Treasured Island of Wilderness

Wielding razor-sharp blades, conservation workers chopped giant reeds off at the knees, then sprayed the stubble with poison to kill the roots.

They hauled away junk from homeless encampments and 6 million pounds of weeds from the Ventura River estuary. They even scooped the top layer of soil from some patches to keep noxious seeds from germinating.

When the violence was done, they planted wild roses and willows, cottonwoods and coyote brush, native plants tenderly reared in greenhouses by volunteers and professional nurseries.

After a year’s labor and $750,000 in cash, state and local park authorities are now poised to unveil their unusual gardening project: restoring the Ventura River estuary to its natural state.

“This area is like a little island of wilderness right next to the city,” said Brenda Buxton of the State Coastal Conservancy. “That is increasingly difficult to find in California, especially in Southern California.”

A team of state and Ventura city officials Tuesday will dedicate the new Ocean’s Edge Trail and River’s Edge Trail that snake through Emma Wood State Park and Ventura’s Seaside Wilderness Park.

The trails were built to show off the first phase of an ambitious project to clear a jungle of exotic plants that have taken root in the river bottom and threaten to choke out native species.

They are also designed to turn a place known since the Depression as Hobo Jungle into a popular wilderness park.

If busloads of schoolchildren, local residents and tourists venture into the area, the pedestrian traffic will make it less hospitable for vagabonds to spread their trash and teenage vandals to spread their mischief.

At least, that is the hope.

“There has been a tremendous amount of vandalism,” said Jerry Revard, supervisor of Ventura city parks. “We are hoping to encourage good, wholesome park activities.”

State park rangers in the past six months have cracked down on homeless people illegally camping in the dunes or the woods, said Steve Treanor, district superintendent of the California Department of Parks and Recreation.

“Things came to a head for me when one of the guys we moved out appeared on ‘America’s Most Wanted,’ ” he said. “We have taken a more aggressive stance. In the past, we would ask them to move along. If we find them now, we are issuing citations.”

Sporadic vandalism and homeless encampments still persist.

Teenagers recently scrawled graffiti on a stone wall built by the California Conservation Corps at various points of the wilderness trail.

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The vandals scattered the stones and fashioned makeshift fire pits, burning lath stakes pulled from barrier fences. They left behind empty bottles of wild watermelon wine cooler in the ashes.

A few hundred yards away lies a human nest of magazines and newspapers, soiled clothes, food wrappers and other garbage from take-out meals.

“It is tremendously frustrating for us to see our hard work being disturbed,” said Jackie Bowland, a Ventura biologist who coordinates the scores of volunteers who have worked on the restoration project. “We always bring plastic bags down there to pick up the trash.”

Although careless humans are troublesome, park officials are focused most intensely on another type of intruder: alien plants.

Their No. 1 enemy is a bamboo-like giant reed called Arundo donax.

Native to the Mediterranean, arundo was brought here as an ornamental plant and has invaded most stretches of the Ventura River.

Unlike willows and other native plants that break and bend when the river swells with storm water, arundo clogs river flows by staking out its turf in dense clumps. Its thick canes, some reaching as high as 25 feet, crowd out native shrubs and rob animals of natural sources of food and shelter.

“The arundo has been the most ominous portion of the project,” said Revard, who has organized work crews for the restoration project. “It’s taken us a lot longer than we expected to get rid of it.”

The California Conservation Corps workers spent much of their time hacking away at arundo and hauling it out of the woods chock-full of poison oak.

Even now, workers continue the ground war, crashing through the bush on search-and-destroy missions for fresh canes spouting from previously poisoned thickets.

“It’s like sweeping the sand dunes in the Sahara,” said Buxton of the State Coastal Conservancy. “You’ll never get rid of it completely.”

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Workers have also cleared acres of other exotic plants--such as castor bean, poison hemlock, German ivy and myoporum--to make way for new plantings.

So as not to pollute the genetic pool of native plants, volunteers and professionals collected seeds near the mouth of the river from coastal goldenbush, beach evening primrose, beach bur and other reintroduced shrubbery. They took cuttings of red and arroyo willows, mulefat and cottonwoods along the river’s banks.

Each was rooted or sprouted in a greenhouse and then plugged strategically around the 110-acre project. Most of the plots are now surrounded by protective lath-and-wire fences to give the seedlings a fighting chance.

“Its mostly weeding and watering now,” Revard said.

The project has left some exotic species, such as the huge cypress trees and date palms that were planted by E.P. Foster around the turn of the century. The prominent Ventura leader and naturalist wanted to turn the area into a neatly manicured park fashioned after San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

Work crews haven’t worried about tackling yellow mustard grass, which, according to lore, was introduced by Spanish missionaries more than a century ago to mark the trail between California missions.

Other than these exceptions, the plan is to nurse the ecosystem back to health.

“We are hoping to halt any further degradation of sensitive habitat for hundreds of species, some of them endangered,” said Mary Lou Schill, Ventura’s recreation supervisor.

The Ventura River and its estuary--the place where fresh river water meets the sea--are home to a number of species close to extinction: the tidewater goby, western snowy plover, California least terns and brown pelicans.

As the native plants grow and the fences come down, the acreage should begin to look more like it has for centuries: a rugged riparian woodland.

The riverside thickets and coastal dunes already teem with life. Workers report sightings of bobcats, foxes, gopher snakes, opossums and dozens of varieties of birds.

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Along the River’s Edge Trail, a dusky-footed wood rat--sometimes called a pack rat--has made a home in a cottonwood tree assembling a twisted mat of twigs, leaves and other rodent collectibles.

A rabbit scampers into the brush and a great blue heron takes flight from placid river waters--all within earshot of the Ventura Freeway.

“We are so fortunate to have such a wild area,” said Johnji Stone, a Ventura city employee who helped put together an informative pamphlet on the two new trails. “Within a quarter of a mile of the freeway, it feels like you are in a wilderness.”

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How to Get There

The new River’s Edge and Ocean’s Edge trails can be reached through Emma Wood State Park, at the west end of Main Street. Take Main Street west over the bridge that spans the Ventura River, and turn left into the state park just before the onramp to the Ventura Freeway. The trail heads are near the parking lot for group camping. Park officials are seeking volunteers to help weed and water newly planted areas. For information call 654-7784 or 658-4726.