Who deserves to use Los Padres National Forest? Motorcyclists, ranchers faced off in 1980s
Many of the issues facing national forests in the late 1980s are still present today with one big exception.
These days, budgets orbit around the ballooning costs of large wildfires. A 2015 U.S. Forest Service report said that firefighting seasons run 78 days longer than in 1970 and burn twice as many acres.
The report estimated the number will double again by 2050 due to climate change.
Wildfire acreage records were broken in 2020 in California and the West, and we’re still weeks away from rain and lower temperatures.
As budgets become tighter, more fees have been imposed at national forests and funding for facilities and other programs have plunged.
The Trump administration is looking to relax rules regarding oil drilling on forest service and federal Bureau of Land Management lands.
Here are stories focused on the volunteers and people who enjoy their time in the forest.
These excerpts are from Ronald W. Powell’s four-day series about Los Padres National Forest, which ran in the Telegram-Tribune in April 1988.
Who marred trails? Most blame motorcyclists
It’s a whodunit with an answer that doesn’t matter.
But the mystery remains: Who destroyed the trails in the Santa Lucia District of Los Padres National Forest?
Finger-pointing, a petition drive and bad feelings have spilled out of the case.
But hikers, horseback riders and others say it doesn’t take Agatha Christie to solve the riddle. The motorcyclists did it, they say.
“The Hell’s Angels image is getting a little old,” retorts William Blocher of the Cal Poly Penguins motorcycle club.
A total of 143.5 miles of trails slice across the district in a haphazard pattern. Sixty-four percent of the routes are designated for four-wheel drive and motorcycle use, with the remainder dedicated to foot traffic — the wanderings of hikers and horses.
But few of the trails were built with any of those users in mind.
Many are the handiwork of homesteaders and miners, who scratched out crude paths during the 1800s to fit their personal and commercial needs.
Other paths are more recent, created as access routes by utility companies to string power lines or by firefighters who used the narrow clearings to curb the spread of wildfires.
Aggravating the design problems was a critical mistake made by the Forest Service in the early 1970s. The agency began designating trails for specific uses without first analyzing soils for their suitability for churning motorcycle wheels or pounding horses’ hooves.
Learning from past mistakes the Forest Service plans to examine soils before designating uses on any of the proposed 128 miles of new trails.
“I hear people saying all the time that they don’t want motorcycles (on forest trails),” said Guenther.
“Its not that I’m not listening. It’s that I believe there is a way to accommodate all the users.”
A portion of the fees — levied on off-road vehicle licenses — are used to build new trails and repair old ones on public lands used by the vehicles. It is the largest source of trails money in Guenther’s district, amounting to at least $50,000 this year.
Guenther denies the green-sticker money influences decisions about trail use. But he admits it allows him to do work that could otherwise not be done. The spigot releasing federal dollars has dried up.
Camp hosts are on top of the world
From their home atop Figueroa Mountain, Jim and Nina Crank see the California Central Coast as few others do.
From their front porch they routinely see deer, and occasionally spot mountain lions slinking by in broad daylight.
Out their kitchen window at the rear of the house, they peer down 3,200 feet past thick green treetops to the hazy blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
At night, Jim Crank said the pinpoints of twinkling lights from Santa Barbara, Los Alamos and Santa Maria “look like a thousand diamonds below us.”
The visual feast is part of the psychic rewards derived by the retired couple who work for the U.S. Forest Service. There is no salary; they work as volunteers.
Still, the Cranks — Jim, 65, and Nina 63 — feel like they are cleaning up. And in truth they are.
“We’re your maids in the wilderness,” said a smiling Jim Crank, who is happy to serve.
Since 1981, the Cranks have worked as volunteer campground hosts for the Figueroa Mountain area of Los Padres National Forest.
The Cranks try to make the visitors feel at home. They greet visitors, answer any questions they have about the area, and strive to keep the campgrounds spotless.
They are also one of the few communication links between the recreation area and the outside world, a pivotal role during emergencies.
“We’re the eyes and ears between the Forest Service and the public,” Jim Crank explained.
Volunteer labor has replaced the work of Forest Service employees whose jobs were lost during the Reagan years. More than 20 percent of the Los Padres National Forest work force has been cut during Reagan’s two terms.
Budget may crimp long-term plan for Los Padres
Last month the U.S. Forest Service released a utopian plan for Los Padres National Forest.
It’s a grand vision, but one that could become nothing more than a paper dream if federal expenditures remain tight.
The current budget is $14.3 million.
In real world terms, said district ranger Keith Guenther , whose district includes San Luis Obispo County, forest users will have to learn to live with less.
Picnic tables won’t be replaced as often. Grazing lands gnawed by cattle will go uninspected for longer periods. Trails will go longer without repairs, roads will go longer unpatched.
The forest began in 1898 by proclamation of President William McKinley, who designated 1.64 million acres called the Pine Mountain and Zaca Lake Forest Reserve.
In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt named the forest to commemorate the Franciscan padres who founded eight missions in or near the forest.
The Los Padres was originally established to protect vital watersheds and neighboring communities from the threat of wildfire.
While that remains the central Forest Service mission, there has been a growing emphasis over the years on recreation and economic development.
Los Padres is the only forest in California with commercial oil production with 125 wells in Ventura County’s Sespe area.
