Road to Solitude

Up in the back country of Ventura County, beyond the mountains on curving California 33, legend had it 100 years ago that this was Satan’s stagecoach route to hell.

Only evil people could see Satan on his infernal rides. But good people could sense him in the ghostly whoosh of wind and the goose bumps left behind.

In many ways, the sense of mystery and danger and a touch of evil have only grown with the passing of a century.

This road--scratched from the coast across the mountains above Ojai to the Santa Barbara County line--can get downright spooky.

Step right off the highway and into the woods, and it’s not unusual to find folks blasting away at trees, road signs or an abandoned trailer.

Go a little farther and you could stumble across an illegal field of marijuana--thousands of plants have been seized in the past year alone--and find yourself worrying whether the growers might be lurking nearby.

Even worse, it could be a body. This road over what was once the path to hell has become the favorite dumping ground for some of the county’s most notorious modern-day killers.

Nichole Hendrix, a 17-year-old allegedly killed by skinhead associates, was one of the victims. Her remains were found in October 1999--nearly six months after her killing--far below a hill offering a pristine view of impenetrable pines.

The body of Kali Manley, an Oak View teenager killed when she took a ride with the wrong man, lay in a culvert beneath the highway for days as cars drove overhead, until her killer, David Alvarez, led authorities to the remains the day after Christmas 1998.

In a campground “back there” in 1994, Andy Lee Anderson and his Australian shepherd lost their lives because a teenager with a shotgun wanted Anderson’s shiny blue pickup truck.

And they were only a few of the victims.

Along this road, in the forest that covers the top half of the county, authorities have found seven homicide victims since 1990, four of those not far from the highway. In the decade prior, five bodies were found along the road.

“You can walk 50 feet off a trail and dump a body and chances are it won’t be found,” Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said. “I’m sure there are a bunch of bodies we’ll never find.”

46 Miles of Moonscape to the Ventura Coast

Back there--same as a century ago--things get strange.

In the early 1930s, when California 33 was being built, Ojai, the artist and movie star enclave of 8,000, was a dusty mountain town on the edge of nowhere.

The road was an Indian trail: one the Mojave traversed to enslave the coastal Chumash, one that allowed notorious mountain man Jeff Howard his route to town, one guarded by grizzlies.

“For many years, in many places, there were areas no one had ever seen,” local historian Richard Senate said.

It was supposed to be the great connection of commerce between the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California, the first direct route for ranchers who had complained for decades about the one-way, four-day trip on the Old Ridge Route to pay their taxes in San Buenaventura.

What they got was a route etched over a tortuous 46 miles of moonscape in the Cuyama Valley and Lockwood Valley, through the pine-capped mountainsides, to coastal Ventura.

The result, of course, was quite different from the route predicted by county historian Sol N. Sheridan, who envisioned “thousands of cars carrying millions” to the cool coast.

It was called successively Maricopa Road, California 186 and in 1968, finally, California 33.

Planning began in 1890, but it took 40 years before local officials from Santa Barbara, Kern and Ventura counties teamed to secure $1.8 million to chisel into the county’s dark western reaches.

In 1929, more than 300 men began grading the path that crosses two mountain ranges and has an average elevation of more than 3,000 feet and reaches as high as about 6,000 feet.

Workers were hurt, a steam shovel tumbled into a creek, but as far as anyone remembers, no one was killed performing the treacherous work, said Bill Friend, a historian who attended the opening day festivities as a small child in 1933.

Even after completion of the road, it was still considered remote: a spot only for hunters and residents making adventure forays into the wilderness.

“Nobody knew how to get back there in the old days,” said Joe Reardon, who succeeded his father as the county coroner from 1938 to 1940. “We didn’t murder too many of us. . . . If there was a shooting, it was in Camarillo or Oxnard. It was just so darn hard to get up there.”

290 Vehicles During Highway’s ‘Rush Hour’

Now, it’s easily the least-traveled highway in the county. About 290 vehicles head through the remote back reaches of California 33 during its busiest hour, according to Caltrans. In contrast, 16,100 cars traverse the Ventura Freeway and California 23 interchange in Thousand Oaks during a similar period.

So why would it not be mysterious?

Satan was a dweller here after all, according to Senate.

And this is where, over on the Sespe to the east, Thomas More, a wealthy landowner, was shot in cold blood, prompting newspapers from Santa Barbara to San Francisco to warn of Ventura County barbarism and savagery. This is where Jeff Howard, a mountain man, killed a Basque sheepherder for grazing on his land, and was sent to jail, from which he escaped and became a fugitive.

