Heaven on Earth : Accommodations Are Primitive, but Santa Cruz Island Is a Great Place to Get Away From It All

This weekend, Francis Gherini will return, as he does every July 4 weekend, to celebrate his 80th birthday on the part of this island that he still owns.

Defends might be a better word. Gherini’s remaining share of the 10 square miles his family once owned will one day be taken over by the National Park Service. It’s the last piece needed to complete Channel Islands National Park--Southern California’s only national park--under a 1980 Congressional mandate.

Until then, Gherini holds out while continuing to practice law in Oxnard. This weekend, he will board a twin-engine Piper Navajo, fly 19 miles southwest out of Oxnard, make one pass to check the tattered wind sock, then circle to a passably smooth landing on the grassy strip that serves as “Santa Cruz Island International Airport,” according to a sign on a shack.

While landing, Gherini once hit a sheep.

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Jaret Owens greets tourists with the airport limousine. Actually, it’s an All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV), essentially a four-wheeled motorcycle that serves as the only motorized transportation on the island.

There are no paved roads, only trails trying to hold their own in grass grown lush by the winter’s rains. Partway along to Scorpion Ranch on the other side of the island, Owens stops where the way is blocked by eight wild horses and one suckling colt.

As they graze amid the bright yellow-gold wildflowers, Owens leans back on the ATV to soak up the sun and observes, “It’s heaven out here.”

It’s close. The east end of Gherini’s property is private, but Owens’ Island Adventures has a lease to book visitors for primitive beach camping at Smuggler’s Cove ($25) or lodging at Scorpion Ranch ($50). Overnight round trips by Island Packers boat are $55, day trips $42.

An 1889 adobe bunkhouse also accommodates Boy Scouts and other groups at Smuggler’s Cove. If urbanites care to try it, they can still get away from it all.

This is not Club Med. No television, no phones, no frills--but there are showers and flush toilets, snorkeling, mountain biking, kayaking in sea caves, some of the best surf fishing anywhere and plenty of peace and quiet. Weekend sailors anchor in Smuggler’s Cove.

Said Bob Murias, who helps Owens: “Your ears get really sensitive out here. With no traffic, there’s no city background noise.”

An abandoned well remains as evidence that Arco once drilled for oil on the island but found only water. Springs provide an ample supply. But there are no stores, no snack bars, no newsstands, no souvenir shops. There is no way to spend any money on the island.

“Maybe one of these days we’ll go big time and get T-shirts,” Owens said.

But he wouldn’t be as comfortable anywhere else.

“I’ve spent most of my life on this island or in Alaska,” he said.

Owens also organizes island hunts for wild pigs, which are in nuisance abundance, and the wild sheep that range the high ground of the east end--descendants of the thousands that were eradicated from the rest of the island in the 1980s. Once a client offered Owens a gun. All he had to do was to go to Los Angeles to pick it up.

“I got down there . . . got scared, got lost,” Owens said. “Took me three hours to get home. I won’t drive past Oxnard now.”

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A visitor begins to understand why Gherini holds out: partly for a better offer, partly for his grandchildren.

Santa Cruz, with 96 square miles, is the largest of the eight Channel Islands, which include Santa Catalina and San Clemente. Gherini’s great-grandfather, Justinian Caire, bought a share of the island in 1869 and became its primary developer. He built Scorpion Ranch and the bunkhouse at Smuggler’s Cove, ran sheep and grew grapes for his winery. There are still piles of stones cleared by Caire’s ranch hands.

Gherini’s brother and two sisters have sold their shares, and the other 90% of the island is owned by the Nature Conservancy, which bought Carey Stanton’s Santa Cruz Island Company land on a lease-back deal in 1978.

Gherini’s daughter, Andrea Gallant, is also a lawyer and has been assisting with negotiations.

“It was difficult in the beginning to think that it wasn’t going to be in the family for another 100 years,” she said during a recent visit with her husband, Brad, and their two children. “Over the years we’ve come to terms with it. We don’t have a choice.”

