Historic Transition

VENTURA —  On these wet winter days, Santa Cruz Island looms like a blue-green emerald in the distance, 20 miles out of Ventura Harbor and a world apart--the home of wild horses, sacred Chumash burial grounds and falcons that spear their prey at 100 mph.

From this week forward, the island’s rugged east end will belong solely to taxpayers as the National Park Service seizes a historic sheep ranch that had been the missing link in Southern California’s first national park.

Owned by one family since 1880, the 6,300-acre Gherini Ranch now figures to be the hub of the five-island Channel Islands National Park, welcoming each year without charge tens of thousands of overnight campers, day hikers, snorkelers, kayakers and boaters.

Landing fees of $15 and camping fees of $25 will be eliminated and the cost of boat trips stands to drop from $47 to $42. Park officials figure visitors will flock to the island once word gets around.

“You’re in a very friendly environment, yet you’re getting a wild experience,” acting park Supt. Tim J. Setnicka said. “You’re able to backpack, yet you’re overlooking the ocean.”

Indeed, the view from a rolling backbone trail on east Santa Cruz can envelop 90 miles of coastline, from the jagged peaks of the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles County to the tip of Point Conception north of Santa Barbara.

But the transition from private property to public ownership has not been quick or easy--taking 17 years and marked by family disputes and ongoing conflict between the National Park Service and 82-year-old Oxnard attorney Francis Gherini, whose partial ownership of the island officially ends with Monday’s government takeover.

In fact, Gherini tried unsuccessfully as late as Friday to get a federal judge in Los Angeles to block the seizure of his ranch, arguing the park service was violating his constitutional rights by taking his property before paying for it.

And before that--just last month--20 heavily armed agents dropped from a Blackhawk helicopter in commando style into two hunting camps run by Gherini’s concessionaire, who later claimed the raid was intended to make the ranch seizure more palatable to the public.

Park officials said the raid climaxed a two-year inquiry into grave-digging by a ranch caretaker and was unrelated to the seizure. The Santa Barbara County Grand Jury begins calling witnesses in the case Monday.

Gherini still claims ownership of the east end’s 13 wild horses, 200 feral pigs and 2,500 sheep, though he lost his attempt Friday to save the lucrative sheep and pig-hunting concession run from Scorpion Anchorage and Smugglers’ Cove.

The business is set to shut down Monday, and the park service wants the animals off the island as soon as possible--the sheep and horses removed by adoption and the disease-carrying pigs by slaughter.

Federal officials predict Monday’s switch from private preserve to national park status will go smoothly.

They say the only remaining dispute is how much Gherini should be paid for his one-fourth share of the real estate.

The park service bought the other three-fourths interest from Gherini’s two sisters and the estate of his brother in 1990 and 1992; each was paid about $4 million.

Gherini held out for a better price only to see the last government appraisal drop to about $2.8 million as values fell throughout the region.

Finally last fall, Congress passed a law seizing the ranch, a so-called “legislative taking” last invoked in 1988, when lawmakers forced a real estate developer to sell the Manassas, Va., Civil War battlefield instead of building a shopping center.

Over the next nine months, a fair price for Gherini’s interest will be negotiated, or a government lawsuit will be filed to resolve the issue.

The Gherini Ranch seizure was welcome news to the park service. Officials now hope to restore native plants and shrubs by removing rooting pigs and the skittish feral sheep that nibble grass to the nub, speeding the natural erosion of the island’s volcanic soil.

The remaining 90% of Santa Cruz Island--California’s largest at 24 miles in length--is already an ecological preserve owned by the nonprofit Nature Conservancy, which plans to work closely with the park service in attacking problems such as destructive pigs.

Setnicka considers seizure of the remaining 10% nothing less than the rescue of a natural gem that has been abused by man.

“What I think we’re going to bring is the equivalent of the Marshall Plan to Europe after World War II,” he said. “On Feb. 10, the liberation and the restoration and the healing begin.”

