Ned Neely writes, “The reality of most [California] campgrounds is that you are far from roughing it and far from alone. Little privacy, and no silence except in the early morning” (“Alta California”).
Some of the backcountry camps and car-camps I’ve written about in these columns may fall into this less-than-idyllic category (e.g., Upper Oso and many beachside camps), but more remote U.S. Forest Service camping sites wildly contradict Neely’s sad but true assessment.
Up at Figueroa Mountain Camp or Nira Camp on the Manzana, human hikers usually encounter wonderful privacy and the overpowering sounds of natural “silence.”
There were likely few permanent Indigenous village sites in what we today call the San Rafael Wilderness (190,000 acres), particularly as the hiker explores deeper into the interior along the key streams: Manzana, Sisquoc and Santa Cruz creeks (and their drainages).
A key challenge for the Indigenous would have been locating reliable water sources such as natural springs and local creeks in the historically dry backcountry. As humans approach the stunning Hurricane Deck formation in the middle of the San Rafael, almost every water source disappears in the long summers, and the few remaining ones are not fully reliable year-round.
How would original Indigenous human inhabitants find water in a pinch or in an emergency?
In late October, I chose to head upstream amid masses of red poison oak leaves as rusty-brown California buckwheat bushes lined portions of the Upper Manzana Creek Trail (31W13). Fresh bear scat full of holly leaf cherry pits and evidence of coyote poop proved that larger mammals still roam despite the extremely dry conditions.
The rounded hump of the eldritch Hurricane Deck formation looms dark and almost purple in the early morning and plentiful deer scurry about.
In the second photo, readers see a typically dry creekbed without any animal tracks, which is how almost all of the watercourse appears. The next day, much colder and with high humidity, I walked by again at around 7 a.m. and discovered that this same bend in the creekbed now had gallons of water in it!
Back in the later 18th century, one of famed Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolá’s spies roamed along a major creek near today’s Santa Paula seeking water for the expedition. Cartographer and military engineer Miguel Costansò became bemused by the near-magical appearance, then disappearance, of stream water in California drought conditions.
The Spanish expedition clearly scouted out the best locations for future missions and presidios.
In 1769, Costansò wrote in his diary: “We halted on the bank of the stream which, at the time of our arrival, flowed with considerable volume, but, shortly after, dried up with the heat of the sun — just as other scouts told us they had noticed on the previous day. This peculiarity we afterwards observed in other [California] streams; they flowed by night and became dry by day.”
This natural phenomenon has been happening for thousands of years but certainly can confound explorers (and Spaniards eager for conquest and settlement).
Mother Hutash somehow impels the living streambed to hide its precious water during the hot California days, but when a cooler night comes in with humid conditions, almost magically the groundwater rises back to the surface. I have noted this striking occurrence in Rattlesnake Canyon Creek beneath the stone Stanwood Bridge.
All the land mammals are very grateful for this recurring water supply in dry periods, as were the 74 members of the Spanish military force. Padre Serra led the Christianization effort while Portolá’s 28 soldados de cuera (leather-coated soldiers) provided the firepower.
The Portolá expedition was the first Spanish expedition to march from Baja California as far as San Francisco Bay, planning and sometimes founding various missions en route.
Mission San Gabriel Arcángel near where I grew up in the San Fernando Valley was founded in 1771, for example, and in total 21 Missions colonized Indigenous California lands. Standard references refer to this as a military expedition, and I believe it’s valid to term this an “invasion.”
Portolá and Father Junipero Serra planned to stay and to — ahem! — “civilize and Christianize” the Indigenous peoples.
Nira Camp was constructed in 1937 under the auspices of the National Industrial Recovery Act, a piece of socialistic legislation pushed by President Franklin Roosevelt, and later in the 1930s ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
A strange irony that this remote and austere camp — no overnight recreational campers were there Oct. 21 — was constructed through the funding of a federal Industrial Recovery law that SCOTUS ruled against.
The venerable Manzana Creek connects Nira with scenic Lost Valley Camp located about a mile upstream within the pristine 190,000-acre San Rafael Wilderness.
The Upper Manzana Trail goes on to enchanting Manzana Narrows, and eventually leaves the creek and crosses over past White Ledge Camp to the Sisquoc River Valley. The fabled Sisquoc is even more remote than these camps along the Manzana, and the 17-mile Hurricane Deck slab of rock separates the two watercourses.
From Lost Valley Camp you can access the ‘Deck by hiking up the very demanding Lost Valley Trail (some of this trail is blocked by fallen conifers).
Beneath mixed oak and scattered gray pine, the spring grasses along the Manzana have withered and turned straw-colored (lead photograph). Poet Gary Snyder has summarized Southern California’s landscape as essentially a tapestry of grasses, oak trees and pines.
While there were indeed no other recreational campers at Nira, it was unusually busy in late October.
At one end of the large camp, a hardworking crew from the California Conservation Corps had their tents set up (and three large trucks) while they worked a few hundred yards back up Happy Valley Road planting willows and other plants to secure the concrete base of the new concrete bridge.
This junction is where Davy Brown Creek debouches into the larger Manzana, and the new structures definitely need these plantings to secure the base of the concrete. At the other end of Nira Camp, next to the Nira Trailhead, a group of cultural resource volunteers prepared for a long hike up the Manzana.
The Parks Management Co. is the Forest Service’s concessionaire at Nira (and Davy Brown), and the $20 per night charge you pay them secures you a parking spot, wooden table and circular metal fire ring — and that’s it.
Parks Management also will try to charge day visitors $10 when they park at the Nira Trailhead (not part of Nira Camp); you do not need to pay this $10.
There’s no water in the adjacent Manzana, so bringing your own supply becomes crucial. There’s an “adjacentcy” feeling at sun-blasted Nira Camp since the nearest bit of civilization is Los Olivos, perhaps a rough hour’s drive in distance.
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» Ned Neely, “Alta California” (2019), quote is from p. 14; Miguel Costansò’s 1769 diary quoted in “Alta California,” p. 134; best map is Brian Conant’s “San Rafael Wilderness Trail Guide and Map” (2015).
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