This is where, Senate said, a sheepherding ghost roams the land, and where Ramon Ortega, a 19th century bear hunter and local legend, traces his last ride every time it rains. This is where, in the hot springs north of Ojai, youngsters drank illegal hooch and listened to hot jazz. And where a bandit hid his $20,000 in gold coins--still not found.

Today, they are long, lonely stretches, punctuated by an occasional trailer on the side of the road, a shot-up street sign, and a spectacular view whichever direction you look.

Indeed, to be up here alone, in the silence, is to be the only person in the world.

Except you aren’t.

In the shadowy woods there are marijuana cultivators. Last year was a banner one: The U.S. Forest Service found 18,000 pot plants last summer. That is a lot, said Patrick Kane, a patrolman.

And people live here: some in the campsites, some in cabins. Many are weekend people in from the city, folks who like the cool and quiet of the forest.

But California 33 is also the new hot spot for squatters, county Code Enforcement Officer Liz Cameron said.

Here they may live in the driveway of an owner who never comes up, and has no idea his property has become a roadside motel.

“Some of these places, they might have drug labs. You don’t know, and I’m not going to test it,” she said. “I want to come back down.”

So she calls the Sheriff’s Department. That is most likely Deputy Elmo Sheeran around here. Some of the residents of his 860-square-mile patrol territory just call him Sheriff Elmo. His job is mostly to check in on the folks who don’t mind being checked in on, to poke his head into the three bars in this vast area, or to admonish snow bunnies for not putting chains on their tires.

He puts it succinctly: “What I have is a dead body or nothing at all.”

Some Looking to Escape Government

Sheeran, one of two deputies who patrols nearly half of the county’s geography, drives only two paved roads regularly, and sometimes has to guess--carefully--where the dirt ones are under a foot of snow. (“Four years ago they finally put in 911. There was no way to give street addresses,” he said) He is a ruddy-faced, just-folks man with a steady look and a slow demeanor, and after five years knows this place better than almost anybody.

He can go hours without seeing a single person. And sometimes the ones he sees don’t want to see him.

“Some are trying to get away from government, and we’ve got to be careful,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of people who come up from L.A. and feel there’s no law enforcement. They tend to get a little bit wild.”

Sheeran gets called to shot-up campgrounds. (A sign off the Rose Valley campground that states “No Shooting” is pocked with bullet holes.) Hooligans occasionally rip up a picnic table for firewood. Gangbangers and others from the cities down below sometimes leave beer cans and tangles of graffiti in their wake.

Sheeran must remember his backup is hours away. He has to be firm, but careful. He has to deal with groups of people who are often drunk, rowdy, and figure they can do as they want.

“Millions of people, millions of guns. They have to go somewhere to shoot,” he said. “That’s when it get[s] spooky.”

He thinks of this on these kinds of calls: In 1969, four officers were killed in a robbery at a Valencia restaurant. The gunmen had spent the morning practicing their shots at Hungry Valley Campground on the eastern flank of Sheeran’s sector.

That is the campground to the east where he was the first law enforcement officer on site to find the badly burned body of Anthony Guest, a 20-year-old man tortured, set on fire and left to decompose under a juniper bush in this windy, dusty stretch popular with off-road cyclists. The maintenance man who found the body took six months off from his job. He never came back.

This is a place where bodies are dumped, but it’s also a place where some people come to kill themselves. Some are never found, hidden deep in the woods under snow and branches.

So, Sheeran must notice car tracks, footprints, paw prints.

When he saw a car parked in the same spot for two days, he checked on it. It was a rental car, supposed to be returned days ago. Sheeran found the man a quarter of a mile into the wilderness. He had shot himself.

“Who knows why they come up here?” he asked. “I guess they get despondent and want some solitude.”

Solitude, they all say, is the big draw. That and blazing down the highway on a souped-up bike.

“Basically, it’s just the road. Motorcycle people love the road,” said Tom Wolf, the mild, plain-spoken owner of the Pine Mountain Inn, otherwise known as Wolf’s Grill.

It’s open sporadically. But you don’t know until you go, because there is no phone and no Southern California Edison. It’s all solar-powered.

Wolf’s place, it’s almost universally agreed, is really weird, a legend in itself. Part zoo: there are emus and dogs. Part shooting range: some guys from the Navy bases helped put it together. It’s all rough, in Wolf’s own estimation. Rough decor: carved-up wood, a prominent NRA sticker, dollar bills taped across the ceiling (when El Nino nearly did business in, he collected the bills and used them: $4,200).

