The Wild Coast

California’s designated wilderness is mostly in the Sierra Nevada and Mojave Desert, yet—to many people’s surprise—325,000 acres are within five miles of the ocean’s edge: 300,000 in federal lands and 25,000 in state parks. There are four federal wilderness areas—Ventana Wilderness and Silver Peak Wilderness in Monterey County, Philip Burton Wilderness in Point Reyes National Seashore, and tiny Farallon Wilderness in the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge off the coast of San Francisco—and four state park wilderness areas—Point Mugu, in Ventura County; Big Basin, north of Santa Cruz; and Prairie Creek Redwoods and Jedediah Smith Redwoods on the North Coast. These lands’ natural features include redwood forests, oak and chaparral hillsides, lush riparian valleys, pine-covered ridges, broad coastal terraces, and rocky, windswept islets. Most are remote places, laced by trails that offer quiet, natural experiences that are increasingly rare in coastal California.

Wilderness advocates have set their sights on more. The Northern California Coastal Wild Heritage Wilderness Act, sponsored by Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Mike Thompson of St. Helena, was passed by the Senate in December and has not been heard in the House. The bill was re-introduced in both the Senate and the House in January. It would designate as wilderness approximately 200,000 acres in the Mendocino and Six Rivers National Forests (Lake, Mendocino, Del Norte, and Humboldt Counties) and 100,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands, including 40,000 acres of the King Range Natural Conservation Area (NCA) on the Lost Coast. The NCA’s manager Gary Peterson says passage of the bill “would not dramatically change our management of the King Range,” for the BLM has managed it as de facto wilderness for 30 years. It would, however, offer a permanent guarantee of maximum protection for the area.

All public wildlands, including potential coastal wilderness, are under pressure from the expansion of cities and suburbs, the growing popularity of motorized and mechanized recreation, and drastic cuts in the budgets of managing agencies.

Roughly 87 percent of Californians—some 30 million people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—live in the state’s 29 coastal counties. The California Department of Finance currently projects that by 2036 the state’s population will top 50 million. If distribution stays the same, that would be 43.5 million people living along the coast.

Armed with such projections, and a 1998 National Sporting Goods Association study showing that wilderness hiking and camping by Californians grew by 42 percent from 1990 to 1998—reaching 24 million visitor days of camping and 64 million of hiking in 1998—advocates launched the California Wild Heritage Campaign in 2000. The campaign seeks to add wilderness status to all those public lands that, in their view, need maximum protection.

The North Coast bill is one of the campaign’s three pending wilderness bills. The other two—a southern California bill sponsored by Rep. Hilda Solis of El Monte, and a northern California bill sponsored by Rep. Mike Thompson—would designate wilderness further inland. The North Coast bill enjoys support from local interests that traditionally oppose wilderness additions, including some homebuilder associations, timber companies, and agricultural operators. It is opposed by advocates of off-highway vehicle recreation and mountain biking, two of the fastest-growing activities on public lands, according to studies by the BLM and U.S. Forest Service.

The International Mountain Bicycling Association testified against the bill in a Senate hearing on July 22, 2004. John Gardiner, its California representative, said the Association supports protection for the area, “but amended, so that we [mountain bikers] don’t lose access.” Rather than a wilderness, the group would like to see a national conservation area, or protection that permits trails that accommodate mountain biking.

The Blue Ribbon Coalition, an 11,000-member organization that promotes trail-based motorized recreation on public lands, also testified against the bill in the July 2004 Senate hearing. Don Amador, the group’s western states representative, contends that areas included in the North Coast bill are not true wilderness. “Those lands don’t fit the original criteria of the Wilderness Act as being untrammeled by man,” Amador said. “They have cell towers, radio towers, and other man-made structures, and one area is near a landfill. I don’t think hikers, including myself, want to be tying our shoes at a wilderness trailhead and looking over our shoulder at the county landfill.”

Ryan Henson, conservation director of the California Wilderness Coalition and a principal author of the North Coast bill, responded by saying that such areas “are well outside of the wilderness proposals.” He added that past legislation, including the Endangered American Wilderness Act of 1978, established that the sights and sounds of civilization outside of wilderness have no bearing on the qualification of an area for wilderness status. “In the last 30 years, Congress has designated as wilderness areas where civilization was audible or visible far more than it is in any contained in the North Coast bill,” Henson said.

Several other issues will affect the future of wilderness in California as well. Land managers have already been challenged by competing uses now allowed in wilderness—hiking, camping, fishing, hunting, climbing, non-motorized boating, livestock grazing—and prohibited uses, including mountain biking and off-highway vehicles. Wilderness supporters worry about the Bush Administration’s targeting of public lands near protected or potential wilderness for logging and oil and gas drilling.

