Photo Essay: The Island the Ranchers Left Behind

I was having one of those "My God, what have I done?" moments.



What made me think I could get up at 4 a.m. to drive two hours to get to the Ventura Harbor by 6:30 a.m. to take a three hour boat ride to an island twenty miles off shore from the mainland...



...where I would stay with a bunch of strangers for four days without cell signal or wifi?



What in God's name made me think I could avoid seasickness despite my propensity for motion-based nausea? What caused me to lie on my self-assessment form to say I had no physical restrictions?



What did "habitat restoration" mean, exactly? What is a "Cloud Forest," anyway? And where exactly was I going? I didn't know anything about Santa Rosa Island—except that it was one of the Channel Islands included in the National Park—until after I committed to volunteer service, and, really, until after I arrived.



What had I done? I had no idea. I made it to Ventura a little late, but in time to catch the NPS boat. I survived the boat ride by napping on a bench.



And walking that long pier with my sack of bottled water felt like walking the plank. I thought, I might die here...



...but since it turned out to be such a beautiful place, I thought that I wouldn't mind if I did.



I quickly discovered that at 15 miles wide by 10 miles long, Santa Rosa Island is the second largest of the Channel Islands (next to Santa Cruz). It was once run privately as part of the Vail & Vickers Co. ranching business, formed in 1889 and bought Santa Rosa Island in 1901. Sheep that supplied wool for Civil War uniforms had overgrazed the hillsides of Santa Rosa since 1844, and then Vail & Vickers brought in cattle to fatten them up on the ranch before sending them to market—thereby overgrazing whatever vegetation remained elsewhere on the island. They also pooped all over the place and contaminated the creeks and streams with "nutrient overload" from their animal waste. No wonder it needs some cleanup.



The former bunkhouse for the vaqueros (Mexican cowboys) was built in the 1960s and now serves as the field research station for the National Park Service. It's not fancy, but it's not camping, either.



It has electricity, potable water, and a private room for each volunteer except two, who get to bunk up in the biggest room and the only one with its own bathroom. I would've normally chosen my own room, but a roommate chose me, and I didn't fight it. After I'd gotten this far, I was just going to let things happen, and see life as it unfolded before me.



Although Santa Rosa Island was designated as part of Channel Islands National Park in 1980, the National Park Service didn't actually own it until 1986, when it purchased it from Vail & Vickers for $30 million. The NPS has only had full run of the island since 2011, when the ranchers' lease finally expired.



They left a lot of stuff behind.



Fortunately, the NPS considers the structures—including the red barn—historic, so they're going to keep them there...



...and turn them into some kind of interpretive display for visitors.



But there aren't so many visitors these days, because the island is so far from the mainland, and largely unknown by tourists and locals alike. A day trip to Santa Rosa would be pretty daunting. Plus, the native plants are finally resurging, so it's probably better that they not be trampled by careless feet just yet.



So for now, the only visitors to the ranch are the seven remaining horses that will live out the rest of their lives on the island—and volunteers like me. It's eerie to know that there used to be as many as 150 horses in the ranch's heyday, ridden by a dozen cowboys, herding thousands of cattle. By the late 1990s, all the cattle had been removed. In the last few years, all the deer, elk, and feral pigs have been eradicated (including one brave deer that swam to San Nicolas Island only to be shot on sight upon arrival). Horses died of old age.



The centerpiece of the former ranch is the ranch house from 1855, the oldest wood-frame home in Santa Barbara County. This is where the Vail family lived while they operated their ranching business on the island until 1996 (when it was forcibly shut down by an environmentalists lawsuit), and their game-hunting business until just four years ago. Deer and elk had been transplanted on the island in the 1920s, and as of the 1970s, hunters would come to kill them for sport.



Equally as impressive is the Monterey Cypress tree out front, which you can see from afar before you can see the ranch house.



The NPS has already painted the house complex and cleaned it up a bit, but it still needs some work before they can convert it into a visitors' center. They may end up losing the tree in the process.



The grounds are remarkably still, with only the ravens circling above, and the wind whipping around, as it tends to do on the island. It was hard to imagine cowboys on horses trying to herd sheep and cattle through here.



But then I spotted two of the seven horses up on top of a hillside towards the end of the first day, and I felt fulfilled. I ate an early dinner, and I went to bed shortly after sundown, several hours before I normally retire.



This was to be my home for the next four days, where I could wake up on my own early enough to catch the sunrise by the tiny schoolhouse...



...and drink a cup of coffee and eat breakfast with my bunkmates...


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...and be ready to work the rest of the day.

Stay tuned for more photos of the rest of the island!

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Photo Essay: The Wildflowers, Oaks, and Rare Pines of Santa Rosa Island

On the Channel Islands—including Santa Rosa Island, where I got the chance to spend four days volunteering for the National Park Service—the climate can be so variable and unpredictable that the wildflowers get confused.



Case in point: there were some California poppies that had sprouted their orange and yellow blossoms in October, because the weather made it seem to them like it might be February.



But there's another wildflower on Santa Rosa Island that has to work a little harder: the island phacelia, a variation on the purple wildflower that I'd seen amongst the poppies in the Antelope Valley during spring.

