A Rocky Road to Preservation

It’s not the Rock of Gibraltar or the Rock of Ages, but the Rock With No Name is just as surely here to stay, a rock around the clock.

The Rock With No Name sits just off Kuehner Drive at the bottom of Santa Susana Pass in Simi Valley. Down the road a few hundred yards sit Elks Lodge 2492, a beauty salon called Mary’s Hair-Em and a neighborhood restaurant called the Walck-In. All those places have names but none is a landmark, as the Rock With No Name, formerly known as Just Another Nameless Rock, probably is about to become.

It’s quite a rock. It’s 60 feet high and 70 million years old.

If it were edible, it might be an overstuffed baked potato.

The county’s cultural heritage board recommended this week that it be our 160th official landmark.

If the Simi Valley City Council agrees to the designation, the rock will be the third county geologic feature (i.e., rock) to cross the landmark hurdle. The other two are Elephant Rock, also in Simi, and Whale Rock, in Ojai. The former resembles an elephant and the latter a whale. But the prospective Ventura County Landmark 160 resembles nothing so much as a big rock, and therein lies the problem.

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I strolled around the big boy this week with Holly Huff and Dawn Kowalski, the Santa Susana Knolls residents who led the effort to save it from a proposed road-widening. We tramped beside old oaks and through knee-high grasses alive with rabbits, our eyes focused all the while on the looming monolith.

“It’s a big rock,” I observed.

“Yep,” Huff said. “It’s a big rock. That’s what we’ve always called it. You know, the Big Rock.”

Unfortunately, Big Rock is not a landmark-like name. It wasn’t far off the old wagon trail over the Santa Susana Pass, but Big Rock can’t be found on any map or in any document. The words don’t echo with history. They don’t pay tribute to a passing pioneer or a long-gone settlement. Big Rock just doesn’t sing--and the cultural heritage board can’t pass its landmark recommendation on to Simi Valley until it comes up with a name that does.

“They just didn’t like Big Rock,” Huff said.

“Maybe Santa Susana Rock?” offered Kowalski. “Chumash Rock?”

We gazed up at it. Call it what you want, it’s one big rock.

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The rock towers over a field where a Beverly Hills developer is planning to build 26 houses. To accommodate increased traffic and new bike paths, the city had planned to shave 12 feet off the boulder and put up a sound wall separating it from the road.

That was the plan in January. It sent Huff and Kowalski, battle-toughened veterans of neighborhood crusades, into high-protection mode: Subdivisions were creeping up the pass! The Knolls--an old neighborhood tucked into shady hillside lanes--was losing more of the placid, oak-studded meadows buffering it from suburbia! Even the Big Rock was threatened!

“Nobody paid a lot of attention to it before,” Huff said. “It was just always there.”

In an earlier day, residents would have mounted baby-carriage brigades at the foot of the Big Rock. Activists would have chained themselves to its flanks: “Scrape, if you must, this old gray head, but highway engineer, spare this rock!”

The landmark route was a lot smoother. The project’s developer had no problem with the idea. The city backed off its plan to widen the two-lane road that winds up Santa Susana Pass. As a county landmark, the Big Rock won’t be protected for the next 70 million years, but it will be more secure than it has been.

“It feels pretty good,” Huff said.

The next neighborhood project: Somehow coming up with enough money to buy the field--Big Rock and all--and preserve it for good.

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In two weeks, the cultural heritage board will meet again. A name for the Big Rock will be high on the agenda.

“Nobody ever really called it anything,” lamented Kim Hocking, the board’s sole staffer.

Chumash artifacts have been found nearby, but scholars are not sure what the Chumash may have called the Big Rock. It may be h’I’m, a Chumash word for storage basket, or hi’im, a word for mystery. If you ask me, the mystery is how anyone can look at the Big Rock and see anything resembling a basket.

In either case, the names would be virtually unpronounceable for tourists seeking the way to County Landmark 160. While they look like the phonetic spelling for the preacher’s four-syllable rendition of ‘him’--as in, “Let us praise He-yuh-ee-um,”--they’re a lot tougher than that.

So Big Rock has my vote. It’s not fancy, but it does the job. Five hundred years from now, scholars will understand it a lot better than “storage basket.”

Big Rock: It’s all rock, for all time.

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.