Crown Jewel

On these wet winter days, Santa Cruz Island looms like a blue-green emerald in the distance, 20 miles out of Ventura Harbor and a world apart--the home of wild horses, sacred Chumash burial grounds and falcons that spear their prey at 100 mph.

From this week forward, the island’s rugged east end will belong solely to taxpayers as the National Park Service seizes a historic sheep ranch that had been the missing link in Southern California’s first national park.

Owned by one family since 1880, the 6,300-acre Gherini Ranch now figures to be the hub of the five-island Channel Islands National Park, welcoming each year without charge tens of thousands of overnight campers, day hikers, snorkelers, kayakers and boaters.

Landing fees of $15 and camping fees of $25 will be eliminated, and the cost of boat trips stands to drop from $47 to $42. Park officials figure visitors will flock to the island once word gets around.

“You’re in a very friendly environment, yet you’re getting a wild experience,” acting park Supt. Tim J. Setnicka said. “You’re able to backpack, yet you’re overlooking the ocean.”

But the transition from private property to public ownership has not been quick or easy--taking 17 years and marked by family disputes and ongoing conflict between the National Park Service and 82-year-old Oxnard attorney Francis Gherini, whose partial ownership of the island officially ends with Monday’s government takeover.

In fact, Gherini tried unsuccessfully as late as Friday to get a federal judge in Los Angeles to block the seizure of his ranch, arguing that the Park Service was violating his constitutional rights by taking his property before paying for it.

Gherini still claims ownership of the east end’s 13 wild horses, 200 feral pigs and 2,500 sheep, though he lost his attempt Friday to save the lucrative sheep and pig-hunting concession run from Scorpion Anchorage and Smugglers’ Cove.

The business is set to shut down Monday, and the Park Service wants the animals off the island as soon as possible--the sheep and horses removed by adoption and the disease-carrying pigs by slaughter.

Federal officials predict that Monday’s switch from private preserve to national park status will go smoothly. They say the only remaining dispute is how much Gherini should be paid for his one-fourth share of the real estate.

The Park Service bought the other three-fourths interest from Gherini’s two sisters and the estate of his brother in 1990 and 1992; each was paid about $4 million. Gherini held out for a better price only to see the last government appraisal drop to about $2.8 million as values fell throughout the region.

Finally last fall, Congress passed a law seizing the ranch, a so-called “legislative taking” last invoked in 1988, when lawmakers forced a real estate developer to sell the Manassas Civil War battlefield instead of building a shopping center. Over the next nine months, a fair price for Gherini’s interest will be negotiated, or a government lawsuit will be filed to resolve the issue.

The Gherini Ranch seizure was welcome news to the Park Service. Officials now hope to restore native plants and shrubs by removing rooting pigs and the skittish feral sheep that nibble grass to the nub, speeding the natural erosion of the island’s volcanic soil.

The remaining 90% of Santa Cruz Island--California’s largest at 24 miles in length--is already an ecological preserve owned by the nonprofit Nature Conservancy, which plans to work closely with the Park Service in attacking problems such as destructive pigs.

Setnicka considers the seizure of Gherini Ranch nothing less than the rescue of a natural gem that has been abused by man.

“What I think we’re going to bring is the equivalent of the Marshall Plan to Europe after World War II,” he said. “On Feb. 10, the liberation and the restoration and the healing begins.”

At first glance, east Santa Cruz Island hardly seems a wreck.

The impression, in fact, is that of the rocky Irish coast--shoreline caves, soaring cliffs, grassy plateaus and boulder-strewn hills rising to 1,500 feet and spotted by groves of oak, ironwood and cypress.

The island is also reminiscent of the Southern California of a century ago--no paved roads, no TV, no telephones except for cellular. Electricity by generator. The two main ranch houses are basic two-story rectangles of 18-inch-thick limestone blocks and adobe plaster, constructed in the 1880s.

At Scorpion Ranch, the quiet anchorage that is the Gherini property’s primary entry point, the housing compound includes an 80-year-old white clapboard bunkhouse, a caretaker’s cabin, assorted sheds and rusting hulks of old farm machinery.

Behind the main house is a midden, an ancient Chumash refuse heap that could date back thousands of years. Scorpion Canyon was a primary camp of the Native Americans before they were decimated by measles and forced off the island about 200 years ago.

From the ranch compound, the canyon spreads flat and wide along a creek for a mile, an easy walk beneath clusters of 100-foot-tall eucalyptus trees.

But this slice of island paradise is occasionally marred by the stench of rotting sheep carcasses left by hunters after they have cut away the rams’ curly horned trophy heads. Thunderous booms from black-powder rifles echo off mountainsides. Sheep trails crisscross the hills, and mountain bikes track them.

To the Park Service, this is evidence that the island has been abused.

Indeed, many hillsides are pocked by collapsed circles of earth and scarred by long and craggy crevasses caused by erosion. Up steep canyons, tree roots are exposed by the digging of feral pigs--tough, thick-necked creatures that act as natural rototillers.

Several miles inland the ecological difference between the Gherini Ranch and the Nature Conservancy preserve can be seen: The east side looks like a golf course with a smattering of aging trees, while the west is laden with high native grasses, coastal sage and lemonade berry and coyote bushes.

“That ranch has been pounded and pounded and pounded,” Setnicka said. “The resource there is flat-lined, and we’re going to bring it back to life.”

Gherini and his hunting concessionaire, Jaret Owens, take exception. They say they have been good stewards of the ranch: fixing up the buildings and having their workers greet thousands of visitors a year at the shoreline to tell them to honor the numerous Chumash camp and burial sites on the island.

“When we were in the sheep business, we ran about 5,000 animals,” said Gherini of a ranching operation shut down in 1984. “Now we have a couple of thousand, so you can see the decrease in any damage being done. And erosion is due to natural conditions. You get water between the soil and bedrock and it slides.”

But park officials say studies show that erosion increased 100-fold under similar circumstances of heavy sheep grazing on nearby Santa Rosa Island.

And Lyndal Laughrin, a UC Santa Barbara ecologist and researcher who has lived on the island since 1971, said there should not be much argument over whether things will improve for natural ecosystems under park service control.

“There will be an improvement without the grazing animals,” he said. “Some natural plants can reappear, and as the erosion abates, there will be healing.”

As preservationists laud coming changes at Gherini Ranch, many of those who know the enclave best say they are saddened by the loss of the privately owned island retreat.

“This is one of my favorite places on earth,” said Bob Bombardier of Thousand Oaks, who has hunted on Santa Cruz Island with bow and arrow for 20 years. “In a sense the islands are going to be lost. And in that spirit, it’s like losing a person. You’ll never be able to experience that special thing again.”