1st Steps for 300-Mile Trail

There are 1,100 miles of documented hiking trails in Los Padres National Forest, but nobody knows how much you can actually walk.

Some of the trails aren’t really there. These are trails in name alone, tangled or hitting dead ends, because they are grown over by brush or washed out by an act of God.

Every time Chris Danch--who has spent his life in Ojai and who has explored the back country since he was a teenager--takes a trail, he has to be prepared to run into a wall of wilderness.

But Danch, director of the 200-member Los Padres Forest Assn., has a dream.

He imagines that someday he will be able to walk a forest trail with no dead ends--a connected strip from Piru, at the southeastern tip of the forest in Ventura County, all the way to the northern end in Big Sur.

That is 300 miles of trail, far longer than the Backbone Trail through the Santa Monica Mountains, and one that could ultimately connect to the Pacific Crest Trail, a mammoth 2,650-mile mountain hike from Mexico to the Canadian border.

The Condor Wilderness Trail as now proposed would connect a network of trails--about 80% of which already exist--from the chaparral of the Sespe Wilderness in Ventura County into the redwoods of the Ventana Wilderness of Big Sur.

This will be a bushwhacking trail, hard-core. The mountain man’s trail through rugged hills and knotty scrub would be for backpackers and adventurers who don’t mind forgetting that civilization exists, even if it is only a day’s hike away.

For Danch’s dream to come true, however, will take at least a decade.

Some of the trails he wants to connect in this 2-million-acre forest that covers parts of six counties from Los Angeles to Monterey are 50 to 70 years old. Some date back further: routes the Chumash used more than 5,000 years ago, and that the Spanish used in the 18th century. Some have outlived their value. Some are where they shouldn’t be, carved into sensitive habitat when expediency was prized over concern for nature.

Danch, paid director of this volunteer group that works with the National Forest Service, devotes most of his time to talking up the Condor Wilderness Trail. He is a bundle of outdoorsman muscle with a believer’s fervor for the forest.

As the Forest Service begins a series of community meetings to figure out its vision of the future--with a plan due in 2003--Danch is trying to include his vision as part of it.

Danch’s concept is a definite possibility, and now is a good opportunity to suggest it, forest officials say. “It’s a good idea,” said Jeanine Derby, forest supervisor. “It’s going to be a long-term project. We’ll look at it as long as we have the funding and wherewithal.”

Because the Forest Service is greatly understaffed, nearly all trail maintenance is done by volunteers. Danch says his project, which he estimates will cost at least $300,000 if staffed almost entirely by volunteers, would require continuous maintenance by volunteers.

“We’re really hampered from being able to do as much as we used to do,” Derby said. “Having an enthusiastic partner is encouraging, but it doesn’t smooth the way for getting through all of these hurdles we still have to be considering.”

The Forest Service has about 200 employees, of which nearly half are firefighters, Derby said. That leaves 100 for other duties. Many of them are more likely to be reviewing a balance sheet than communing with the outdoors, Derby said, leaving perhaps five or six who actually get into the back country for jobs other than firefighting.

“If it were just a matter of going out and brushing some trails to connect them all up, that would be one thing,” said Kathy Good, a Forest Service spokeswoman. “For our trail system, we’re way behind. I remember hearing that some trails should be maintained every couple of years, and it’s more than every 10 years now.”

Clearing a trail is no easy task. It’s back-breaking work, done by hand, without bulldozers or other machines. In addition, maintaining a trail, beating back the advances of nature--brush, boulders, logs, erosion--is a constant struggle.

Other concerns include hikers who harm wildlife or crowd the forest; required archeological and biological studies; and private property owners along the route, particularly a section owned by Hearst Corp. between two swaths of national forest edged by San Luis Obispo and San Simeon.

It is too early in the process for the Los Padres Forest Assn. to contact Hearst Corp., but Stephen Hearst, a company executive, said such a trail could be a problem, running right through his company’s agricultural property.

For now, however, that problem is the last one on Chris Danch’s mind. Instead, he thinks of the great things. And those thoughts occur to him in a continuous stream of why California needs this trail:

* To get future generations excited about the forest.

* Because people care about what they know. If they have more access, they will take better care of the forest.

* To chart the trails for the Forest Service to help track what is going on in the forest.

The Forest Service project would relocate trails, based on scientific studies, away from where they developed because of convenience. It would move them out of riparian areas where sensitive species live. These would be smarter trails, Danch says.

And for the most part, environmental groups seem supportive, with some qualifications. They want to ensure that their Los Padres--one of the most underused forests in the National Park system--is not invaded by touring hordes.

This is not a forest with a tourist hot spot--a Yosemite Falls or an Old Faithful--and they want to keep it that way.

“Our organization would not welcome major ongoing publicity that would draw a consistent and heavy influx of people,” said Alasdair Coyne, who heads the Keep the Sespe Wild Committee, an advocate for users of the forest. “It would depend on this horrible phrase of ‘marketing.’ Will it be on every brochure, and in Sunset magazine and in color supplements in The Times?”

But, in a forest with a primary purpose that has always been recreational, forest proponents say that bringing people into the forest in their backyards is indisputably a good thing.

“This is something environmental to do,” said Russ Baggerly[cq] of the Ventura County Environmental Coalition. “It’s not beating some developer over the head to make things green. It’s doing something green for green’s sake.”

For Danch, it may just boil down to something even simpler, a gift for himself and his children. “It would just be fun,” he said.