Coastwalkers Hike 36 Miles on Principle : Outdoors: Group envisions a shore trail from Oregon to Mexico. Walk is staged to educate public on beach access.

The Leo Carrillo State Beach parking lot firmly in her sights, 67-year-old Hazel O’Donnell finally slowed her stride.

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After five days of walking, her straw visor was adorned with five sea gull feathers, her knapsack was full of sand, her new hiking boots had become old friends, and Coastwalk, a journey down the Ventura County coastline, was over.

“I wanted to see if I was fit enough to do it,” the Newbury Park resident said, coming to a halt with a smile of satisfaction. “I guess I am. I feel great.”

Last year, O’Donnell had breast cancer and a mastectomy. She refused to quit her job as a waitress in the Agoura Hills Denny’s, because she says, she hates having nothing to do.

Last week, she used that energy to promote a rather utopian cause, Coastwalk’s dream of a coastal trail running from the Oregon border to Mexico.

The environmental group based in Sonoma has staged walks in various Northern California counties since 1983. But this is the first year the group has organized walks the entire length of California’s coastline and the first time Ventura County has been tackled.

The premise was simple: Learn about the coast by covering its length a step at a time. But executing the challenge was far more complicated, and exhausting, than any of its participants expected.

Along with 20 others, ranging in age from 5 to the mid-70s, O’Donnell plodded across sandy beaches, over slippery rocks, on city streets, and all too often on the dirty shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway, traveling about 36 miles in five days.

Coastwalk tries to educate the public about its rights to access to the California coast, or at least to the beach below the high-tide line as put forth in Article 10 of the state constitution. The treks are part political statement, part educational venture, and part hard work--as O’Donnell and her companions found last week.

Although miles of sandy beach along Ventura’s coastline reach out invitingly, the Coastwalkers, as they called themselves, found numerous obstacles, man-made and natural, to continuous oceanfront walking.

High tides and no-trespassing signs at the private communities of Seacliff, Faria and Solimar stymied the trekkers up the coast from Ventura, sending them into vans to shuttle to the next point of coastal access.

Getting around the Port of Hueneme Harbor involved a long detour through the Port Hueneme Naval Base. Farther down the coast, they were turned away by barbed wire fences that surround Point Mugu Naval Air Station.

They did what they could, sticking as close to the water as possible, often getting drenched by rogue waves in the process. They shuttled cars every morning so they would be ready to drive around the man-made barriers. They helped each other over the rocks and up the hills.

Eight of the Coastwalkers were senior citizens, three were children. Many were not terribly fit and most unfamiliar with camping. Several were in the midst of divorces and were looking for peace of mind along the trail.

The leader was a 70-year-old man whose hearing aids were in the shop (they rusted after he flipped a kayak a few months back). But all of them were remarkably patient and surprisingly tough.

DAY 1: CARPINTERIA BEACH

Adjusting the unfamiliar weight of backpacks and tightening laces on their hiking boots, the group of 21 Coastwalkers set out fresh on Monday morning.

It was hot and clear, with only an edge of fog visible, far beyond the oil platforms.

Leader Tom Maxwell, a 70-year-old with the legs of a man half his age, pointed out a few curious seals popping their heads out of a kelp bed near the pier. The Coastwalkers headed down a precarious edge to the sand and rocks below.

“Don’t walk too close to the edge or it might cave in,” Maxwell said, blithely ushering the first walker under a strand of barbed wire.

The coastal trek was laced with lessons, under the leadership of Maxwell, a retired Cal Lutheran anthropology professor with a vast store of knowledge.

“This is oil,” he said, pointing to a natural seep in a patch of rocks glistening with an black sheen. A trickle of viscous black goo dripped onto the sand. The walkers looked worried.

“See, this shale is naturally full of oil,” he said. “It isn’t leaking out of those Chevron tanks.”

The same tarry glop on the rocks was once used by Native Americans to caulk their canoes, Maxwell explained.

The group soon broke into twos and threes heading across Carpinteria State Beach, then Bates Beach. The older Coastwalkers politely averted their eyes on the nude section of Bates Beach while the children stared openly.

O’Donnell stopped to mop her brow with a damp cloth. “I’m only doing this to prove a point to myself,” she said, sweat beading up on her fair skin, “to prove I could do it.”

She confides she hasn’t slept in a tent in 25 years. To train for Coastwalk, she walked four or five miles at a stretch around her neighborhood.

“We’re coming into Ventura County now,” said Maxwell, as the group passed the county-line marker, a wooden pole tilting a little in the sand.

Where a small group of posh houses curve around Rincon Point, Mary Fink, a 73-year-old Sonoma woman, discovered a dead bird. She found a small metal band encircling one of the bird’s legs. Tiny numbers were barely visible.

