Road to Nowhere

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 in the mountainous terrain between Ventura and Bakersfield: Business--a frail reed at best in this 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 the highway 18 miles north of Ojai. Yes, Caltrans set aside $2.5 million and went to work right away.

Even so, The Thing That Devoured the 33--a dirt monster 200 yards across that slid from 40 stories high and is 30 feet deep on the highway--might choke off the area’s main lifeline well into the 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 east on 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 is also bad news for the few hundred 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 longer.

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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 so isolated that it doesn’t even have 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.”

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, the couple 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. “And it seems you have to use up practically everything you have just to qualify for a [Federal Emergency Management Agency] loan.”

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There have been bad times before, but this is different. Only three roads--the 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’s 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 the business’ four owners.

For four years, Pink Moment has picked up vacationers at Ojai hotels and chugged up the 33. Under a special permit from the U.S. 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 said.

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 he has had to haul beer up to it himself. About six miles north of the slide, the inn has no power, no phone and a refrigerator that runs on propane. But it boasts guinea hens, peacocks, a potbellied pig and 20 wild acres--and it can all be yours for about $250,000.

“This thing is really pushing me toward selling,” said Wolf, a retired college teacher who lives in Oxnard. “I’ll be 60 in August, and it takes a lot of physical effort to operate a place like this.”

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

“Thank God the locals support us,” Gayle Carpenter mused as she sat alone in a place called the Place.

Emigres from the San Fernando Valley, Gayle and her husband, Wen, figure they’ll outlast the slide. Wen grows alfalfa--now he has to truck it the long way around to stables in Ojai--and there’s 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,” said Gayle, gazing toward the 33. “You can darn near take a nap on it.”

That’s a far cry from what was predicted long 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 citizens band 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’ll send their kids to schools that might be an hour away. They’ll ration their groceries until they can make a big shopping trip to Bakersfield or Taft.

In a dozen places, 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.

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

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Just north of Rose Valley, 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 rain weakens the mountain more.

“At night the boulders keep coming down,” said Sam Bennett, owner of Bennett Construction, the Fillmore company working the site.

That hasn’t kept people from trying to cross.

David Dame and his daughter Megan, 12, lug groceries on a muddy mile-long trail skirting the slide through the scrub and 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 that he has never paid for electricity or water, it is just another character-building exercise that comes with living in the back country. “Wouldn’t trade it for a second,” he said.