The Special Challenge of the Santa Monicas : Environment: New superintendent Arthur Eck must organize area’s piecemeal nature into an accessible national park.

Take a canyon here and a ranch there. Add thousands of acres of chaparral, a few state parks and beaches and a mountain range.

Draw a rough line around all that and you have the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, a 150,000-acre patchwork of public and private land in Ventura and Los Angeles counties that represents the shape of national parks to come.

That kind of piecemeal park stretching from Point Mugu to Santa Monica, with an ecosystem as varied as the parties that own its land, presents veteran National Park Service employee Arthur Eck with the challenge of his career.

Eck, the newly appointed superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, will be charged with pulling it all together, melding disparate areas into a cohesive park where people come to enjoy nature.

“In many ways, the Santa Monica Mountains represent the kind of national park that we will see in the future,” said Eck, who takes office July 9. “There just aren’t many opportunities left to set aside vast areas like Yosemite or the Grand Tetons. This is a chance to help set the direction of the park service nationwide.”

Because there are few large tracts of wild lands left, parks of the future will have multiple owners, as the Santa Monicas do, Eck said. One of the challenges will be to manage them so that the public is unaware of the complex network of agreements and cooperation it takes to pull it off, he said.

“The people who come to a park don’t care who owns it,” Eck said in an interview from his Redwood National Park office in Northern California. “They are there for the experience.”

Eck’s work at the Redwood National Forest creating cooperative agreements with the state will be a boon to the Santa Monicas, said Scott E. Erickson, deputy superintendent at the Santa Monicas.

“The Redwoods have one of the most innovative cooperative agreements with the state and the park service,” he said, noting that the park shares campgrounds and rangers. “We’ll probably see that here under Art’s leadership.”

With recent and projected funding cuts for local, state and federal parks, cooperation is essential to make the most of the public’s money, Erickson said.

“Not one of us stands a chance of getting the job done separately,” he said. “We can hang together or we can hang separately.”

Under Eck’s direction, he said, the agencies will hang together and the park’s users will come out the winners.

Eck, a native of Thermopolis, Wyo., began his career with the park service in 1977 as a legislative affairs specialist in Washington, D.C. He served as assistant superintendent in the Ozarks National Scenic Riverways in southern Missouri and has been assistant superintendent at Redwood National Park near Eureka since 1988.

His wife of 13 years, Lori, will join him in Southern California.

During his time in Washington, Eck helped fine-tune the legislation that created the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in 1978.

The expansive area that ranges roughly from just south of the Ventura Freeway south to the ocean shoreline and from Point Mugu to Santa Monica contains some of the most diverse lands of any national park, Eck said.

It is home to 10 endangered plant and animal species and another 50 species under consideration for endangered status. Thirteen species of raptor nest in the area along with another 369 bird species. The area is a key stop on the Pacific Flyway for the Western Hemisphere’s migrating birds.

About 50 species of mammals find shelter in the area and 36 kinds of reptiles and amphibians slither among rocks and shrubs. Within its boundaries are two of the state’s only remaining salt marshes at Mugu Lagoon and Malibu Lagoon.

And the type of ecosystem within the Santa Monicas, which includes hillside chaparral with an oceanside climate, exists in only four other places on Earth.

“This is a very biologically rich place,” Erickson said.

Another unusual aspect of the park is its close proximity to the cities of both Ventura and Los Angeles counties, making it easily accessible to millions of people.

Because it is so close to Los Angeles, some low-income city kids who might not otherwise be able to see a national park can get a close-up view of nature through programs offered by the state and the park service, Eck said.

“The greatness of the Santa Monica Mountains area lies not only in the richness of the resource, but that it serves as a gateway to the national park system itself,” said the 46-year-old Eck, who has been with the National Park Service for 18 years. “It serves that role better than some other parks that would make a great postcard.”

But many areas of the Santa Monicas make for postcard-perfect vistas as well.

Just 10 minutes south of Thousand Oaks, a few miles up windy Westlake Boulevard before the turnoff onto Mulholland Highway, a look back offers a stunning view that is quintessential Southern California: golden hills dotted with oaks and abounding in wildflowers, with spears of flowering yucca plants shooting up to claim dominance over the hillside.

A few more miles up and a gaze to the south displays the Pacific Ocean spreading toward the horizon. At various enclaves and peaks, homes with million-dollar views dot the landscape.

A recent visit to the Circle X Ranch in the remote hills of Ventura County revealed campgrounds at the former Boy Scout camp shaded with clumps of new growth sprouting from oaks whose trunks are incongruously blackened from the Green Meadow fire of 1993.

Water from a nearby spring bubbled past and small mammals scurried over the rocks as a visitor ambled down a dirt road.

“The Santa Monicas capture the natural essence of one of the most beautiful places on Earth,” Eck said later. “There is a reason that Southern California has attracted so many people.”

But the park is still “a work in progress,” he said. The National Park Service still needs to develop more programs for visitors and buy more land to create contiguous corridors, he said.

Eck looks forward to the opportunity to guide the park’s development.

“When you work in a place like Yellowstone, the Army laid out the roads there 100 years ago. A lot of their options are closed off. Here, it is a great opportunity to make a lot of decisions, a lot of good choices, I hope.”

But visions for the park could be dashed if funding dries up, as many fear. The nation is still recovering from a recession, and the new congressional leadership is talking about dismantling the national park system.

But Eck may be the best man to deal with those challenges, said Ruth Kilday, who heads the nonprofit Mountains Conservancy Foundation, which helps the park build visitor centers.

“It’s wonderful to get someone with so much experience working with the legislative office of the National Park Service who knows the ropes in Washington,” Kilday said. “He understands politics, and politics will be particularly important at this park.”

The park service also works closely with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state agency that buys land for resale or donation to the park. The conservancy also owns and manages some parklands.

“The major challenge is making sure we have a contiguous public parkland in place to protect the wildlife corridors, trails and the scenic quality of the mountains,” said Rorie Skei, division chief for the conservancy. “It is less important who owns what.”

Eck urged everyone close to the Santa Monicas to get out and experience their beauty.

“Everyone wants to go to the Everglades and Yellowstone,” he said. “But the desire to experience the outdoors and make the connection with our cultural past can be accessible to a great number of people through this park, right here next to the second-largest city in the United States.”

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Patchwork Parkland

The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area comprises 150,000 acres that includes diverse ecosystems and both public and private land. This kind of piecemeal park may become more common nationwide.