Winter Leaves Its Messy Mark

The destructive impact of last winter’s storms is reaching into the Fourth of July weekend, dampening vacation plans for hikers, campers and beachgoers.

In the mountains, some campsites are washed out, and avalanche snow as deep as 15 feet still blocks a major road. Sunbathers compete for space with piles of driftwood at beaches in Malibu and Ventura County, and washed-out access roads make it hard to get to the water. Bunks were destroyed at a beloved Los Angeles summer camp, and a popular San Bernardino County senior center remains wet, moldy and shut.

In many cases, repairs will not be completed this summer -- or even this year. It will cost more than $50 million to fix beaches and parks in the city and county of Los Angeles, and officials say it could be years before the work is done. Parks, beaches and roads in Orange, San Diego and Ventura counties also require repairs that will costs millions.

“We’ve had miles and miles of trails that suffered damage, some of them total washouts,” said Jim Combs, assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks. “There are probably some remote trails in some of our parks that will never be repaired.”

The storm damage has cut into plans by 9-year-old Marielle Rosky of Los Angeles to attend Camp Hollywoodland in Griffith Park, the 1920s-era girls’ sleep-away camp owned by the city of Los Angeles.

The camp has had to close two of its 20-bunk cabins, one because it was damaged, and its contents destroyed, by a mudslide last January and the other because it depends on a nearby bathroom that remains shut. So the camp is accepting a third fewer campers than usual -- 110 girls each week instead of 150 -- and Marielle’s application was turned down.

“I was really depressed when my mom told me the bad news,” Marielle said. “I actually started to cry.”

Marielle has since found another camp. But Robin Smith, the city’s camping director, said turning girls away is hard for children, parents and staff alike. “They are not happy campers,” Smith said. “We have girls whose mothers and grandmothers attended this camp.”

In addition to property destroyed in dramatic landslides, the city lost hundreds of mature trees, Combs said, and floors in dozens of neighborhood gymnasiums were damaged, he said.

“We have so much of it that we’ve got to face; it’s literally going to take us years to get in and make all those corrections,” he said.

Although officials in several Southern California cities and counties say that, for the most part, parks and beaches are cleaned up and open to the public, the remaining trouble spots include some of the region’s favorite natural areas.

At Camp High Sierra in Mammoth Lakes, owned by the city of Los Angeles, the summer opening was delayed two weeks, till this weekend, because the ground was still sopping wet. “It’s just like walking on sponge, the water table is so high,” Smith said. “It goes squoosh, squoosh.”

In the Angeles National Forest, rangers have closed most campgrounds near Saugus, including Cottonwood, Bear, Spunky and Zuni.

A sad blow, said District Ranger Cid Morgan, was the destruction of the newly refurbished Los Cantiles picnic and hiking area, with accommodations for the disabled, in Bouquet Canyon above Saugus.

“We had spent $50,000 fixing that thing up,” Morgan said. “They scoured it, they fixed the well, they fixed the pump. Everything was beautiful. Then, bam! Totally filled with mud.... I wanted to cry.”

Angeles Crest Highway, a popular scenic route that links Glendale with the mountain town of Wrightwood through the Angeles National Forest, is washed out in places and, as of late last week, one spot was still covered by 15 feet of snow from an avalanche.

The California Department of Transportation, which maintains the road, says it might not be repaired until next summer, and then at a cost of up to $4.5 million.

At the Village Grind coffee shop in Wrightwood, day manager Rebecca Fuller worries about the effect on the town’s summer business. “It’s going to hurt us tremendously,” Fuller said. Most summers, she said, motorcycle clubs and automobile buffs roar over the Angeles Crest, stopping in Wrightwood to eat and shop.

Nearby, at the entrance to several hiking trails in the Angeles National Forest, Joan Eli and Lorax Chambers ran into a surprising patch of winter in late June. The couple had been hiking for more than a month up the Pacific Crest Trail, following a route from near the Mexican border to the route’s terminus in Washington state, near where they live.

On a recent warm day, they sat, rubbing their feet, stymied by lingering snow and washed-out trails. They’d hiked halfway up the mountain only to turn around.

