L.A. STORIES : Tunnel Vision

When I was 10, I rode across the desert in my roller skating coach’s Winnebago to my first national championship in Fort Worth, Texas. On the way, we stopped off in New Mexico to see the famous Carlsbad Caverns. I’d never been inside a cave before, and I was picturing the kind of cozy grottoes I’d seen in sci-fi movies on late night TV. What I saw instead was a vast, unruly chain of echoing chambers that seemed to have no top or bottom.

As we tiptoed farther into the cold belly of the mountain, I realized that this was not the kind of place misguided aliens or misunderstood monsters could call home. The damp air was thick with the screeches of bats, the trails were steep and treacherous, and there was no flat place where one could build a fire or make a bed. The caverns were exciting in their own horrific way, but I left with the vague feeling I’d been cheated.

Twenty years later I found the caves I’d yearned for as a child, right here in Los Angeles. At the top of Canyon Drive, in the westernmost pocket of Griffith Park, the Bronson Caves stand in the middle of an old quarry, inviting and navigable. The floors of the caves are flat, the ceilings high, but not terrifyingly so, and there are two smaller alcoves leading off from the main vessel. It would be the perfect place for a kid to establish a secret domain if the caves weren’t already inhabited most days by film and television crews.

While the caves are not on any map or included in any Hollywood tour, they’re one of the most popular locations in the area, used in hundreds of productions to represent everything from an Old West hide-out to a Martian family’s modest home.

Really more of a tunnel through a tall, rocky hill, the caves were originally cut to facilitate access to the quarry that surrounds them. Stone from the quarry was used in the early part of this century to build hillside roads and embankments in the swank housing development of the Hollywood Hills and to pave Wilshire Boulevard. When the best material was depleted, the man-made caves and surrounding cliffs were left to nature.

But it wasn’t long before the movie studios jumped at the chance to film exotic, mysterious locales right in their own backyard. The foreboding landscape was used as the jungle island in the original “King Kong” and showed up again and again in sci-fi movies such as “Star Trek VI”--in which the quarry doubled as the Klingon prison camp--and in TV shows, including “Bonanza.” In the 1960s the caves assumed the role of Batcave in the “Batman” television series. If you were around then, you might have caught a glimpse of Adam West speeding down the adjacent fire road in the Batmobile on his way to save the day in Gotham City.

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Because of their seclusion and easy access, the caves are still a popular location site. David Barsky, production manager for FilmRoos, has used the site a few times while filming segments of the A & E series “Biography,” most recently in the story of King David.

“Last week we had Moses up there coming down Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments,” Barsky says.

As a kid, Barsky devoured late-night alien and monster movies on TV, and says the Bronson Caves were one of the first places he visited when he moved to Los Angeles many years later. “To me,” he says, “this place is as recognizable as the Washington Monument. Every alien in the ‘50s landed here.”

Even Amelia Earhart landed here in a speculative version of her demise that was part of a TV documentary. The landslide that was staged to resemble a crash site inadvertently covered what was left of the “Star Trek VI” Klingon camp set, and there’s a rumor going around that many of the expensive set pieces are still buried under the rubble.

But a spokeswoman for the Griffith Park Film Office, through which all requests to use the site must be processed, assures me that the “Star Trek” people had the set removed. “It’s not like there’s some big mystery up there,” she says.

I’m not so sure of that as I stand at the entrance to the caves at twilight on a cool spring day. You get the feeling that there’s something spooky going on up there, besides all those make-believe monsters and aliens. Many historians of the occult believe that the area is a hotbed of paranormal activity. I begin to believe this when I look up one of the steep trails that riddle the quarry like veins to see two enormous Rottweilers who seem to be guarding the entrance to the underworld.

But I’m startled from my reverie by doll designer Beth Iiyssa’s three less sinister dogs--Brewster, Pam Pam and Boo. Iiyssa is one of several locals who use the area to run their dogs or hike. “I like the sound it makes when I walk up here,” she says, referring to the wonderful echoes that make every dog bark sound like three.

Inside the caves, a breath of cool, mountain air whistles through the main artery, and I wish I had known about this place as a kid. I’m the only person left in the area as the sky grows darker, so I slip into one of the smaller alcoves, crouching as the ceiling drops, and sit on a rock next to a spot where someone had recently made a fire. For a few minutes the world around me dims, and I’m an adventurous kid again, carving out my very own secret domain from the hidden history of old Hollywood.