And a rough crowd too: He caters to bikers by night.

“When I bought the place, I’d never been around cycles. It kind of grew that way,” he said. “The first party, I was thinking, ‘How many guns should I have here?’ ”

They come in all types. There are locals who will paint a wall for a six-pack. There is a notorious Ojai ruffian whom Wolf sometimes lets tend bar, but doesn’t trust too much. There is Mike--just Mike--who lives somewhere back in the woods, and who might be a hermit, but to Wolf is simply “funny and fat, and just doesn’t need people.”

But, hardest of all, the wives with fliers: Their husbands went out for a hike, or a bike ride, somewhere in Los Padres National Forest, they don’t know where, and they never came back.

He posts the fliers, but can’t count on anything. There are so many places to go off the road or get lost. It’s dotted along its stretch with an occasional cross guarded by trinkets--a harmonica, a bottle of Jack Daniels: the totems a bike victim once loved.

There are many, many more accidents. Only eight fatalities, they say since 1995, according to the California Highway Patrol, though that seems low to some up here. And 130 injuries.

“There are an awful lot injured and we can’t do anything for them,” Wolf said.

Last year an Ojai woman Karen Palmer knew went over in her car, and lay there for days before anyone found her.

“Did that woman die lying in that car for a week?” Palmer asked. “That gives me the shakes just thinking about it.”

Remoteness and Body-Dumping

At the Half Way Station--that is, halfway between Ojai and Taft, down the northern slope from Pine Mountain--bartender Rob Wheeler, a friendly, skinny character with an ever-present cigarette between his lips and a bear claw on a chain around his neck, holds court on the subject of the back country: on tourism, remoteness, and the phenomenon of body-dumping.

He likes tourists, and wants more. He doesn’t mind remoteness. Body-dumping is indisputably not a good thing.

It’s “kill ‘em in Ventura and dump ‘em up here, and we don’t appreciate it,” he said. “We don’t need the bad reverberations. Dead bodies on the summit isn’t a selling point.”

Business has been slow at the Half Way. Construction on 33, Wheeler believes, is discouraging tourists. But on a Tuesday afternoon there are a handful of folks, a regular, a couple of Ojai strangers, at the bar. All gathered in this rustic cabin festooned with bumper stickers, at least one guaranteed to offend, and mushroom clusters of baseball caps across the ceiling. And on Mondays--spaghetti dinner night--the locals come out to the de facto Ozena Valley community center.

They accept the mail for folks who live up on the dirt roads. They will happily lend a place to stay on the couch to a tourist who gets stranded. It’s practically the ever-present Bud Dalton’s living room. He is a bear-shooting old-timer who sips a Pepsi at the bar and doesn’t tend to share much other than a chuckle at the John Wayne movie on the satellite TV.

But the most crime they have seen is a couple teenagers from Ventura stealing beer from the back room, and a missing motorbike that later was returned.

“Everybody has a gun up here. We’re not worried about crime,” Wheeler said. And there have only been three or four fights at the bar in its 12-year history--and just one broken window (following an incident with a wayward elbow).

So far into this week, only three visitors have signed the guest register. That is the way some like it.

Says Harry Gramig, who spends his week as a Culver City salesman, but prefers life in Lockwood Valley, just down the--very steep--road from Pine Mountain: “Out here you can leave your keys in the car.”

He leases a big chunk of land--it’s cheap, and plentiful and is the canvas for sunsets that look like Remingtons.

“There’s mountain lions, bobcats, and not a lot of people,” said Judy Gramig, his wife.

It’s a little bit lawless, they say. No one minds if you carry your gun in a holster on your hip, as he and Judy do. Unless there is something really wrong, the deputy leaves the folks who live here alone. Even some of the pot farmers are good neighbors.

“I know the people who grew it,” he said of the targets of a recent bust. “They’re nice people.”

The district attorney, an avid booster of the back country, has stumbled across the remains of a pot farm, but he has also stumbled across an awesome ancient Indian site. But he won’t say where.

Bradbury knows there will be more findings. More pot. And more bodies. That is because there is more law enforcement. But mostly, there are more hikers, more campers, more nature lovers to stumble across the nefarious doings in the backwoods. This remote, mysterious place--just miles away--is becoming less remote, if no less stunning.

“It’s going to be spotted more readily,” Bradbury said. “But, my guess is there’s still a lot more we’ll never find.”