In Santa Anas, He Knows the Way

When Ken Croker went on his first backpacking trip in the Santa Ana Mountains almost a quarter-century ago, he didn’t get very far.

“While I was in the San Mateo Canyon, I got kind of disturbed that the trails that showed on the topographic maps didn’t exist on the ground. I said, ‘Gee, I thought we’d have a trail we could hike on while we were in here.’ But the trail disappeared within less than a mile from the campground we started from,” said Croker, who eventually found the overgrown remnants of an old trail cleared in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

“I said, ‘This is terrible. Somebody ought to do something about this.’ So I called the Forest Service and they laughed and said, ‘We don’t have any money to do trail maintenance.’ And that’s what kicked off my trail-building career.”

Croker, a 61-year-old aerospace engineer, has spent 24 years organizing and leading volunteer crews with the Sierra Club to clear and maintain trails throughout the Santa Anas. When he began, there were only three usable hiking trails. There are now 25 trails totaling 67 miles that Croker and other volunteers have cleared, in addition to 13 roads also used by hikers.

“Thirty years ago, the public didn’t know anything about most of the areas in the Santa Ana Mountains,” Croker said. “You just couldn’t get to most of these places.”

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By 1984, the Costa Mesa resident had become a political activist, traveling to Washington to urge lawmakers to protect the site of that first trip: San Mateo Canyon.

“I had to use my vacation time from work to testify. The Forest Service officially fought it tooth and nail. They did not want to see another wilderness area established by Congress because it causes them special headaches, from a management standpoint. But a lot of the lower-level Forest Service people said, ‘Go get ‘em. That’s a fantastic area. That ought to be a wilderness.’

“I worked pretty hard on that for a while, and I had help from a lot of friends. We managed to get the San Mateo Canyon included in the California wilderness bill of 1984, and it’s been protected as a national wilderness area ever since.”

The preservation and expansion of the Santa Ana Mountain trails are largely the work of Croker and other loyal Sierra Club volunteers. The U.S. Forest Service provides tools, but there is no government funding for maintaining the trails. And Croker is worried about their future. He is planning to retire in a year or two and move to Oakhurst near Yosemite National Park.

“I’ve already put the regulars of the trail maintenance project on alert that it’s time to start thinking about who’s going to take over and be the leader of this band of ragamuffin trail-builders,” he said.

“I haven’t had anybody step forward who wants to keep the records, do the scouting, coordinate with the Forest Service, keep the tools sharp and do a whole bunch of the jobs I’ve been doing all these years, just because I enjoy it. I’m looking for someone who feels the calling like I did, or maybe they can split it up a little bit.

“Somebody needs to keep it going. We’re a volunteer organization, and if nobody steps forward, this project will die.”

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Croker has had difficulty in recent years recruiting volunteers for trail-clearing work. Most of the regular volunteers are more than 50 years old.

“It’s really sad. We’d love to have somebody who is 35 or so, about the age I was when I got started; somebody in that age group to be the leader who could stick with it for a few years. If we stop doing this, we’ll turn all our tools back in to the Forest Service and the trails will start growing over permanently.”

And Orange County residents would lose what Croker says is one of the few uncrowded wildlife areas left.

“Most of the trails in the Santa Anas provide more of a wilderness experience than you can get in Yosemite, because they are not heavily used. Except for the San Juan Trail, which the mountain bike folks have adopted, on most all of the other trails, you’ll never see anybody if you hike them on a weekday.

“Somebody has to be the voice of the animals and the land and the trees and the streams here; somebody has to care what happens to these things. I’d like there to be something left for my grandchildren.”

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Profile: Ken Croker

Age: 61

Hometown: San Pedro

Residence: Costa Mesa

Family: Married to Carolyn; three grown children; one granddaughter

Education: Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University

Background: Aerospace engineer with McDonnell Douglas for 38 years, currently a manager working on the International Space Station project; Sierra Club member since 1967 and served several terms as chairman of the Orange County “group”; Sierra Club Cleveland National Forest coordinator since 1974; leader in restoring and maintaining hiking trails in Santa Ana Mountains for 24 years; author of “Santa Ana Mountains Trail Guide”

On conservation: “The naturalist John Muir said back about a hundred years ago, ‘Everything in the universe is hitched to something else.’ That is really true. You do something to the land in one particular area and it’s really hard to say it’s an isolated case. Everything really does interact.”

Source: Ken Croker; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times