To outsiders, Los Angeles can seem like a desolate wasteland of cement, traffic, and if you’re lucky, a few miles of sand. But just outside the city is a remote mountain range where wildlife still roams unencumbered and the state of the California coastal mountains is the same as it has been for thousands of years. Today, the National Parks announced that you can now connect that unencumbered gift from just outside Santa Monica in Will Rogers State Park, 67 miles to Point Mugu State Park.
Connecting the trail that traverses one of Southern California’s last true wild places was no easy task. There are public tracts but much of the trail runs along private property, so it had to be pieced together though the years. The National Park Service was recently given a key piece of land: 40 acres was donated by former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and fitness guru Betty Weirder. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that two other parcels along a fire road called the Etz Meloy Motorway are expected to close escrow within the next week to ten days.
The completion represented a massive interagency effort that’s been underway since the 1960s as four agencies purchased land over the years to make it happen: the National Park Service, the California Dept. of Parks and Rec., the Santa Monica Conservancy and the Mountain Recreation and Conservation Authority.
Because of the donated land, the Parks Service was able to save serious cash that can be used to buy other tracts along the trail in the next year or so with hopes of implementing camping along the newly completed route.
The Park Service wants the trail designated as a National Recreation Trail, which would make it one of only 1,500 in the country that promote health, conservation and recreation. It will also help the Parks with further funding for maintenance.
Because it has taken so long to piece the newly-completed trail together, work on it has spanned generations. Ron Webster is 82 and estimates he’s helped build around a third of it. He’s proud of how pristine the trail stays with millions of people living just a few miles away. “Mountain lions and rattlers are watching you, but you’ll meet a lot of people and still have a reasonably wild wilderness experience,” he said. “We may not have the biggest waterfalls or the biggest trees, but we do have the biggest ocean.”
The Park Service will celebrate the trail opening on National Trails Day, June 4th at Will Rogers State Park.