It turns out that our voluntourism wasn't just about hard labor, but also science. Biologists, botanists, and ecologists working for the NPS or the USGS have been figuring out ways to bring native plants back after being torn apart by the sheep, cattle, feral pigs, deer, elk, and horses that once roamed—and chewed up—these fields over the last 250 years.



But it turns out that phacelia thrives in soil that's been somewhat disturbed—but just not too much. So one of our jobs was to rake the field where the phacelia is supposed to grow, clearing out all the dead grasses, and disturbing the soil just enough to maybe allow the rare wildflowers to sprout up.



The native plants aren't the only endangered species on the island. There's also the island fox, which was brought back from near extinction through a captive breeding program. The last of the captive foxes were released back into the wild in 2008.



And now, you can't leave your shoes or your pack out unattended because, as we were constantly reminded, "the foxes will get it." Apparently they'll not only steal your lunch, but also your stuff. And they're not shy around humans—they won't run away as you approach, which we saw first-hand when we were hauling our yard equipment back to the trucks. Arms full of scissors and tarps and a rake, I couldn't scramble for my camera when I finally spotted one of those adorable foxes—the only one I saw over the course of my trip.



Pretty much the entire shoreline of Santa Rosa Island is protected, surrounded by a total of 11 marine reserves, including our lunch stop, Carrington Point. Santa Rosa Island was once the site of quite a bit of abalone fishing, an industry the Chinese established in 1860. But, like all the other natural resources at Santa Rosa, the abalone was overfished, and harvesting was outlawed—ending the industry. Now, fishing and commercial harvesting are only allowed in two conservation areas.



The focus of our four-day trip, however, was on the flora—not the fauna. And some of the work was utterly backbreaking, blistering the tender tissues between fingers even through heavy duty work gloves.



At one point, the 4WD trucks that were carting us volunteers around the island stopped abruptly in the middle of a debris-filled road on a hill. "We're here?" we asked. And so began the task of taking bags woven out of coconut husk fiber, filling them with rocks, and hauling them into the flatbed of a truck.



This was one of those moments when you think to yourself, "I chose to do this?!" Hauling sacks of rocks is the kind of thing you see chain gangs do in old movies. It feels akin to indentured servitude.



But then, in the oak grove near the top of Radar Peak (where the old Air Force station was, also known as Signal Peak), we could see what the rock bags were being used for: to trap and divert flooding waters to reduce erosion and foster growth of new plant life (which would hopefully anchor the soil so it wouldn't blow or wash away so much).



This oak grove was what brought us to the island. It was the elusive "Cloud Forest," named because of the fog that rolls in when the air and temperature are right, and that gets trapped in the trees, creating rainforest-like conditions.



The regular exposure to high moisture in the air is what makes so much moss grow around the trees....



...and so much lichen grow on the tree trunks.



It's hard to imagine what these hillsides must've looked like when the Chumash were here, before the Russian furriers came, before the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries brought measles, before the ranchers were given the island as part of the land grant system.



Using limited materials (like repurposed fence posts that we pulled up from old ranch boundary lines) and somewhat makeshift engineering and hydrology principles, we were trying to right nearly two centuries of environmental wrongs. We amateurs were pounding fence posts, fitting together cut pieces of wood like a jigsaw puzzle, and trying not to staple-gun ourselves before we lost the light of day.



At least we stayed long enough to see the fog start to roll in.



At other times, working on the island felt incredibly civilized, intellectual, and even nurturing. I could imagine living here in the housing, where Park staffers typically stay for eight-day stretches.



I wanted my daily office to be the Foxpital, where scientists bring foxes for regular physical examinations and testing to make sure they're healthy and disease-free.



I found it so meditative to dig my gloved hands into the soil, irrigating it with a hose, turning it over in a wheelbarrow like a giant vat of cake mix or bread dough.



I loved planting the tiny seeds harvested from the fallen cones of bishop pines, trying to grow new seedlings. It was the first time I ever felt like I could be giving life to something. I've never felt closer to our planet, and I could not imagine experiencing the Channel Islands by any other means.



I was also going through a massive allergy attack, though it didn't occur to me that it might be the pine seeds (as I get sneezy around sappy Christmas trees) until I reached the grove of a different evergreen: the Torrey pine.



It was our last assignment of our trip, and I was not about to miss out on anything, so I braved the forest and dove into those tree branches, collecting mature needle samples....



...from cone-bearing trees...



...and got sap all over myself.



But my nose was already running non-stop, and this was my chance to get up close and personal with the rarest pine species in the country, which only grows in two places: here on Santa Rosa Island and in La Jolla, CA.



Hence why the scientists are keen to study them.



Santa Rosa island is so incredibly diverse, from oaks, pines, and cypress to Island red buckwheat, Island red paintbrush, Island monkey flower, and everything in between.



No one really knows what the island looked like when the Chumash were here, before they were killed off or driven out. But give it a few years, and if we're careful, and we work hard, maybe we'll be able to return the island close to its natural condition.

As our volunteer leader said, "Humans are the biggest invasive species there is."

I have to think our restoration project is doing more good than harm, but I wonder what would happen if we could just leave something alone, for once....

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Photo Essay: The Island the Ranchers Left Behind
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