*

At first glance, east Santa Cruz Island hardly seems a wreck.

The impression, in fact, is that of the rocky Irish coast--shoreline caves, soaring cliffs, grassy plateaus and boulder-strewn hills rising to 1,500 feet and spotted by groves of oak, ironwood and cypress.

The island is also reminiscent of Southern California of a century ago--no paved roads, no TV, no telephones except for cellular. Electricity by generator. The two main ranch houses are basic two-story rectangles of 18-inch-thick limestone blocks and adobe plaster, constructed in the 1880s.

At Scorpion Ranch, the quiet anchorage that is the island’s primary entry point, the housing compound includes an 80-year-old white clapboard bunkhouse, a caretaker’s cabin, assorted sheds and rusting hulks of old farm machinery--tractors, trailers, woodcutters and cultivators. Storage caves are cut out of the hillside and shored up with lumber.

Behind the main house is a midden, an ancient Chumash refuse heap that could date back thousands of years. Scorpion Canyon was a primary camp of the Native Americans before they were decimated by measles and forced off the island about 200 years ago.

From the ranch compound, the canyon spreads flat and wide along a creek for a mile, an easy walk beneath clusters of 100-foot-tall eucalyptus trees. One canyon wall shines white in the bright sun, a bleached Monterey shale.

But this slice of island paradise is occasionally marred by the stench of rotting sheep carcasses left by hunters after they had cut away the rams’ curly horned trophy heads. Broken arrows lay discarded by hunters who have paid $550 for a four-day stay at the ranch. Thunderous booms from black-powder rifles echo off mountainsides.

Sheep trails crisscross the hills, and mountain bikes track them.

To the park service, this is evidence the island has been abused.

Indeed, many hillsides are pocked by collapsed circles of earth and scarred by long and craggy crevasses caused by erosion. Up steep canyons, tree roots areexposed by the digging of feral pigs, a tough, thick-necked creature that acts as a natural rototiller.

Several miles inland over the east end’s highest hill--1,581-foot Red Mountain--the ecological difference between the Gherini Ranch and the Nature Conservancy preserve can be seen: The east side looks like a green golf course with a smattering of aging trees, while the west is laden with high native grasses, coastal sage and lemonade berry and coyote bushes.

“That ranch has been pounded and pounded and pounded,” Setnicka said. “The resource there is flat-lined, and we’re going to bring it back to life.”

Gherini and his hunting concessionaire, Jaret Owens, take exception. They say they have been good stewards of the ranch: fixing up the buildings and having their workers greet thousands of visitors a year at the shoreline to tell them to honor the numerous Chumash camp and burial sites on the island.

“When we were in the sheep business we ran about 5,000 animals,” Gherini said of a ranching operation shut down in 1984. “Now we have a couple of thousand, so you can see the decrease in any damage being done. And erosion is due to natural conditions. You get water between the soil and bedrock and it slides.”

But park officials say studies show erosion increased 100-fold under similar circumstances of heavy sheep grazing on nearby Santa Rosa Island.

And Lyndal Laughrin, a UC Santa Barbara ecologist and researcher who has lived on the island since 1971, said there should not be much argument over whether things will improve for natural ecosystems under park service control.

“There will be an improvement without the grazing animals,” he said. “Some natural plants can reappear and as the erosion abates, there will be healing.”

*

As preservationists laud coming changes at Gherini Ranch, however, many of those who know the enclave best say they are saddened by the loss of the privately owned island retreat.

More people might make it to the island now, they say, but what they find will be less authentic and more sterile than in the old days.

Many hunters also condemn the government for heavy-handed tactics--the island seizure and the recent raid. Others say they feel nostalgia more than anything.

“This is one of my favorite places on earth,” said Bob Bombardier of Thousand Oaks, who has hunted on Santa Cruz Island with bow and arrow for 20 years and returned three times recently because he knew an era was coming to an end.

