Southern California's forgotten islands - Channel Islands - includes related article on the scenic spots in the Channel Islands

Sunset, July, 1996 by Matthew Jaffe

From the natural wonders of San Miguel to the hidden harbors of Santa Catalina, the Channel Islands are a rare slice of California, the way it used to be nothing, just the small outcrop of Richardson Rock, then more than 2,000 miles of open ocean before landfall on the Alaska Peninsula.

The trail cuts through grasslands that seem to bend and wave in San Miguel's undying northwest winds. Sand blows into dune fields, daring anything larger than a shrub to grow.

Indeed, though willows survive in sheltered ravines, San Miguel's only forest is a product of the wind and sand. It is made of a calcium deposit called caliche (ka-lee-chee) that encrusted plants as sand buried them thousands of years ago. What remains are sun-bleached casts of stems and stumps - a landscape of death masks.

Farther along, patches of waist-deep violet bush lupine soften the scene. As the trail climbs a final rise of windswept rock, ocean breezes deliver the scent of kelp mixed with the riper smell of animals.

Then Point Bennett comes into view. Even if it were empty, its beauty would rival that of any stretch of coast on the mainland. Instead, it's alive with 15,000 marine mammals. In summer, the numbers reach 30,000.

Along the vast sweep, sea lions cluster near the water, elephant seals loll in looser groups farther in, and Northern fur seals range deep into the dunes. The fur seals' flippers, which they hold up to the breeze to keep cool and regulate their body temperature, wave in the air like palm fronds.

As the wind briefly ebbs, the noises become more distinct: barks and belches, groans and moans, great rushes of air from lungs that allow the largest of the animals, the elephant seals, to dive to depths of almost 5,000 feet for 45 minutes.

There's nothing pretty about the sounds, and yet they are beautiful to hear. Just 26 miles from the mainland is a wildlife display to rival any in Africa.

This is what the rest of Southern California must have once been like. That's the first impression of the Channel Islands. With more time, however, each of the eight islands becomes unique, a little piece of like-nowhere-else-in-the-world. As Marla Daily, president of the Santa Cruz Island Foundation, puts it, "Each island has its own heartbeat."

PARALLEL CALIFORNIAS

The helicopter swings around the eastern end of Santa Cruz Island, passes over a ridge, and takes me through the great gap of the island's Central Valley.

For almost a century, the valley was the heart of this island. Ahead is evidence: a grove of eucalyptus and a cluster of buildings - a slaughterhouse, a winery, and barns - some whitewashed adobe, others made of island brick. Many date back more than 100 years, when Frenchman Justinian Caire began ranching on the island. The winery here was one of Southern California's largest until Prohibition, and the furrows of the vineyards are visible in the afternoon light.

On San Miguel, you always know you're on an island. Santa Cruz's scale, on the other hand, is continental: two major mountain ranges, 10 distinct plant communities with more than 650 species, and a complex geology. As for the Central Valley, it's an earthquake-fault rift zone.

The helicopter lands near the tiny Chapel of the Holy Cross built by the Caire family in 1891. A vintage Toyota Land Cruiser drives up to greet me, and out steps Rob Klinger and his dog, Astro. Klinger is the preserve ecologist for The Nature Conservancy, which has owned and managed 90 percent of Santa Cruz Island since the death in 1987 of rancher Carey Stanton, who passionately loved the island. Astro is a Catahoula leopard, a Louisiana hunting dog. Together they make up the conservancy's biology team.

It's Klinger's job to try to reestablish the island's natural processes by monitoring plant and animal populations, eradicating aggressive non-native plants, and conducting experiments designed to test which technique - burning, spraying, or mowing - will best promote the return of native vegetation.

The question, though, is how do you know what to restore the island to?

The Channel Islands have the longest known human occupation of any site in California. And the arrival of deer mice on San Miguel may coincide with the arrival of humans close to 10,000 years ago. Scores of plant and animal species have been introduced during the last 150 years; in a natural system, maybe one new species would arrive per century.

"We don't know what was here. And it's probably a foolish endeavor to restore the island to some snapshot condition," says Klinger. "If natives go extinct naturally, that's the way it goes. We don't know enough to tinker with nature in depth."

Especially when nature itself is so capricious. Although the four northern Channel Islands - Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel - were linked during the last ice age, they have been separated long enough to allow certain plants and animals to evolve into species distinct even from cousins on neighboring islands.

With no land bridge to the coast, a biological crapshoot played out over thousands of years, as the whims of the wind and sea helped colonize the island with mainland species.