“See, you should always look at the dead birds on the beach,” Fink told the walkers. “That metal band means someone has been tracking this bird and they’ll want to know what happened to it.”

Taking out her penknife, Fink sliced off the bird’s leg and stashed it in her pack, telling the others she would send the band to federal wildlife officials. Fink is something of a Coastwalk expert. She has been on every walk since 1983. This summer, she began at the Oregon border June 12 and hopes to reach Mexico on Sept. 24.

A few yards away, the beach ends abruptly. The waves crash against a rock wall at the base of the freeway.

The wall provided a perfect backdrop for a political speech for Richard Nichols, Coastwalk’s statewide coordinator.

“The enemy is the freeway,” said Nichols, a middle-aged environmental activist with a walrus mustache. “There is no beach here anymore because the waves bang up against the freeway and pull all the sand out.”

High tides again trapped the group just north of the Cliff House Hotel and Rincon Island, forcing the group onto the shoulder of the highway.

“Single file, with 10 feet between people,” Maxwell said. “That way they can only take out one of us at a time.”

The little parade marched down the Ventura Freeway, drawing swiveled heads from the occupants of cars and trucks whizzing by.

The exclusive seaside communities of Seacliff, Faria and Solimar presented another barrier to coastal access.

The public can walk along the beach during low tide. But when the ocean rises, the beachfront houses, many protected by concrete seawalls, block the way to the beach. And homeowners post no-trespassing signs, showing no ambiguity about what they think of visitors.

So the group boarded vans, drove along Pacific Coast Highway and hunted for an entry point to the beach.

“How about there?” Elaine Kendrick of Ventura said. “Oh no, it’s gated. Keep going. We’ll just drive until we get access.”

The vans finally stopped at the southernmost edge of Rincon Parkway, just past the row of RVs parked in front of the seawall. The group tumbled out, ready to walk the rest of the way to camp at Emma Wood State Beach Campground, less than two miles away.

Coastwalk had arranged for dinner to be waiting at the campsite, and the hungry walkers fell on barbecued chicken, baked beans and cans of cheap beer.

Despite complaints of sore legs, sunburned shoulders and blistered feet, the Coastwalkers were obviously pleased by their first day of hiking. By the time they gathered around the campfire, nearly everyone was boasting a clean, new Coastwalk T-shirt, dug out from a cardboard box in the back of Nichols’ van.

DAY 2: EMMA WOOD BEACH

The morning begins with groans, pancakes, and a heavy fog chilling the air. Between the trains on the ocean side of the campground and Ventura Freeway traffic on the other, few hikers slept through the night.

By 7:48 they had torn down their tents and stuffed them into a station wagon bound for the next night’s campground.

Heading out to the beach, Kelsey McCalla, a 10-year-old from Simi Valley hiking with her aunt, stopped to search the train tracks for the pennies she had left on them the night before. Clutching the flattened coins, she climbed over the rounded rocks that line the shore at Emma Wood.

“I am an adventuress,” she proclaimed.

The mouth of the Ventura River was dry, but littered with the carcasses of five sea lions, in various states of decay. The walkers also found three dead birds and something that looked like it had been a cat.

Camille Ahmadzai poked at a can lying in the sand. “This is a dead animal too, of the Budweiser species,” she said.

The group used a sandbar to make a dry crossing and followed the bike path beyond Surfer’s Point, winding its way into Ventura.

In front of the Holiday Inn, Nichols posed the group for pictures with the Coastwalk banner. “We call this a ‘name it and proclaim it’ ceremony,” he said. “You may think that we’re providing these walks for pleasant beach strolls, but what we’re really doing is promoting the idea of a continuous trail down the coast.”

On San Buenaventura State Beach, Maxwell discovered a sea hare. He picked it up, watching it elongate in his hand. He described the way it inks the water to camouflage itself from predators, then gently put it down on the sand.

“I guess that’s what attracts people to the ocean,” mused septuagenarian Dan Hirtz of Santa Rosa, rolling his pants up to wade in the surf. “You never know what you’re going to find, whether it is a bird or a sea hare or something.”

At Marina Park, True Heitz of Ojai was waiting with a pickup truck filled with kayaks. She had volunteered to lead a small fleet of kayaks across Ventura Harbor.

Most of the Coastwalkers had never been in kayaks before. A few, including Shelley Sharp, her 5-year-old son Tyler, and O’Donnell decided to take Heitz’s truck instead. “I’m not a water rat,” O’Donnell said firmly.

But 16 Coastwalkers did put to sea, experimenting with paddling techniques and bumping into each other like rubber ducks in a bathtub. They waited for several fishing boats to go by, then shot across the harbor.

