A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : Protecting the Forest in Her Own Backyard

Two selections from the film library of Nancy Mecum Gjerset pretty much illustrate the spectrum of her experiences during the quarter century she’s been living in Big Tujunga Canyon.

In 1980, with an 8-millimeter home-movie camera, she captured a pair of condors riding the thermal air currents over a ridge just north of her home. A dozen years later, her video cam viewfinder framed the roadside arrest of a group of 13 heavily armed men who had been shooting illegally.

“That’s life in the canyons,” said Gjerset, who with her husband, Ron, semiretired from the aerospace industry, is among 300 people living within Angeles National Forest, northeast of Sunland. The couple’s private property was originally part of the Ybarra Rancho land grant dating back to 1856. The surrounding areas were officially designated as national forest in 1892.

Gjerset raises race horses, but her attention seldom seems to waver from what she calls “preserving the forest experience.”

Over the years, she has monitored bird activities, taken stream temperatures to facilitate trout stocking, worked to limit shooting to designated areas, and become such an expert on flood-plain management that she finds herself consulting on projects from Topanga to the Florida Keys.

But for her money, the No. 1 local environmentalist group is the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Last week she was elected chairwoman of the Community Advisory Committee of the Crescenta Valley Sheriff’s Station in La Crescenta, under whose jurisdiction 275 square miles of Angeles National Forest lie.

“It’s simple,” Gjerset said. “When crime is down, the environment is protected.

“If I’m impacted on my own private land,” she added, pointing to graffiti on a water tank within her fence, “then the people who want to use the forest peacefully and safely are really being impacted.”

Her biggest recent success was persuading (with the help of her videotape) the Sheriff’s Department to create a Mountain Task Force with the U.S. Forest Service for patrols during heavy-use weekends. She said their presence has greatly reduced accidents, graffiti, illegal shooting and other abuse of public lands.

She feels especially protective of the Delta Flats riparian (riverbank) area, which she has watched regrow after it was denuded by off-road vehicle use and a flood in the 1970s. But she said the acreage needs more rest and protection.

“When I first moved here, people came to hike and enjoy the environment,” she said, standing next to a pile of used diapers, beer bottles and other debris. “Now they bring their boomboxes, build illegal fires and stay all day next to a pond where there are no restrooms or stoves.

“People today don’t seem to be able to relate to their resources.”

She is hoping to change that with Friends of the Forest, a program using videos and booklets being developed for schools and libraries to encourage wise use of local resources.

“We’re looking at youngsters,” said Gjerset, who once helped produce an NBC daytime program for children, “The Me Too Show.” “I’m afraid we’re too late to reach the older kids.”

In her review of available environmental materials, Gjerset finds some irony in the high profile enjoyed by the rain forests of Brazil.

“Our forests are just as important,” she said.

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