“In a sense the islands are going to be lost,” he said, waiting in a driving rain two weeks ago to hop a skiff to shore. “And in that spirit, it’s like losing a person. You’ll never be able to experience that special thing again.”

A rare camaraderie exists among hunters on Santa Cruz, he said, nodding to his friend, Mike Brooks of Newbury Park, a hunting buddy for 15 years.

Like Bombardier, Brooks has completed island trips by bringing baby lambs home for his daughter to raise for 4-H. “She was always excited when I brought a lamb home,” Brooks said.

Leonard Kroll, a Sierra Madre kayaker and photographer, came to the island last week to experience it one last time without park service controls.

“I really think this place has a charm that can only exist as it is now,” he said. “When the government takes it over, the soul will be just wrenched from the island.”

The ranch house kitchen, where he now swaps stories with strangers over coffee and meals, will be gone, he said. The adobe building will become a park information center instead.

“We’ll be looking at exhibits of things the way they used to be,” he said, “not experiencing them.”

Actually, park service officials say, change will come slowly to east Santa Cruz.

“It’s going to be a gradual process,” Setnicka said. “There won’t be an overnight transformation. . . . But the island will clearly be much more accessible.”

About 15,000 people visited east Santa Cruz last year, nearly the same as popular Anacapa Island next door. Many more are expected this year, as Island Packers expands its boat service out of Ventura and a second concessionaire begins trips out of Santa Barbara.

*

Still, rangers are only now deciding how to bring the ranch’s drinking water and sewer systems up to standard. No one knows how long it will take to change the old ranch houses into park centers. And it will be years before a permanent 150-foot pier is built to allow boats to quickly load and unload passengers instead of using skiffs to ferry six people at a time to shore.

Hunting and mountain biking will be banned immediately. And commercial operations, from kayak activities to bed-and-breakfast and helicopter tours, will end Monday.

Perhaps most significant to the general public, fees for landing and camping will be eliminated and boaters will be able to come ashore at will.

Hikers will still be able to wander the island unescorted. Kayakers and snorkelers are still welcome but must now bring their own equipment.

Thirty-five camp sites will be set up in eucalyptus groves already used for camping at Scorpion Ranch, but oceanfront camping will no longer be allowed. Back-country camping will eventually be allowed, but not right away.

Two full-time law enforcement rangers--with training as nature interpreters--and a maintenance person will live on the island instead of the four private caretakers who now oversee it.

Those caretakers--Dave Mills and Susan Manchester at Scorpion Ranch and Brian Krantz and Chris Risius at Smugglers’ Ranch--will be served with 90-day eviction notices on Monday. Federal relocation payments are being figured for them and for the island’s business concerns, officials said.

*

What is not yet clear is precisely what is going to happen to the island’s wild horses, pigs and sheep--and when.

Park officials say the animals can’t stay. But a final decision on where they will go is up to their owners, Francis Gherini, his siblings and their heirs. And, just as the family was divided over selling the ranch in the first place, its members are split over what to do with the animals.

Gherini and his nephew, attorney John Gherini of Santa Barbara, both claim a 25% share of the livestock. But the nephew wants to sign over his ownership share to the park service and the uncle does not.

“When my dad passed away, my uncle actually tried to block acquisition of my dad’s interest by the federal government,” John Gherini said. “That was total nonsense. . . . And now he’s decided to go down a different path again.”

If and when the owners agree on disposition of the horses and sheep, the government is required to relocate them. The pigs, officials say, must be killed on the island regardless of ownership because they carry a potentially lethal rabies-like virus.

“If any of those pigs came back alive they could wipe out the swine industry in the United States,” said Kathy Jenks, the animal-regulation director for Ventura County. Jenks is heading a sheep-adoption effort that has gathered steam since last fall when park service officials left open the option of sending sharpshooters onto the island to mow down the critters--similar to the 1980s slaughter of about 30,000 sheep by the Nature Conservancy on the rest of Santa Cruz Island.