The government has offered $3 1/2-4 million, which may sound like a lot, but works out to about $2,300 an acre. Gherini doesn’t think that’s enough, and if he’s being forced to sell, he wants a fair price. He can’t put a price on what his grandchildren might miss, although the government has agreed to allow the Gherinis visitation rights for 25 years.

A glass case in the bunkhouse displays a large collection of arrowheads and grinding stones left by the island’s first residents, the Chumash Indians.

According to exhaustive research by Channel Islands historian Marla Daily, after his voyage of discovery in 1542, Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo described the Indians as “very poor . . . (and) they live very swinishly and go about naked.”

The Indians lasted another 300 years until moving to the mainland in the early 1800s. Like Owens and the Gherinis, they really didn’t want to leave their untracked beaches, their pine forests, their eucalyptus, sycamore and cherry trees, their peace of mind.

The island is a special place for bird watchers, who note that the bright blue Santa Cruz Jay, a third larger than its mainland cousin, is found nowhere else. Peregrine falcons nest in the rugged north coast cliffs, and a peacock named Big Bird hangs around Smuggler’s Cove.

Scorpion Ranch is a cluster of cabins and shacks, including a 19th-Century blacksmith shop gone to rust, set deep into a canyon away from the beach. Outside Magazine recently listed it among 15 “Perfect Spring Camp Sites” in the United States.

Fishermen once tied up at a wharf in the cove to trade their catches for bread baked in the kiln-type oven built into a bat cave. The wharf is mostly gone. Visitors are shuttled to shore on skiffs. The bats remain, along with skunks, quail and a few harmless snakes.

Mac McGowan, the resident handyman, wipes footprints off the picnic tables in the courtyard. The little Channel Island foxes have come calling in the night. Visitors meet them on the road in the daytime. They seem wary, but unafraid.

McGowan, 70 and a retired electrician, visited the island on a Sunday trip and noticed Owens fumbling to hook up a radio to a solar panel. Solar power is the source of the ranch’s electricity.

“I helped him do it, and then his dad asked, ‘Would you be interested in coming out and working this place?’ ” McGowan said.

McGowan’s chores include keeping an old bulldozer running, the solar power working and playing his baritone ukulele for sing-alongs around the campfire.

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What will become of Owens’ operation when the National Park Service swallows up the east end of Santa Cruz is uncertain. The Gherinis recently gave the Assn. of Santa Barbara Channel Yacht Clubs permission to establish an outstation at Scorpion Cove.

Francis Gherini declined to comment for this story, but his daughter said: “It will be open to public recreation under the authority of the national park. I don’t think there’ll be any hunting. They don’t like hunting in national parks . . . and they don’t like sheep, they don’t like horses.

“I can’t imagine it being the same, but I don’t know what it’s going to be. Right now, with Jaret’s operation, it’s a wonderful paradise.”

Said Brad Gallant: “I’ve been coming here since ’69 or ’70. We used to round up all the sheep, chase the horses down . . . lot of memories, lot of work, lot of fun.”

Andrea Gallant said when she was a child, “I would come over every other week when my father brought a boat from Santa Barbara with supplies. He has had 80 years of his life here, and I spent a lot of that time with him on horseback.

“We had a working sheep ranch. We rounded up the sheep once a year for shearing in the springtime . . . get up in the morning, catch your horse, round ‘em up, bring ‘em down for shearing.”

Not until three years ago did she visit Santa Catalina Island.

“I was curious to see what an island looked like that was developed, with stores and buildings. It was like being in Santa Monica in the summer--people everywhere.”

On Santa Cruz Island, Owens said, “20 people is a big weekend.”

And some of those were concerned when they met a reporter who planned to do a story about their island hideaway. Now everybody would know about it.

“My kids won’t grow up herding sheep and fixing fences,” Andrea Gallant said. “That was the hardest part when this was first talked about in the ‘70s--that my kids weren’t going to have that experience . . . running free, without worrying about them. Where else can you do that anymore?”

They will do it for a few days this weekend, when Francis Gherini comes home. He’ll have 35 friends and family members to help him become an octogenarian.

“It’ll be the biggest birthday party you’ve ever seen,” Owens said.

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Information on visiting the privately owned east end of Santa Cruz Island is available by calling (805) 642-1393.