Guenther said his budget went from $2.3 million in the pre-Reagan years to a low of $1.6 million two years ago. It now stands at 1.8 million, but he said volunteer labor is becoming more critical in efforts to keep the forest in fit condition.
Last year alone, volunteers, along with workers from the California Youth Authority, California Conservation Corps and the state Department of Corrections contributed $160,000 of labor.
That level of volunteerism is still needed, Guenther said, for the Forest Service to carry out the spirit, if not the letter of the law.
Users reflect many strains on forest land
The bumper sticker on Jim Sinton’s sedan tells a lot about him.
“Beef is real food,” it declares in red letters on a white background
For most of his 71 years, Sinton has made his living raising cattle. His 12,000-acre ranch is a finger that juts into Los Padres National Forest at the headwaters of the Salinas River.
Wild oats and other vegetation form the diet for Sinton’s herd, a minimum of 400 head. Their dinner table is Sinton’s private land and the bordering public forest.
While hikers, campers, horseback riders and even motorcyclists might occupy the popular view of who uses the forest, many other groups find pleasure — and profit — within its borders.
Sinton has one of 33 grazing permits issued by the U.S. Forest Service in the Santa Lucia District, which includes San Luis Obispo County and northern Santa Barbara County. Cattle owned by those ranchers mow a tenth of the district — 58,000 of the 538,000 acres.
In the Santa Lucia District 44,000 to 49,000 animal-unit-months are consumed each year. Forest Service workers said that amounts to moderate grazing, leaving enough grass to hold the soil and survive from wet to dry seasons.
Sinton, the picture of the gentleman rancher, says he has learned such care over the decades that he and his family have ranched in the Pozo area.
He is tall and lean with silver hair and eyes the color of the water off Pismo Beach on a cloudless day. His skin is tanned from years of tending cattle under the sun.
Sinton’s father began the ranch in 1892, “before the forest was created,” he points out.
Sinton is among those who believes the forest should be preserved in a natural state. For that reason, he uses no motorized vehicles in his daily cattle work, preferring the cowboy’s traditional means of transport — the horse.
He was active in the successful drive to get Machesna Mountain designated as a wilderness area.
And although he allows motorcyclists to ride across part of his property during the annual Hi Mountain Enduro, he is against expansion of off-road vehicle trails.
Off-road vehicles and motorcycles tear up forest roads and trails, he has told District Ranger Keith Guenther in letter and conversation.
“I think Keith is sincerely doing what he thinks is right by trying to open the forest to off-road vehicle use,” said Sinton, who makes his home in Shandon. “But I’m fighting him because I think he’s wrong. Damn wrong.”
Clean-cut William Blocher, a member of the Cal Poly Penguins, knows he is part of a despised culture.
“I’ve never heard a good thing said about us,” Blocher recently complained.
Blocher, 26, and his friends are motorcyclists who ride their machines on forest trails in the Pozo and La Panza areas.
Motorcyclists are roundly criticized for destruction to forest trails. Blocher doesn’t fully deny that, but says the problem is not that simple.
Blocher says he has seen the trails destruction and he and others in the 35-member organization have donated time to clear and repair some trails. He says the club has “screamed and hollered” to the Forest Service about erosion, but that their requests seem to “get lost in paperwork.”
One solution is to restrict motorcycle use on steep grades where erosion is likely and repair — and constantly maintain — gentler riding areas.
Solving the image problem is more difficult.
Family quarries rich vein of stone in forest
For more than 30 years Henry Antolini has turned stone to gold in the Los Padres National Forest.
As owner and president of G. Antolini & Son Quarry, Forest Service officials say he may be the only person who has chiseled out a full-time living from a Los Padres resource.
Since 1954 Antolini has scooped 25-million-year-old stone from the earth in northern Santa Barbara County and fashioned it into a handsome profit. But you won’t find Antolini’s stone just anywhere. Getting a piece of his rock is expensive.
“I go for the Cadillac trade,” Antolini said bluntly during a recent tour of his operation on blazing Colson Summit, about 20 miles east of Santa Maria.
At least 10,000 tons of it adorns the walkways, exteriors, patios, swimming pools and appointments of several Beverly Hills estates.
Certainly the work is profitable; Antolini says he grossed $605,000 in 1985. But his livelihood is also part of a family heritage of stone craft that dates back 250 years.
Stone has been good to the Antolinis. The 63-year-old is a seventh-generation stone worker who learned the business from his father, Giovanni, who immigrated to the United States from northern Italy in 1912.
As a pioneer in the stone business, Antolini has refined the trade and has several patents to show for it.
His is a highly mechanized business, requiring only six employees, one of them his 27-year-old son, Paul.
U.S. Forest Service official Ruth Wenstrom says there are no signs that Antolini’s quarry has brutalized the environment.
Wenstrom, who administers lands and minerals for the Santa Lucia District of Los Padres, said agency workers have checked creeks below Antolini’s operation for signs of siltation. So far, the amounts have been negligible.
Antolini operates the quarry on a mineral materials permit obtained form the Forest Service. Under the permit, Antolini pays the U.S. Treasury a fee for the stone he removes — 75 cents a ton for flagstone and 35 cents a ton for rubble.
