Wilderness Corridor Quietly Being Formed

Environmentalists are quietly piecing together a huge swath of undeveloped hills from Whittier to Anaheim to form a wilderness corridor to rival the better known Santa Monica Mountains corridor.

This archipelago of tenuously connected open spaces known as the Whittier-Puente-Chino Hills breaks up the urban sprawl of freeways, endless housing tracts, mini-malls and office complexes in eastern Los Angeles and northwestern Orange counties.

“The hills are a unique resource and need to be saved,” said Whittier City Councilman Bob Henderson, a leading wilderness corridor advocate. “They are the last large contiguous natural area in Los Angeles County, and they are surrounded by 3 or 4 million people.”

The hills will soon offer hikers a respite from the routine of urban life as well as provide a playground for deer, coyotes, bobcats, squirrels, skunks, possums, birds, lizards and even an occasional mountain lion.

“Without wildlife corridors, the hills will be like landscape paintings on canvas--pleasing to look at but devoid of life,” said Geary Hund, a state parks department ecologist.

Preservationists such as Henderson say that with luck and tenacity, they will create an uninterrupted wilderness area extending from Whittier to Mexico.

Preservationists last month purchased the 107-acre Sycamore Canyon, known as the “crown jewel” of the Whittier Hills. And the new state budget provided $1 million to help buy 685 acres in Coal Canyon, a key property that will connect the Chino Hills State Park north of Yorba Linda and the Cleveland National Forest.

Other important parcels have been bought in Whittier, including nearly 1,300 acres of former Chevron and Unocal properties. Negotiations to buy the 3,400-acre Firestone Boy Scout reservation east of the Orange Freeway are continuing.

Officials in Whittier say they anticipate opening portions of the Whittier Hills Wilderness Preserve--that portion of the corridor within its jurisdiction--next year.

The preservationists’ dream seems nearer because of three factors--former oil company land, money from a voter-approved parks measure and California’s prolonged recession.

In the Whittier area, large portions of the hills were originally oil fields, land that environmentalists never believed would be suitable for housing. But Chevron began planning a large housing project on its property in 1989 as the oil reserves there were exhausted.

Preservationists rallied in opposition and provided crucial support in 1990 to successful City Council candidates who helped block the development.

“After the election, we were able to talk the remaining council members into supporting the hills,” said Henderson.

Two years later, voters approved Proposition A, an initiative providing funds to improve parks and acquire open space. Whittier received $17.2 million and used about $9 million to buy the 300-acre Unocal property and a 970-acre parcel from Chevron.

Those properties became affordable because the state’s economic downturn had caused the bottom to fall out of the real estate market.

The Whittier-Puente-Chino Hills, with about 35,000 acres, and the 472,000 acres in the Cleveland National Forest once formed a natural chain. But construction of the Riverside Freeway and associated development in Yorba Linda, Anaheim and Corona have broken that chain.

Sycamore and Coal canyons are the bookends of hills covered by chaparral and scrub between Whittier and Anaheim.

Sycamore Canyon, a narrow sliver of land about a mile long, “has a feeling of isolation and beauty,” Henderson said. “There is running water in the stream year-round and ancient sycamore and oaks.”

Biologists say Coal Canyon is the key to preserving ecological diversity in the wilderness corridor, providing an undeveloped area for animals to cross beneath the Riverside Freeway.

“In order for these hills to stay alive, they need to be connected with each other,” said ecologist Hund. “There’s literally a river of life at stake here. We know that if we don’t save it, species will become extinct.”

Even with 212,000 cars rumbling overhead daily on the Riverside Freeway, the Coal Canyon underpass allows everything from mice to mountain lions to move between the national forest and Chino Hills State Park.

A Northern Arizona University study shows that losing the Coal Canyon connection between the Chino Hills and the national forest would eliminate mountain lions from the hills. Such a loss would increase the risk that those animals would be lost from the national forest as well.

Without mountain lions, populations of smaller predators such as bobcats, raccoons and skunks would explode, Hund said. Because these animals are skilled at raiding birds’ nests, the bird population would decrease. Without adequate distribution of seeds by birds, the variety of plant life will also decline, he said.

Coal Canyon is home to one of the last Tecate cypress forests--a biological remnant of the last ice age--in the Western United States.

The canyon is also home to the largest remaining stand of Southern California black walnut trees and brilliant wildflowers such as the scarlet delphinium, bush poppy, Turkish rugging, coastal nolina, woolly blue curls and white dicentra.

State and local officials went to Coal Canyon to announce that $1 million had been budgeted to buy land there. They called that money the first and toughest step in coming up with the additional $10 million to $14 million they estimate is needed to buy the privately owned land remaining in the canyon.

“The state is now saying, ‘We are interested,’ ” said Brea Mayor Glenn Parker, a board member of the Wildlife Corridor Conservation Authority. The agency includes representatives from four city governments, two unincorporated county areas, the state Parks Department, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the state Department of Fish and Game.

To help buy the hills, environmentalists have used creative financing techniques. Three years ago, Henderson, a member of the county sanitation board, got approval for an additional $1 fee per ton of refuse dumped at the Puente Hills Landfill. That fee goes into a special habitat fund that has provided $3.7 million a year to buy land.

In addition, the Whittier City Council used Proposition A funds to create a trust that will pay ranger salaries and maintenance costs.