Flooded with adoption offers since then, Setnicka is now working with Jenks and the national Farm Sanctuary, a nonprofit organization that hopes to place about 1,000 of the animals with owners who agree not to kill them. Mainland ranch owners also say they want the Rambouillet-Merino sheep for grazing and their fine wool, and perhaps as hunting stock.

Francis Gherini vowed in a recent interview not to stop the adoption because he believes it is impossible for the park service to carry out its plan to round up all 2,500 sheep and herd them to a government landing craft to be shipped to holding pens at the Port of Hueneme for distribution.

He may have miscalculated.

Terry Parrish, a nationally known trainer of border collies, demonstrated recently just how quickly her dogs can maneuver the wild sheep into herds in open pasture. Directing two collies with sharp whistles, she rounded up perhaps 800 sheep in a single hour.

“It always makes your heart stop when you see all those sheep charging up a hill,” she said.

She told ranch caretakers Mills and Manchester--who have spearheaded adoption planning on the island--that the roundup can work by using three or four dogs to herd sheep down a steep hill to makeshift pens at Scorpion Cove. Hard-to-corral animals that hang in the canyons and high country can be caught this summer when they come down to two ranch watering holes to survive.

In a separate rescue effort, a group of Santa Barbara horse lovers has attempted for months to keep the ranch’s dozen hearty horses on the island. They maintain that the horses, descendants of stock imported to work the ranch, have evolved into virtually a breed of their own over the past two centuries, particularly strong and large-hoofed and possessing unique genetic characteristics.

“They’ve adapted to this island environment, and they should stay here,” said Karen Blumenshine, a veterinarian who is heading the Heritage Herd Advisory Committee. “They embody the history of Santa Cruz Island.”

The group has promised to pay the costs of managing the herd. And on a recent sunny afternoon, as a bandylegged, day-old filly trotted nearby, Blumenshine shot a dart into the rump of a mare to temporarily sterilize her. That way, the herd could be kept small and overgrazing avoided, she said.

“Today is the first day in an exciting chapter for this herd,” said Blumenshine, who said she had Francis Gherini’s permission to pursue her genetic and sterilization experiments.

But now, a week later, John Gherini has directed her to stop working with the horses, and Blumenshine says, “I’m at a standstill. All of the sudden we don’t have any say-so.”

The flap between the Gherinis on this issue is just one more example of the bickering that still marks the transition of the island from private to public control. To Francis Gherini, the horses reflect the island’s history. But to John Gherini, the horse experiments are nonsense, another distraction from the larger effort to change Gherini Ranch into a prized piece of a national park.

“I don’t want any part of these experiments,” he said. “The taxpayers have paid $12 million for this ranch and the public hasn’t had the opportunity to use it. So now our intent is to work with the park service and provide a smooth transition.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Completing the Park

The National Park Service is purchasing the eastern 10% of Santa Cruz Islands, which will become a hub of activity for Channel Islands National Park. The remaining 90% of the islandis owned by the nonprofit Nature Conservancy and access is restricted.

Santa Cruz Island at a Glance

* Size: 96 square miles, about 24 miles long, 6,000-plus acres of backcountry, largest of the Channel Islands.

* Location: 20 miles from mainland.

* Highest point: 2,471 feet, highest point in the Channel Islands.

* Topography: Grasslands, canyons, cliffs and sea caves along 77 miles of coastline.

* Facilities: New pier, historic buildings.

* Wildlife: More than 600 plant species, 140 land bird species. Of the 85 plant species endemic to the Channel Islands, nine occur only on Santa Cruz, including the island oak, island fox, and scrub jay. Sea lions, harbor seals and occasionally elephant seals found in surrounding waters.

* Access: Via 1 1/2-hour boat trips through Island Packers from Ventura. Future access from Santa Barbara.

* Activities: Hiking, backpacking, camping, kayaking and snorkeling.