live here came to escape the city--and few have telephones--the closure Feb. 19 of a small stretch of highway has changed their lives.

“It’s been rough on the whole community,” said Mike Virgilio, who owns 1,800 acres of ranchland in the area. “If they keep it closed, it’s going to turn into a desert.”

What especially raises hackles is that the state Department of Transportation and the U. S. Forest Service, the two agencies involved in plans to clear the highway, have yet to clear the landslide that so residents’ lives can return to normal.

“In the past when there has been a slide, there’d be people out there the next day cleaning it up,” said David Kenney, one of two Ventura County sheriff’s deputies responsible for patrolling an 865-square-mile beat in the northern portion of the county. “What people can’t accept is why it’s taking so long.”

The size of the landslide has contributed to the long delay. Another problem has been where to put the debris, which includes automobile-size boulders and large trees, once it is removed, officials said.

On Tuesday, after months of discussions, Caltrans and the Forest Service, which owns most of the land as part of Los Padres National Forest, reached a tentative agreement on where to dispose of about 30,000 cubic yards of rubble--about 3,000 dump truck-size loads--once the roadway is cleared.

Originally, Caltrans wanted to remove 150,000 cubic yards of rock and dirt, including the rubble in the road and unstable portions of the hillside it came from, and place it at the side of the highway in the national forest.

But Larry Hornberger, a Forest Service engineer, said Forest Service officials balked at the idea, citing laws that require lengthy environmental studies when a significant change to the landscape of a national forest is proposed.

According to the agreement, the rubble will be discarded on a privately owned ranch about two miles from the site of the road closure.

Hornberger said the agencies did not discuss the road closure with urgency until May 2, when Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) interceded in the dispute.

Despite the dispute, which led to a delay of nearly three months, Gallegly said he was pleased with the response of Caltrans and the Forest Service after he held a meeting with representatives from both agencies.

“It appears (that) after three months of indecisiveness by the agencies, we’ve gotten the matter resolved,” Gallegly said Wednesday. “If they keep their commitment, the highway should be back in operation in 60 days.”

But residents of the area are unmoved. They say they will believe it when the six-mile stretch of winding road between Pine Mountain and the Ozena Ranger Station is reopened.

“Nobody cares about us up here,” said Wen Carpenter, whose alfalfa ranch is losing business because it has lost a direct route to horse owners in the Ojai area.

With the approach of Memorial Day weekend, which has traditionally swelled the population of the area from 1,000 to 4,000 as campers, backpackers, hikers and bikers flock to the forest, a sense of desperation has begun to set in among the area’s business owners.

“It has been very, very bad business-wise, and I don’t even want to think about what’s going to happen this summer,” said Meg Emord, co-owner of Sagebrush Annie’s, a roadside cafe on a stretch of California 33 north of the rockslide. “We’re just barely surviving now.”

Gayle Carpenter’s restaurant and bar is struggling even more than husband Wen’s ranch.

“The locals are the only people who are coming,” said Carpenter, who has watched business at The Place drop by two-thirds since February. “A lot of our business is weekenders from Ventura. Now, if you’ve got a motor home, it takes $100 in gas to get up here. Even the bikers can’t get up here.”

Residents have been forced to take a nearly 100-mile detour to go to the post office and pick up prescriptions in Ojai. What was once an hourlong trip has become a daylong round-trip. A straight shot down California 33 has been replaced with a journey that leads area residents south on the Golden State Freeway, west on California 126 and north on California 150 and California 33.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Virgilio is six months pregnant and her doctor is 3 1/2 hours away in Oxnard--on the other side of the roadblock. The Virgilios are considering living in Oxnard during the final month of the pregnancy if the road is still blocked.

The local sheriff’s deputies must drive the long way to the county jail in Ventura. They joke that the long drive gives drunk-driving suspects a chance to become sober.

Carol Hodge shops for her favorite brand of ice cream in a supermarket in Taft in Kern County, 60 miles away.

And Partner Hicks said he has to drive 200 miles out of the way to buy feed for his chickens.

Says Wen Carpenter: “It ain’t gonna make or break us and we sure as hell ain’t gonna die, but it would sure be a hell of a lot nicer if it was open.”