Taming the alien golf cart species

Down IN THE SCRUB OF THE ISLAND OUTBACK, MILES from the old casino and nautical boutiques, a pair of hands parts a thicket and a silver-maned islander steps through the gray stalks. She is a hiker without a trail -- for the moment.

“This is chaparral sunflower,” says Deb Jensen, education director for the Catalina Island Conservancy, pausing at the stalks. “In the spring, this whole area is just full of sunflowers about this big. Encelia californica.”

Saying so, Jensen, 51, makes a big circle with her thumbs and forefingers, grins at the idea of all those yellow petals, then turns back to picking her way west through the roadless riparian canyon. A few hundred yards farther, at the canyon’s mouth, the red-berried toyon trees, beavertail cactus and mud puddles on our path give way to sand, and then some serious waves.

This spot is called Ben Weston Beach. Picture Malibu, with bison patties instead of beach houses, birds and bugs instead of spoiled stars. In fact, throughout our hike to the coast, our brown-bag lunch at an old picnic table and then the hike out up the ridge, we have this rugged territory to ourselves.

But change is coming, and Jensen is part of it. Even as the Island Conservancy struggles to re-naturalize the place, its leaders are laying plans to connect Catalina’s remote corners with a system of trails. The first phase calls for getting islander input and county permits, then shoring up and marking about 30 miles of trails, including an 18- to 21-mile trans-island route that would allow hikers to cross from Avalon to the island’s northwestern isthmus on a path free of motorized vehicles.

Though the effort probably will take more than five years and cost about $250,000, Jensen expects the first miles to be completed in 2004, including some trails for hikers, mountain bikers and equestrians in combination, some with single uses. Eventually, hikers could make a campground-to-campground circuit over multiple days.

Sounds simple enough. But on Catalina, this is a revolutionary idea.

Over its history as ranchland and then a weekend tourist getaway, Catalina’s keepers have carved out a few roads beyond Avalon -- about 200 miles of them, mostly dirt and many of them eroded back into near-wilderness. But nobody ever put together a true trail system.

Among the island’s roughly 900,000 visitors yearly, conservancy leaders guess that fewer than 20% leave the mile-square town of Avalon -- which has been fine with that town’s merchants, hoteliers and restaurateurs.

Those who do find a way out into Catalina’s backcountry find oak-studded hillsides, 50 miles of beaches and bluffs, and the occasional eagle wheeling overhead among the gulls and red-tailed hawks. But only a small community of seasoned locals and wily visitors gets there.

The rest of us, unable to rent cars on the island and banned from taking golf carts (the dominant local transport) on the main route out of town, don’t get much encouragement.

The island does include five improved campgrounds (with toilets, fire rings and barbecue pits) and six rustic campgrounds without any amenities, most of them accessible only by boat.

But in a typical year, conservancy officials say, they issue fewer than 7,000 hiking permits (they’re free and theoretically mandatory, but conservancy officials concede that most local hikers and many visitors don’t bother). They also issue about 1,000 mountain-bike permits, which cost $50 a year for individuals, $75 for a family.

On the whole, “it’s really hard to help people understand this place when it’s so hard to get around on foot,” says Jensen.

To flesh out the trail-network idea, the conservancy in 2000 enlisted four graduate students in Cal Poly Pomona’s landscape architecture program. In their 2001 report, they labeled the island’s existing pedestrian routes “a maze of trails and roads with varying degrees of usefulness,” some of them “a detriment to the environment.” In June 2003, the conservancy hired its first trails coordinator.

One reason to welcome a trail network here is that we’ll probably never see anything like that on Santa Cruz, Catalina’s larger island neighbor to the north. Some 76% of Santa Cruz is owned by the Nature Conservancy which, in its efforts to revive native ecosystems, strictly limits public access.

The remaining 24% of Santa Cruz is accessible as part of the Channel Islands National Park, which also includes Anacapa, San Miguel, Santa Barbara and Santa Rosa islands. Together, those islands (which don’t allow horses or mountain bikes) get about 300,000 visitors yearly.

Catalina, which lies about 20 miles off San Pedro, amounts to 76 square miles. Since the early 1970s, when the Wrigley family (of gum fame) donated the land, the Catalina Island Conservancy has owned 88% of the island -- just about everything outside the town of Avalon. The conservancy, which merged with the Wrigley Memorial Garden Foundation in 1996, has in recent years added staff and waged campaigns to rid the island of nonnative pigs and goats, to revive the embattled island fox and bald eagle populations, and to reduce the effects of those beloved but alien bison.

Jensen left her position as executive director of the American River Conservancy to come to the island in 1998. She and her husband, who teaches at Catalina’s only public school, live in a cottage amid the rolling hills of the island’s Middle Ranch area.

“People ask me what I do on the island in my spare time. This is pretty much it,” says Jensen near the end of our hike.

And these backcountry forays have brought “some truly transforming moments. Sometimes, it’s just a rattlesnake on the trail, reminding me of the patterns of nature. Sometimes it’s a loggerhead shrike. That’s a rare bird. Impales its prey. Nature,” she adds, grinning wickedly, “is cruel.”

And on Catalina, it’ll soon be a little closer.

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous West Wild columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.