Navy Swamp for the Birds and Tourists

They used to call it ugly and hurl artillery shells at it.

True, the 2,000 acres of land along Pacific Coast Highway is marshy and filled with insects. But it’s a swamp with a view and a prime spot for bird-watching and marine birthing. And now Point Mugu wants to show it off.

With the help of UCLA architecture graduate students and input from the National Park Service and Caltrans, the Navy hopes to construct a visitors center beside the ecologically sensitive wetland site.

“There are so few wetlands left,” said Cora L. Fields, a spokeswoman for the military base. “We want people to enjoy it and to learn from it.”

On Tuesday, 18 graduate students from UCLA presented four proposals for a visitors center at the military base. They ranged from a simple solar-powered grotto with a series of boardwalks to a 2,500-square-foot building with an auditorium, bookstore and interpretive museum.

“We hope to suck people in, even if they only stopped to use the bathroom,” Josh Sherman, 25, said of his group’s hillside viewing center. The group’s conceptual plans even call for an artificial “petting marsh,” where visitors can walk around and touch marshy vegetation.

“It’s like a petting zoo, but it’s a marsh. This way the real marsh won’t be damaged,” Sherman said.

Like most of the students, Sherman spoke in a foggy haze brought on by sleepless, but creative, nights.

“We’ve worked on our models and drawings for 48 hours straight,” he said. “Zero sleep.”

Martha Willard’s group designed a visitor center with two low-tech satellite sites on different ends of the marsh and lagoon.

One site--a viewing platform--resembles a stone ruin and, like Stonehenge, it tracks the winter and summer solstices.

“It’s called a meditative site,” Willard said. “Meditative. That’s what we like to call it.”

But that’s not what their audience--park rangers, transportation planners and Navy officers--came to hear. A Caltrans officials raised his hand to ask about parking.

“The proposals are very innovative, but they need to be more practical,” Dan Kopulsky, a senior planner for Caltrans, said later. “Safety is most important to us at Caltrans. Our main concern is access and parking.”

The Mugu Lagoon and surrounding swamp make up one of California’s last and largest wetlands, Fields said. It’s home to 400 species of migratory birds, 250 harbor seals and seven endangered species including the California brown pelican, the snowy plover and the peregrine falcon.

“Sometimes you see dolphins and whales swim nearby,” Fields said. “It’s just full of critters.”

The proposed center would sit on what is now a roadside pull-off from Pacific Coast Highway, about half a mile from Mugu Rock. Road signs advertise it as a vista point for wildlife viewing. But besides a small wooden platform, the area isn’t particularly inviting. Maybe it’s the large, forbidding signs that read: “Warning, U.S. Government Property, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.” Maybe it’s the rusted barbed wire.

But if the Navy and Park Service ever pick a design and find an estimated $1 million needed to build it, one day an interpretive center and viewing platforms may fill the site’s dusty void.

Fields said it would be at least five years until the 4 million travelers who use the section of PCH yearly will have a visitors center from which to view the marsh, the lagoon, birds, and an array of radar sites and aircraft hangars.