State’s Biggest Urban Park Maintains a Low Profile

California’s largest urban park, and its most expensive, opened to the public almost three years ago, but few people have been able to enjoy Chino Hills State Park.

There are no signs on nearby highways directing visitors to the park’s only entrance road--a rutted, unpaved track in a rural corner of San Bernardino County.

There are no telephones in the park for its superintendent, rangers or users to communicate with the outside world.

And basic facilities, such as picnic tables, improved campsites and toilets, remain scarce.

Some area residents, calling local offices of the state Parks and Recreation Department, have even been told that the new park at the junction of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties has not yet opened.

The reason for the lack of park improvements or even information about it, state officials say, is that their primary concern has been to acquire all of the 13,500 acres of rolling hills and dramatic canyons that fall within the park’s planned borders before its precious wildlife succumbs to the encroaching suburban sprawl.

“People say: ‘Well, what’s there and what’s it for?’ ” said Doug Healey, landscape architect for the Department of Parks and Recreation.

“The primary purpose of this park is to preserve some open space within this metropolitan area, so that people will have a chance to see what the land was like before it was covered with houses, to experience what the land was like a hundred years ago,” Healey said.

Hills for Everyone--a coalition of environmentalists, area homeowners and equestrian and hiking enthusiasts--supports the state’s strategy and is satisfied with the pace of park development, said Claire Schlotterbeck, the group’s chairman.

Hills for Everyone has spent a decade lobbying for the park’s creation, helping to plan its development and even operating and improving the park for a time under a free lease from the state.

“Our priority all along has been acquisition,” said Schlotterbeck, a resident of Olinda Village, an isolated neighborhood in Brea’s Carbon Canyon that will be virtually surrounded by the state park.

“The state has also believed that the highest priority is to buy the land. . . “ she said. “It is so threatened by encroaching development.”

Land acquisition for Chino Hills has been a top priority in the state parks budget, Schlotterbeck said, because officials recognize the rapid growth on all sides of the park “and the escalating land prices that brings.”

Since 1980, the state has spent $47 million to buy 9,735 acres for Chino Hills State Park, said Deborah Gates, acquisition project manager for the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Parcels Called Crucial

Almost all the land that remains to be acquired lies along the park’s perimeter, above the canyons--Telegraph, Aliso, Brush, Water and Bane--that make up the bulk of Chino Hills State Park.

Even though those parcels are on the edges of the park, Schlotterbeck said, they are crucial to the park’s success because they include hilltops and ridges that shield surrounding development from view when one is inside the park.

“The park was designed along (ridge-line) boundaries,” she explained, “so that once you’re inside the park you’re isolated from all the urbanization. . . . You can’t tell there’s 15 million people around you.”

If those hills and ridges are not protected by state ownership, she said, landowners could build houses there and spoil the park’s natural “view shed.” Civilization’s only intrusion in the park comes in the form of high-tension power lines that cross its canyons.

Some of the remaining parcels of land may be donated to the park, Schlotterbeck said, but she estimated that completing the acquisition will cost at least $13 million more.

“We don’t have appraisals in on all that property. We just have rough estimates,” Gates said, declining to release her estimate of the cost of the remaining land.

No matter what the final price, Chino Hills ranks among the most expensive parkland in the state parks system because it sits squarely between some of the fastest-growing areas in the country and some of the most highly developed, Healey said.

About half the state’s population lives within an hour’s drive of Chino Hills State Park, a 1979 study found, and more than 9 million people--40% of California residents--live within a 40-mile radius.

With the rapid growth forecast for the Southland, particularly in the Riverside-San Bernardino area, that number is expected to increase by 2 million before the end of the century.

Already, a developer is grading land for a housing tract at the north end of Bane Canyon, next to the park entrance off Pomona Rincon Road in San Bernardino County.

More Entrances

Eventually, park planners hope to move the main entrance south to Slaughter Canyon, next to Prado Regional Park, and develop campgrounds, parking areas, trail heads, a visitor center and other facilities in the east end of the park.

They also want to build entrances, with less extensive facilities, near Carbon Canyon Road in Orange County and Green River Road in Riverside County.

Orange County’s proposed entrance would pass through Carbon Canyon Regional Park in Brea and would provide access to picnic areas, hiking and equestrian trails, as well as parking areas for cars and horse trailers.

Similar facilities are proposed for a Riverside County entrance, off Prado Road, west of Corona.

The proposals are included in a preliminary general plan scheduled for presentation to the state Parks and Recreation Commission in May, Healey said.

Guidelines to Be Provided

The first stages of development could be completed in 1989, said Jan Anderson, district superintendent for Chino Hills State Park.

The general plan, which is required before the state can spend any money to develop the park, will “provide guidelines for development, operation and resource management for the next 15 years,” Anderson said.

Reductions in the state parks staff, increases in its workload and the state’s stringent environmental review requirements have delayed formulation and approval of those plans--and hence delayed the park’s development--Healey said.

Hills for Everyone and other volunteer groups, however, already had installed some chemical toilets, hitching posts, fire pits and picnic tables, and improved some of the park’s 40 miles of trails, before formal planning began.

“Mostly it was Scouts and horse groups that did the work,” Schlotterbeck said.

150 Visitors a Week

Now, the park is operated and maintained by Anderson, two park rangers, a maintenance worker and an office assistant, with help from three California Conservation Corps interns and a volunteer mounted patrol.

This year, the park has seen only about 150 visitors a week, estimated Ranger Jon Wright, who has lived in the park for a little more than a year.

When the first facilities are completed and park use increases, Anderson said, park staffing will likely increase as well.

The development planning process began in 1984 with a detailed inventory of the park’s natural resources, including its wide variety of habitats, its native wildlife and its potential archeological sites.

Chino Hills’ “wildlife species include deer, bobcat, coyote, gray fox, many small mammals and reptiles, and a significant diversity of birds,” including “hawks, owls, eagles, vultures and resident and migratory songbirds,” an early state study found.

Variety of Species

Several rare or endangered plant and animal species--including southern bald eagles, peregrine falcons, southwestern pond turtles and red-legged frogs--have been observed in the park.

The hills boast “one of largest populations of native California walnut (trees),” Healey said, and a variety of other plant communities ranging from chaparral to oak woodland to grassland.

“Within a very small area, we have a great variety of landscapes,” Schlotterbeck said. To preserve those landscapes, the proposed development plan calls for roads and improved campgrounds only at the fringes of the park.

“This is a preservation park,” Schlotterbeck said. “The purpose of the park is . . . to hold this piece of California the way it was. . . .

“The nice thing about this park is that when you use it, you use it alone.”

TIPS FOR PARK USE

How to Get There: Visitors can hike or ride horses into the park through Carbon Canyon Regional Park in Brea or from the Green River area north of the Riverside Freeway. To drive into the park, take Pomona Rincon Road off the Corona Expressway (California 71), between the Riverside and Pomona freeways. Watch for a brickyard on the west side of the road and head west on the adjacent dirt road. Follow the dirt road--and the brown Chino Hills State Park signs--through Bane Canyon.

Hours: The Bane Canyon gate is open daily from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m.

Fees: Paid on the honor system in an “iron ranger” box at Bane Canyon, fees are $2 per vehicle for day use and $3 for primitive overnight camping. Add $1 per day for each horse or dog.

Information: Although no telephones have been installed in Chino Hills State Park, the Parks and Recreation Department’s Los Lagos District office at Lake Perris, (714) 657-0676, relays messages there daily by radio.