Managing wilderness for both people and wild nature has also grown more difficult. Gene Blankenbaker, deputy supervisor for the 1.7-million-acre Los Padres National Forest, said “wildfire is one of our biggest challenges.” Managers, he said, are charged with upholding wilderness values, “which means that fire has a role to play in the ecosystems.” However, Los Padres spans the highly settled coastline between Ventura and Monterey. “Around here,” Blankenbaker said, “even if you’re 12 miles deep in the San Rafael Wilderness, a Santa Ana wind picks up and less than 12 hours later that fire is in the suburbs of Santa Barbara.”

Compromise and
Stewardship

Expanding the wilderness system had broad nonpartisan support in the decade following the Wilderness Act of 1964. Wilderness became a politically divisive issue, however, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose first Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, opposed most wilderness proposals. Now California is among the few states where wilderness still has strong congressional support, according to Bob McLaughlin, a long-time wilderness advocate and former chair of the Sierra Club’s San Francisco Bay Chapter Wilderness Subcommittee.

Yet in November 2004, at a slideshow celebrating the Wilderness Act in a Berkeley outdoor store, McLaughlin suggested that even in California, the days of “pure wilderness bills” may be over. The recently passed Nevada public lands bill, the Lincoln County Conservation, Recreation, and Development Act, could be a precedent, he said. While designating 770,000 acres as wilderness, it also included several large public land sales and exchanges, a utility corridor through public lands for a water pipeline serving Las Vegas, and a major trail concession to off-highway vehicle users.

Wilderness managers have long dealt with compromise, however, and now, because of budget shortfalls, they are turning to volunteers for help. Peter Keller, wilderness program manager for the Forest Service’s Region 5, said that because of annual budget cuts of $200,000 over the last four years, his program staff members have gone “from being the doers to being the facilitators.” He oversees stewardship on four and a half million wilderness acres with a total operating budget of $3 million, which, he points out, amounts to less than 70 cents an acre. As a result, some places are suffering from wear and tear as well as outright abuse. Sikes Hot Springs, on the Big Sur River in the Ventana Wilderness, for instance, is about ten miles from the nearest trailhead, yet is visited so often that it fails to deliver the solitude that is supposed to be part of a wilderness experience, Keller said. Other places in the Ventana have been degraded with trash, improper disposal of human waste, and deteriorating water quality. Lacking funds for backcountry patrols and without the permit system that limits backpacker numbers in popular Sierra Nevada areas, Keller has turned to volunteers from the Ventana Wilderness Alliance for help with clearing trails, gathering trash, and monitoring use.

More than a dozen other organizations similar to the Alliance now play supporting roles to wilderness managers across the state. Keller said their partnership has changed the agency’s mentality for the better. “Many people got into the Forest Service to work in the woods, away from people. It turns out that a majority of the work is with people. In the long run, we’re building a constituency which otherwise wouldn’t be involved with their local forest. They work alongside the Forest Service now as stewards.”

While volunteers have been increasingly involved in wilderness stewardship over the last decade, since 1964 their biggest role has been in advocacy for designation of wilderness. Inspired by their love of hiking, camping, climbing, hunting, fishing, and wandering in nature, with passion and hard work they have scored many successes.

Back at the Brazil Ranch, Boon Hughey and his fellow Ventana Wilderness Alliance members are celebrating their recent success. Hughey, a founding board member, has backpacked throughout the Santa Lucia Mountains, the coastal range that stretches from northern Santa Barbara County to Monterey. Soon after the Alliance was founded in 1998, he and a dozen other members went to work mapping the remaining potential wilderness in the northern Santa Lucias. In collaboration with the California Wilderness Coalition, the Alliance developed a wilderness proposal for the area, then approached owners of private property near the lands they proposed to protect.

“The response was mostly positive,” Hughey says. “Farmers in the Salinas Valley voiced some opposition over concern for their water rights,” but that proved to be a non-issue. The Big Sur Wilderness and Conservation Act, sponsored by Rep. Sam Farr, was signed by President Bush in December 2002—the first California wilderness bill to pass in eight years. It added 57,000 acres to the existing Ventana Wilderness and Silver Peak Wilderness, which together equal 270,000 acres, more than 80 percent of the state’s coastal wilderness.

That accomplished, the Alliance has turned to other projects, including trail maintenance, advocating for Wild and Scenic River designation for the Arroyo Seco and Little Sur Rivers, moving forward with a wilderness intrusion inventory (mapping things that do not belong in the wilderness for future removal), and, perhaps most difficult of all, independent monitoring of livestock impacts on habitats in wilderness grazing allotments—a process Hughey describes as “contentious.” So it’s no surprise when Hughey says that above all, he looks forward to “going out with the volunteers, getting out into the outdoors with good people to do projects.”

Brett Wilkison’s last Coast & Ocean article was “Tilapia Growth Hormone Test,” Winter 2003–04.