Mountain of Woe

If faith can move mountains, you can’t prove it by the crew at the Half-Way Station, a rough-hewn bar 20 miles up the road from a slab of mountain that thudded across California 33 in February.

Puffing his cigar, bartender Rob Wheeler pours a cup of coffee--it’s free, by Half-Way tradition--and brings up an old joke making a lively comeback in these parts.

“Did you hear they declared us the No. 2 priority area in California for getting the roads cleared?” Wheeler asks. “You wanna know the first? It’s the whole damn rest of the state!”

Wheeler sings the same sad song as others around here: Business--a frail reed at best here in the back country--is dying, and nobody in the outside world seems to care.

Yes, bulldozers are gnawing away at the colossal gray-brown mass that squats across California 33 just north of Rose Valley. Yes, the California Department of Transportation set aside $2.5 million and went to work right away instead of dithering for months, as it did when a smaller slide blocked the road five years ago.

Even so, The Thing that Devoured the 33--a dirt monster 40 stories high, 200 yards across and 30 feet deep on the highway--might choke off the area’s main lifeline well into summer.

“It’ll probably be until at least July or after,” said Caltrans regional manager Dave Servaes. Hopes of carving a temporary route through the mess have faded, he added.

That means weekenders from the coast can’t come up to fish, camp, ride motorcycles, throw snowballs or just hang loose without driving nearly three hours across California 126, up Interstate 5 and down lonely Lockwood Valley Road. Before the landslide in the first week of February, the drive to Lockwood Valley from Ojai took 40 minutes.

It’s also bad news for the few hardy souls who live here. Many wend their way to Bakersfield for major shopping trips, but those who want to see a doctor in Ventura or test-drive a truck in Oxnard must make a tortuous detour of 120 miles or more.

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On a gray afternoon at the Half-Way Station, a handful of locals and a Caltrans road crew belly up for the usual fare.

A genial host, Wheeler shows off a photo of the brown bear that 78-year-old Bud Dalton, beaming at the bar, took down with a single arrow. To make a point about the recent floods, Wheeler pops in a video of a tractor nudging out a propane truck stuck hub-deep in the mud of a nearby ranch. Someone jokes about the “Ozena Valley Yacht Club,” a flotilla led by a rancher whose Cadillac was swept down the Cuyama River in February’s storms.

The spirits are convivial but the bar’s ledger is funereal. In a region without phone lines, there aren’t enough locals to sustain the place, and weekend trade has all but ceased. Wheeler said business has dropped 60% to 70%.

“To be honest, it’s killing us,” he said.

A mile off Lockwood Valley Road, Rose Putzier and her husband J.R. are saying much the same thing. They own a bar and grill at the heart of Camp Scheideck, a string of 37 cabins along Reyes Creek.

“It’s been awful,” Rose says. “I’ve made only one deposit to my business account since December, and that was a small one. Business is down something like 100%.”

On a normal spring Sunday, the Putziers fix 30 or 40 meals for people who come up to fish or simply relax in their weekend cabins. At this point, they haven’t had to bring home a big load of groceries in months and their beer is so old, the distributors are replacing it. To pay the rent and keep themselves going, the Putziers are digging into their retirement nest egg.

“It’s devastating,” said Rose Putzier, who navigates the detour to Ojai every week to check her messages and buy supplies. “And it seems you have to use up practically everything you have just to qualify for a FEMA loan.”

Businesses Going Under

There have been bad times before, but this is different. Only three roads--California 33, Lockwood Valley Road and California 166--lead into the back country, and at times this winter all have been closed. El Nino has scared away all but the most intrepid day-trippers, and there is no guarantee that the 33 will be cleared for the summer’s vacation traffic.

For businesses that rely on tourists, the results are catastrophic.

Stymied by the slide, Pink Moment Jeep Tours will close May 1.

“We may or may not reopen,” said Jim Nichols, one of Pink Moment’s four owners.

For four years, Pink Moment has picked up vacationers in Ojai and chugged up the 33. Under a special permit from the National Forest Service, drivers unlock a gate at Rose Valley and bounce along a dirt road on spectacular Nordhoff Ridge.

But no longer. Work around the slide has kept Pink Moment off the ridge, scuttling its centerpiece tour.