“There’s no path any more, and there’s at least 5 or 6 feet of snow,” said Eli, 47. “We thought we’d come back down here and regroup.”

Elsewhere in the forest, heavy steel drainage pipes stick out from mountainsides, bent and crumbled like crushed aluminum cans.

About 80 vacation homes, a firetruck and other vehicles in Chantry Flat near Arcadia in the San Gabriel Mountains are still cut off from the main road by landslides on Santa Anita Canyon Road.

A popular walking and jogging route around the Hollywood Reservoir has been closed for months because of mudslides. “It’s a nuisance, but I don’t blame anybody because it’s beyond anybody’s control,” said Fran Ancona, 47, a library aide who now jogs on a nearby street.

The Department of Water and Power said it hopes to open a small loop of the trail within the next month but that full repairs might take several months. Tom LaBonge, the Los Angeles city councilman whose district includes the reservoir, said he is working with the city utility, “trying to get them to speed it up.”

One of the reasons why damage repair could take years is that initial state and federal cleanup money went for emergency work, including repairs of a sinkhole on Tujunga Avenue where a Los Angeles city worker died in February and of blocked roads needed for emergency vehicles.

State and federal repair funds are available for parks, but those are not coming quickly, several officials said. It took nearly 11 years -- until last month -- for final approval to repair parks damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, said Combs, of L.A. Recreation and Parks.

Congress can appropriate funds for repairs in national forests, but Morgan, the Angeles National Forest ranger, said not enough money was available to do all the work this year. Campgrounds, she said, have to wait while scarce resources first go toward fixing roads.

In San Diego County, El Capitan Open Space Preserve has been closed for months with such severe erosion that repair crews can’t get equipment onto the trails, said parks department spokeswoman Amy Harbert. Cleanup at El Capitan and other county facilities will cost $3.1 million, she said.

In some Orange County parks, including Carbon Canyon Regional Park, Aliso and Wood Canyons Park and Caspers Wilderness Park, some eroded hiking trails and fire roads remain closed, said Tim Miller, operations superintendent for the county’s Harbors, Beaches and Parks division. Orange County officials estimate that it will cost about $4.6 million to repair beaches and parks.

In Crestline in San Bernardino County, 84-year-old Bob Gustafson spoke sadly about the clubhouse that the town’s seniors club had painstakingly rehabilitated from an old lakeside bathhouse. A mudslide in January destroyed the dining room’s hardwood floor that members had laid themselves. By June, mildew had set into the walls, and a moldy odor permeated the air.

The 300-member club has moved its bingo games and spaghetti nights to the nearby San Moritz lodge, but president Grace Holding, 69, said losing the clubhouse has “been a horrendous disruption.”

The damage is not limited to mountainous areas. Some beaches in Los Angeles and Ventura counties are littered with debris washed down from higher elevations, storm drains are broken and several key roads and paths are washed out.

In Malibu, workers have cleaned up the rattlesnakes, rotting tree trunks and even a refrigerator that washed onto the beach.

But at Nicholas Canyon, a 12-foot hole in an access road makes it nearly impossible to use a ramp for disabled people. Blue tarps and yellow caution tape surround portions of the hillside next to the beach, and dried twigs, brush and bamboo cover the sand in places.

At Zuma Beach, the main access road remains closed on weekdays because a nearby creek is still overflowing, but county workers plan to pump out the water for weekends so beachgoers can get through.

At McGrath State Beach in Ventura County, tree roots, branches and trash cover the beach for the length of several football fields.

On a patch of smooth sand, 52-year-old Joann Schatvet sat watching her four grandchildren play. Schatvet, who has been coming to McGrath since her son, now 32, was a Boy Scout, said she had never seen so much driftwood there.

But Schatvet wasn’t really complaining. It would be, she said, a massive job to clean it all up, a fight with nature that was not necessarily worth undertaking.

“The coastline changes. That’s part of the ocean,” Schatvet said. “That’s what it’s supposed to do. God forbid it should stay the same.”