Restoring the Wilderness of 100 Years Ago

A wildlife preserve the size of a small national park, replenished with animals that roamed this part of California 100 years ago, is taking shape in the canyons and foothills of the San Emigdio Mountains, about an hour’s drive north of metropolitan Los Angeles.

Named Wind Wolves, the preserve, off California 166 near Maricopa in southwestern Kern County, is the creation of the Wildlands Conservancy. The group bought the land in 1996 and has been busy since then taking down buildings, obliterating roads and restoring ponds and streams -- all part of an effort to make the place look much as it did when explorer John C. Fremont came across it in the 1850s and established a ranch there.

“We want people who come here to be able to look face-to-face at something that is truly wild,” says David Myers, the conservancy’s executive director.

Myers is talking about the kind of sights most people associate with Yellowstone National Park or remote parts of the Sierra foothills: a platoon of elk filing across a ridge, clusters of blacktail deer napping under valley oaks, a bobcat bounding across a trail, a great horned owl perched on its cliff-side roost.

As much as the wildlife, it’s the sense of boundless space -- of unexplored territory -- that Myers hopes will enrapture visitors when the 150-square-mile preserve opens its gates to the public sometime next year.

50 Miles From L.A.

By then, Myers hopes that the process he calls “rewilding” will be far enough along to create an impression of wilderness barely 50 miles north of the nation’s second-largest city.

For now, the preserve is holding nature classes and field trips for Kern County schoolchildren and accepting reservations for the two small campgrounds that are completed. There is no admission fee and no plans to charge one, says Myers, although a fee may be assessed for overnight parking at a proposed recreational vehicle lot near the main entrance. But people won’t be able to drive into the preserve, tour it in buses, stay in hotels or eat in restaurants there.

Myers is insistent on that point. “We don’t want the glint of metal or the slamming of car doors to get between people and the world we want them to discover.”

About the only bows to civilization at this point are campgrounds, picnic tables, an outdoor classroom and a couple of rock-walled restrooms that blend into hillsides. This spring, partly to show off its gaudy mosaic of wildflowers, Wind Wolves has been conducting van tours of the lowlands, limiting the excursions mostly to preserve volunteers, conservation groups, archeologists and other scientists.

The tours, which follow dirt roads over a small portion of the preserve, may become a permanent feature of the place, Myers says. But most visitors will have to be content with seeing as much as they can on foot or horseback. Myers says the preserve staff is mulling whether to allow mountain bikes on the same dirt roads the vans use.

A thornier question is how much public access should be granted to the marine fossils -- of clams and whales -- and to the Chumash paintings that adorn sandstone cliffs and shallow caves. Archeologists have described the orange and indigo images as among the most resplendent Native American rock art in the country, but it is so prone to erosion that the preserve staff warns visitors not to brush against it.

At a place called the Lizard Cave, conservators working with dental tools painstakingly restored paintings marred years ago by photographers using black-and-white film who applied chalk to highlight the images.

The Wildlands Conservancy, based in Oak Glen near Yucaipa, had been acquiring and preserving remote desert tract when the opportunity arose to buy Wind Wolves for $140 an acre, Myers says. The conservancy outbid a Utah ranching concern and bought it from developers who had envisioned thousands of homes on the land, but couldn’t wait for the housing market to catch up with the rural location. Only one house was built; the preserve manager lives there.

Encompassing more than 95,000 acres, Wind Wolves is only slightly smaller than Northern California’s Lassen and Redwoods national parks. It is larger than all but one of California’s state parks, Anza Borrego in the Sonoran Desert.

From its southern boundary with the Los Padres National Forest, the preserve steps down from the snowy heights of the San Emigdios, about 6,000 feet above sea level, through stands of ponderosa and pinyon pines, oaks and cottonwood and onto the rolling grassland that inspired the name Wind Wolves. The expression, says Myers, comes from the Great Plains, where wind moving through the tall grass reminded early settlers of running wolves.

Abutting the San Andreas Fault, Wind Wolves is a geologic quilt of sandstone and granite thrown together by seismic upheavals. The mountains that form its southern boundary, along with its major canyon and a defunct 19th century settlement, were named for St. Emygdius, an early German martyr and protector against earthquakes.

Historical records indicate that the land is part of an 1842 grant conveyed by the Mexican governor of California to Jose Dominguez. His heirs later sold part of their property to Fremont. Between 1890 and 1967, the bulk of the land was owned by the Kern County Land Co. and run as a cattle ranch. Subsequently, mineral rights to the property were acquired by several energy companies.

The wolves and grizzly bears that lived here in Fremont’s time won’t be back as part of Myers’ rewilding plan. But he has reintroduced about 100 tule elk, animals that were native to the area before hunters wiped them out, and he hopes to see the herd grow to 2,000. The preserve also plans to reintroduce bighorn sheep, and Myers and preserve manager David Clendenen wait expectantly for antelope to migrate from nearby Carrizo Plain National Monument. Small groups are beginning to make their way over.

From the dawn chorus of doves to the fresh tracks of mountain lion, black bear and coyote, the animals here declare their hegemony. But it was not always so.

Rewilding has meant closing down a rock quarry; stopping progress on a hazardous waste dump; ridding the property of lethal sodium cyanide “coyote getters”; cleaning up petroleum waste pits where owls and hawks sometimes drowned; and dismantling a poacher’s camp.

It also required erecting steel barriers across canyon walls to stop trespassing all-terrain vehicles and motorcycles, which Clendenen blames for igniting at least one brush fire.

There are still more than 40 oil wells on the property, many of them operating, and Myers estimates “we may have to wait 20 to 30 years before the oil plays out and we are petroleum-free.”

‘Their Eyes Grow Wide’

Other challenges loom, notably air pollution and other byproducts of suburban sprawl. The Tejon Ranch Development, with its planned 23,000 homes and 350-acre industrial park, is being built virtually next door to Wind Wolves’ northeastern boundary.

Myers says he is not worried about the prospect of more people in the area. “There are two types of environmentalists: those who shun people and those, like me, who welcome them.”

For each of the past four years, the conservancy has brought as many as 15,000 schoolchildren to Wind Wolves to learn about nature firsthand.

“We are showing these kids things that make their eyes grow wide, that make them say, ‘Oh, wow!’

“Isn’t that what the environment is all about?”