A sea lion sunning itself on the dock barked at the flotilla of kayaks going by, then flopped into the harbor.

“That was great,” Nancy Kellogg of West Hills said as she pulled herself up on the dock and then checked to make sure her niece and nephew made it across. “Where can we rent some if we come back?”

Jim Watts, a 70-year-old Thousand Oaks retiree who said he keeps busy climbing the highest peaks in the Sierra, sat down on the wall at the entrance to the Channel Islands visitors center.

“Wouldn’t take too much to become a beach bum,” he observed, resting back on his elbows to dry his shorts in the sun.

By 5 p.m. the group began moving at a fast clip down the beach toward McGrath State Beach Campground, wading through the Santa Clara River toward the promise of showers--25 cents for two minutes of hot water--and lasagna from Maxwell’s wife, Ruth.

With the day almost over, some of the walkers become reflective.

“I’m really impressed by Ventura,” Hirtz said. “I always thought it was a dump before. The beaches are beautiful, and anyone can come to the beach; you don’t have to be rich.”

Anup Bhowmik and his son, Ajit, 14, both of Westlake Village, were dragging behind the others.

“Ajit wants to be in the water, not walking by it all the time,” Bhowmik explained. “Coastwalk is a little too much of a cause for me.”

But Kellogg interrupted.

“I like the cause,” she said. “It feels good to be participating in something that might actually wake people up to the fact that we’re losing our coast.”

DAY 3: MCGRATH STATE BEACH

Wednesday was the longest day, more than nine miles of hiking punctuated by several unsurmountable obstacles: two harbors, one decidedly not scenic Navy base and another base protected by razor wire and signs warning to keep off the U.S. Government property.

The hike began at McGrath Lake, with a discussion of how last December’s oil spill affected wildlife and vegetation. Then the group moved on along the beach to the Mandalay Power Plant, where Heitz swam across Edison Canal while the rest of the Coastwalkers took the bridge.

Beyond the power plant and Mandalay State Beach, homes press up against the wide swath of sand at Oxnard State and Hollywood beaches. They stack up on both sides of man-made Channel Islands Harbor, tucked in between Hollywood Beach and Silver Strand.

“I sure wish the move to save the California coastline had started in the 1940s,” groused Nichols, stepping onto the asphalt path around the harbor. “We’re about 30 years too late.”

Any development made Nichols grumble. But for most, walking on paved streets instead of soft sand was a relief for the Coastwalkers.

They walked down Victoria Avenue and passed through the gates of the Port Hueneme Naval Construction Battalion Center. The group was getting tired and a mini-mutiny almost broke out when Nichols ordered Coastwalkers into a crosswalk, accusing them of acting like 5-year-olds.

“Excuse me, who’s the 5-year-old?” mumbled Shelley Sharp, reluctantly backtracking to find a crosswalk with the others.

Once out of the base, they stopped at the Port of Hueneme, appealing to port officials to let future Coastwalkers cross the mouth of the harbor. A bridge? A tunnel? A Chunnel?

Port official Kam Quarles laughed.

“We’ll keep you in mind,” he said. “But I don’t think the Hueneme Golden Gate or Chunnel is going to happen any time soon.”

Waiting for the Coastwalkers on the edge of Port Hueneme Beach was Al Sanders, a Sierra Club member and self-appointed guardian of Oxnard’s endangered sea birds, the least tern and snowy plover.

“Other than Camp Pendleton, this is the best nesting site for least terns in Southern California,” Sanders said.

The birds nest along the Hueneme Lagoon, an estuary behind the beach. At the far end of the lagoon is Halaco Engineering Co.’s aluminum recycling plant. An enormous pile of metal tailings sits next to it.

The wide stretch of white sand at Ormond State Beach was deserted, except for brown pelicans, sea gulls, terns and the steam-belching Ormond Beach Power Plant.

A mile later, the security fence around Point Mugu Navy base came into sight through the late afternoon mist.

Navy officials rejected a request by Coastwalk to walk the base’s four-mile sandy coastline. They offered instead to ferry some of the group by bus, but wouldn’t take the children.

So Maxwell decided to bypass the base altogether. He was also told the public is not allowed even on the seaward side of the high-tide mark.

“They told me we’d have to stay at the surf line and if we washed ashore they’d arrest us,” Maxwell said. “I don’t understand why this excellent beach has to be kept in a state of secrecy.”

The base’s 10-foot barbed wire fence extends into the surf. Reaching it, Maxwell climbed a few feet upward, then turned to bellow about the unfairness of the military.

The group peered through the fence and then walked inland to the waiting vans, putting aside talk of military injustice in favor of anticipation of that night’s feast: seafood enchiladas, Caesar salad and chocolate mousse.