“It’s cut our business by three-quarters at least, but all our costs are still there,” Nichols says. The business is now up for sale.

The slide is also slamming the doors shut at Tom Wolf’s Pine Mountain Inn, a bar so remote that for 22 years Wolf has had to haul beer up to it himself. Just off the 33 about six miles north of the slide, the inn has no power, no phone and a refrigerator that runs on propane. However, it boasts guinea hens, peacocks, a pot-bellied pig and 20 wild acres--and it can all be yours for about $250,000.

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“This thing is really pushing me toward selling,” says Wolf, a retired community college biology teacher from Oxnard.

The slide reverberates as far as Ventucopa, 30 miles up the highway.

“Thank God the locals support us,” Gayle Carpenter says as she sits alone in a place called The Place, her only company the llama out back. “We used to say the population was 39, counting dogs and cats. But then, of course, the twins came along.”

Emigres from the San Fernando Valley, Gayle and her husband, Wen, figure they will outlast the slide. Wen grows alfalfa--now he has to truck it the long way around to stables in Ojai--and there is always the local yen for The Place’s ostrich burgers and beer. Even so, that adds up to a whole lot of emptiness.

“Just look at that road,” says Gayle, gazing toward the silent 33. “You can darn near take a nap on it.”

That is a far cry from what was predicted a long time ago for the twisting mountain road by Ventura County historian Sol N. Sheridan:

“Along its scenic reaches will be many beautiful resting places where will pause for rest thousands of cars carrying millions going from the south to see the wonders of mountains and stream and forest, and going from the hot interior valley to seek the cool breezes of the Southern California beaches.”

The road was completed in 1933, but the thousands and millions never quite made it, much to the delight of the few who did.

Only a thousand people or so live on the ranches and in the isolated houses of back-country Ventura County. Many are beyond the reach of power lines. Cell phones don’t work up here and even CB radios are spotty.

But the solitude is infectious; in exchange for it, people will do their customary grousing, but gladly drive miles to a pay phone. They will send their kids to schools that might be an hour away. They will ration their groceries until they can make a big shopping trip to Bakersfield or Taft.

Roughing It as a Way of Life

In a dozen places, churning creeks cascade across roads that twist through miles of yucca and pine, the home to deer and bears and mountain lions. From time to time, condors are seen overhead, sightseers from the nearby Lion Canyon release area in Santa Barbara County. To the dismay of biologists, picnickers fed one popcorn a few years ago.

But these days the most remarkable sight in the region is also the least welcome.

Eighteen miles from Ojai, the makeshift mountain--all million cubic yards of it--looms behind the barricades. Working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, bulldozers carve out terraces on it to limit further sliding. Every two minutes or so, huge trucks filled with dirt rumble from the slide to the dumping site, a canyon in nearby Rose Valley. If that fills up, the Forest Service has pinpointed another canyon not far off.

Before the crews are done, the trucks will have made tens of thousands of trips. Meanwhile, new cracks have been discovered behind the slide and new rainstorms weaken it further.

“At night the boulders keep coming down,” says Sam Bennett, owner of Bennett Construction, the Fillmore company working the site. “You can hear them banging all the time.”

That hasn’t kept people from trying to cross.

Just after dawn one morning, Bennett’s crews discovered a pickup stuck in the slide. The driver had been trying to deliver a load of furniture to her mother in Taft when the dirt gripped her wheels and trapped her overnight.

Mountain people have made their peace with the slide more efficiently.

David Dame and his 12-year-old daughter, Megan, lug sacks of groceries on a muddy milelong trail skirting the slide through the scrub and the willows of Sespe Creek. They left their car on the Ojai side and are headed to a car waiting for them on the other side.

To Dame, a longtime resident who boasts he has never paid for electricity or water, it was just another character-building exercise that comes with living in the back country. It’s just the price you pay for living in a place where you can raise three kids without TV, or where you can feel cramped because your closest neighbor is six miles away.

Besides, it beats trying to cross higher up, where a truck-size boulder nearly mowed Dame down.

On the far side of the trail, he has planted a neatly painted homemade sign that says “Gramma’s House Detour.”

“Remember ‘Little Red Riding Hood’?” he asks.

Dame points up at the slide.

“Well, that’s the wolf.”