Secrets of the Backbone

Here is what you hear in a few hours on the trail with Milt McAuley, the grand old man of the Santa Monica Mountains: See this bay tree? A couple of leaves go great in chicken cacciatore. And that mugwort? Rub the leaves over your hands and it’s just like soap. That reddish stone there? The Chumash made paint by grinding up milkweed with powder from stones just like that one. This creek? When Herbert Hoover was president, he fished right here.

The facts come out in a deep, wry western growl that hangs in the superheated air for McAuley’s charges to savor. The 82-year-old McAuley has led thousands of hikers up and down the trails of the Santa Monicas and intends to do so until his legs give out.

He has written seven guidebooks to the mountains and has been a persuasive voice urging federal acquisition of lands for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. At an age when many men are doing well to play 18 holes from a golf cart, he is walking the walk.

“It gets in your blood,” says McAuley, who logs as many as 20 miles a week on one trail or another. “I’ve got to do it.”

This week, 35 hikers are striding along with McAuley on a six-day, 65-mile trek down the Backbone Trail, the centerpiece of the recreation area and McAuley’s labor of love.

Through Coastwalk, a volunteer effort to host summer hikes in each of California’s 15 coastal counties, hikers paid $350 each for exposure to poison oak, ticks, blasting heat, three squares a day, McAuley’s gentle philosophizing, and an overall marvelous time.

A garrulous, high-spirited bunch, they are a generation or more younger than McAuley and are dripping with sweat. At a rest stop, some peel off their socks to dangle their feet in a shallow pool and lay on blister remedies. The tiny thermometer on one man’s pocketknife registers more than 100 degrees.

“You appreciate the little things you always took for granted,” says Marilynn Mariano, a hearty white-haired woman who leads coast walks along the rocky shores north of Monterey. “A little shade never felt so good.”

McAuley, a sturdy man with a brush mustache and eyebrows that reach for the sky, remains unwilted. He carries a pack with a first-aid kit, three bottles of water, sandwiches and a cell phone. As prepared as the Boy Scout he once was, he carries a camera on each hip--all the better to promote the trail at trip’s end.

“Left one’s for photos,” he says. “Right one’s for slides.”

The group set out Sunday at Sycamore Canyon near Point Mugu and will end its trek today at Will Rogers State Historic Park in Pacific Palisades. Each night they bed down in campgrounds, their gear transported and their meals--civilized affairs with wine and hors d’oeuvres--prepared by a volunteer support team.

Because camping areas and drinkable water are sparse along the trail, making the trip without such help would be nearly impossible for all but the most hard-core trekkers, McAuley said.

An Inspiration to Younger Hikers

By Wednesday, the gang has recovered from the slow roasting it suffered two days before on “the Death March”--a nine-mile, 3,100-foot climb up Boney Mountain. Now, they plod through silent canyons and beside still glades, joking despite the heat. After they run into a few supermodel-thin young women who earnestly said they were on a “purification” retreat, they burst into guffaws.

“Can you believe it?” asks one incredulous woman. “They said they had one boiled egg and a glass of juice for breakfast! That’s it! One boiled egg! As if they couldn’t use a few more pounds! My God!”

Many of the hikers walk with spring-loaded, hundred-dollar trekking poles--someone in the group derided them as “yuppie sticks”--to ward off sore knees and aching backs. McAuley uses a dried-out yucca stalk.

“He’s an inspiration,” says Art Sauerstrom, a 48-year-old Brooklynite who has been hooked on the outdoors since moving to the Bay Area eight years ago. “He’s the kind of guy I’d like to be when I’m old.”

McAuley has been leading hikes since he was 16. An Air Force pilot for 21 years and then an aeronautical engineer, he didn’t hit his stride as an advocate for the mountains until he borrowed on his insurance policy to print his “Hiking Trails of the Santa Monica Mountains” in 1980.

“Next day, I put on some decent clothes, got into my pickup, and went out to place them in every bookstore I could find,” he said. “I even went into an adult bookstore and the lady there could tell immediately I was in the wrong place. She took two books anyhow and paid me on the spot.”

So far, more than 50,000 copies of the guide--McAuley’s most popular work--have been sold, followed by his “Wildflower Walks of the Santa Monica Mountains.”

But why tell the world--and in such inviting detail--about a spot you want protected forever?

“If you didn’t build a trail and invite people in, someone would come along and subdivide the land,” McAuley said. “To preserve parkland, you need access to it. Otherwise, nobody will vote the funds to acquire it.”

Finishing the Trail

In the early 1980s, McAuley got to know the mountains intimately as a hike leader for Learning Tree University. He was one of about 10 hikers who laid out the Backbone Trail, trudging through chaparral, up fire roads, down ranching paths dating from the days of Mexican land grants.

He envisions a day when hikers can spend the night in trail-side huts or even strategically located bed-and-breakfasts. But that is a long way off; the final 600 acres earmarked for six miles of trail and a wildlife corridor have yet to be purchased by the National Park Service.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) said he expects the acquisitions to be completed in the next 12 months. After that, he said, it shouldn’t take long for largely volunteer crews to hack a path through stretches of brush.

“We have the money already appropriated,” said Sherman, whose district includes the trail, “but I don’t have to tell you that doing land deals in the Santa Monica Mountains can be a long process.”

McAuley knows that. About 10 years ago, he gave a talk about the trail and vowed to be around for its completion.

“That land should have been purchased years ago,” he said. “On the other hand, I guess I should thank the government for prolonging my life.”

As the hiking day approaches an end, the Coastwalkers are drooping. McAuley, though, is enlivened, something like a horse on its way back to the stable. Stopping in the brilliant sun before a gnarled oak, he announces to the flagging hikers that this is the spot where the infamous bandit Joaquin Murrietta used to plan his raids.

“Anyhow, that’s what someone once told me,” he says. “If you want, you can go right ahead and believe that.”