DAY 4: MUGU ROCK

“Is it only 8:30? It seems like I’ve been up for hours and hours,” Camille Ahmadzai said with a yawn. She looked around at her fellow Coastwalkers gathered in a damp group next to Mugu Rock. “Come to think of it, I guess I have been up for hours.”

Cal Lutheran geology professor Bill Bilodeau had come to speak to the group about the geological history of the coastline. But the days of politely listening to the invited guest speaker, or at least pretending to, were long gone.

As Bilodeau explained why the Santa Monica Mountains run east-to-west, the Coastwalkers shifted on sore feet and gazed longingly down the beach toward the county line, still a day away.

Behind Mugu Rock, giant slabs of Old Pacific Coast Highway lie on the rocks below. Some sections of it still stand, though almost completely undercut by waves and weather.

“All the years I’ve been coming by here and I’ve never gotten out and walked around,” Jim Watts said.

While Bilodeau pointed to a fossilized clamshell embedded in the damp rocks, a wave crashed over the group, soaking Watts and several other Coastwalkers.

Hazel O’Donnell decided to opt out of the day’s hike, which wound eight miles into Point Mugu State Park to look at the aftermath of November’s wildfires. Instead, she and several of the older women decided to stick to the coast, ambling down two miles of sandy beach to the Sycamore Canyon Campground.

The others strapped on backpacks and climbed 863 feet up the Chumash trail, just north on the other side of Pacific Coast Highway. Botanist Milt MacAuley, author of several books on regional wildflowers, led the way.

The trail has been in use for 7,000 years, he said, giving passageway to Chumash making their way from camps in the La Jolla Valley down to the ocean to collect food.

The Chumash Trail connects to the Backbone Trail, which runs throughout the Santa Monica Mountains.

Somewhere along the eight-mile trek through dust and dirt, the 10-year-old cracked.

“I’m tired,” Kelsey said, tugging on the hand of her aunt. “Too much walking. How much farther?”

In the relative cool of Sycamore Canyon, she ducked her blond ponytail under a faucet and emerged restored, leading the rest of the pack into camp where the beach walkers were waiting, along with a batch of ravioli and another throng of hungry mosquitoes.

More than 30 miles down and only about six to go.

DAY 5: SYCAMORE CANYON

“Today you’re going to have to have a little patience,” said Jim Watts, the morning’s hike leader. “We’re going to be bouncing back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball from the beach to the road.”

But patience was not a problem. To reach the Los Angeles County line, the group had just under six miles to travel. The terrain was relatively easy, and followed what is arguably Ventura County’s most spectacular coastline. The Coastwalkers were positively lighthearted.

Nichols took up the sweep position in the rear, armed with a SLOW sign for the benefit of traffic whipping around the curves along Pacific Coast Highway.

Watts broke stride along the shoulder during a break in the traffic, looking at the swirling blue-green water below.

“It’s so quiet when the cars thin out, isn’t it?” he said.

Just then a line of brown pelicans, nearly matching Coastwalkers in numbers, flew by, headed up the coast.

“I’ve got six bug bites,” Kelsey told her Aunt Nancy.

“That’s all?” said Kellogg. “I’ve got 37.”

They laughed together.

“Kelsey and I have decided we’re going to quit our jobs and school and just go on Coastwalks,” Kellogg told the group behind her.

Just after 10 a.m., Watts spotted a place to get down off the highway and onto the beach, the patch of sand too small to appear on any map.

At the end of it, boulders took over the coastline, and once again the Coastwalkers were forced back to the road.

Nestled at the beginning of the next beach are about 10 homes, lined with decks and huge windows. Using the fence of a house as a guardrail, the Coastwalkers edged down to the beach.

“I wonder what kind of jobs they have,” said Shelley Sharp, looking up at the homes from under the weight of son Tyler riding on her shoulders.

Another rocky point and the Coastwalkers emerged onto the beginning of County Line Beach, filled with wet-suited surfers who stared at the bedraggled group trudging through the sand.

A cluster of homes known as Malibu Village sits in the middle of the beach. A seawall stands solidly at the end of the development, protecting the homes from the onslaught of wind-driven waves.

With no-trespassing signs visible, the Coastwalkers kept going. Surfers bobbed on gentle waves, children screeched from boogie boards and sunbathers dozed on blankets.

“This is why people come to Southern California,” Watts said, gesturing at it all. “I don’t care how bad the economy gets, the weather and the beaches will always draw people here.”

Along that stretch of beach, just after 1 p.m., the Coastwalkers slipped past the unmarked boundary into Los Angeles County. They had reached their destination but were too busy striding down the beach to notice.

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