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Interpretive Guide Channel Islandsnationalpark U.S National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Channel Islands National Park InterpretiveInterpretive GuideGuide SantaSanta RosaRosa IslandIsland timhaufphotography.com Trail Guide Pier to Water Canyon Beach4 Derek Lohuis Derek Other Points of Interest How to Use This Guide Vail & Vickers Ranch Area We recommend you begin with the Hichimin, Place Name 18 Trail Guide which provides eight More Sheep Ranch 18 interpretive stops along the 1.75- Vail & Vickers Cattle Ranch 19 mile walk from the pier to Water Hunting 22 Canyon Beach via Cherry Canyon. Cowboy Life 23 Before you leave the ranch area, Horses 25 make sure to visit the ranch exhibit Boats 26 in the schoolhouse. Pier 30 Rope House, Chute, Pile Driver 32 After the hike, select another area to Corrals 33 visit according to your time, interest, Fencing, Water Resources 34 and ability. Please note that many Foreman’s House, Schoolhouse 35 of the topics covered in the various Bunkhouse 36 locations are applicable to any island Horse Barn 37 location. For a more detailed hiking Blacksmith Shop Barn, Boilers 38 map, please see the “Hiking Santa Scale House, Branding Shed 39 Rosa Island” bulletin available at the Main Ranch House 40 pier and campground entrance signs. Miscellaneous Structures 41 Hay Fields, Eucalyptus 42 Cypress Trees, Airstrip 43 Black Mountain Cloud Forest, San Miguel Island 56 Water Canyon Native Plants 44 Carrington Point 56 Soft-leaved Island Paintbrush 57 Torrey Pines 47 Pygmy Mammoth 57 Skunk Point Lobo Canyon57 Mixing Waters 49 Geology 58 Western Snowy Plover 49 Landbirds 59 Tidepools 50 Terrestrial Animals 62 Jane L. Stanford Shipwreck 53 Johnsons Lee 66 East Point WW II Army Camp, Radar Post 67 Abalone Rocks Marsh 54 Post-War Military Facilities 68 Qshiwqshiw, Munchkin Dudleya 55 South Point Light Station 71 2 Santa Rosa Island Interpretive Guide Introduction Societal values about people, places, When Congress considered whether cultures, and our landscapes shift over or not to include Santa Rosa Island as time. Santa Rosa Island has a deep history part of Channel Islands National Park, that illustrates this phenomenon. the open and undeveloped landscape perpetuated by ranching was a key For more than 13,000 years Native determining factor in their decision. Four American people were here, hunting, generations of the Vail family and their fishing, gathering, managing, and extended ranching “family” managed and treasuring the island. The Island cared for the island, preserving intact the Chumash’s economy collapsed during the last original and consistently operational Spanish Mission era and they were forced Mexican land grant. The Vail family from Wima (Chumash name for Santa descendants of today have personal and Rosa Island) into the mission lifeways on vital connections to the island landscape the California mainland. Nevertheless, and its ranching history. the Chumash people of today maintain strong cultural, spiritual, and historical Santa Rosa Island is now managed by the ties to the island and their legacy is still National Park Service on behalf of the embedded in the land. public for its natural, cultural, historical, and wilderness values and resources. Within a single generation of Island We encourage you to explore the island Chumash departure, the island had been and experience its full complexity, as a granted by the governor of Alta California landscape that has been loved and lived in to the Carrillo brothers. Thus began for thousands of years and continues to a 150-year period of ranching, during provide recreation, respite, and renewal which first sheep and then cattle roamed for current and future generations. and grazed the island. timhaufphotography.com Sand dunes at China Camp. National Park Service 3 a d o R e n o h p l e Te 4 Santa Rosa Island Interpretive Guide Santa RosaIsland Interpretive N Pier 1 B e c h e r s B a y 0.25 miles Schoolhouse Ranch Exhibit Barn 2 W a t e r C a n y o n 8B e a c h Ranch House Coastal Road Wreck Road 7 Smith Highway Telephone Road Soledad Road 3 5 6 4 Cherry Canyon il Sto ra p T Nowhere Else on Earth 1 Location: Pier timhaufphotography.com Close to the mainland, yet worlds apart, island. While the southern California Santa Rosa Island, along with the other coastal mainland has seen extensive Channel Islands, is home to plants and development, the Channel Islands remain animals that are found nowhere else on undeveloped. The islands’ separation Earth. Like on the Galápagos Islands of from the mainland by over 25 miles of South America, isolation has allowed an often turbulent ocean has limited and evolution to proceed independently on directed human use and occupation for the islands, fostering the development thousands of years. And it continues of nearly 150 endemic or unique plants today, giving us a chance to see coastal and animals. Santa Rosa Island is home southern California as it once was. to 46 of these and some, like the rare Hoffmann’s slender-flowered gilia, are So step back in time and experience found only on Santa Rosa Island. the island’s isolation as you walk from the pier through Cherry Canyon and Isolation has also played a major role eventually on to Water Canyon Beach. in shaping human activities on the It’s like nowhere else on Earth. National Park Service 5 il Sto ra p T Preserving the Past 2 Location: Vail & Vickers Ranch Complex An island ranch is a study in self-reliance. With no stores, phones…everything has to be fashioned from whatever is on hand; it’s the art of making do. Gretel Ehrlich, Cowboy Island: Farewell to a Ranching Legacy While the isolated island offered ranchers several advantages over the mainland, including no predators and the world’s best fence (the ocean), it created special challenges as well. Supplying such a remote outpost was probably the biggest challenge. The transportation of supplies and stock on and off the island was always an adventure—the distance to the mainland, rough seas, and expense timhaufphotography.com made it very difficult. However, ranchers Unloading cattle, Santa Rosa Island, 1995. adapted to the challenges of island life worked with salt water and a kelp knife through self-reliance and, as one ranch to protect the rudder and prop, but soon foreman wrote, “learning to make do with discovered that fishing still was better what [they] had.” from the rocks on the island shore. No one was better at this than Diego To be as self-sufficient as possible, island Cuevas, a former ranch foreman, who ranchers grew and raised much of their stated in an oral history that he learned own food, importing deer, elk, quail, pigs, to “fix things by improvising. You had and rabbits. They would make many of to out there. We didn’t have any stores.” their own supplies such as ropes, saddles, Margaret Vail Woolley, part of the Vail candles, and soaps. They often salvaged family that owned the island, concurred, what they could from shipwrecks and “He [Diego] could make anything out from abandoned military establishments of anything. It was remarkable. He was from World War II and the Cold perfect for the island.” War. And they had specialized boats constructed to transport supplies, cattle, Some of Diego’s inventions included and staff to and from the island. shutting off the generator by creating a timer using ice, cables, and pulleys (which Ranching began on Santa Rosa Island in didn’t work), or by using a rat trap, string, 1844 shortly after the island was granted and an alarm clock (which did work). He to the Carrillo family by the Mexican also built a motorized cart to haul slop to government. Then from 1858 to 1901 the the pigs and a diesel-hauling trailer with More family ran one of the largest sheep a tank. He installed a truck engine in a ranches in the state, with up to 80,000 boat given to the ranch by the Air Force sheep. and devised a cooling system for it that 6 Santa Rosa Island Interpretive Guide timhaufphotography.com Historic Vail & Vickers ranch house built in the late 1800s. The Mores centered their operations in Although the end of ranching in 1998 Becher’s Bay, where they constructed a brought a close to a truly unique way pier and built the clapboard ranch house, of life, Vail & Vickers’ commitment horse barn, and blacksmith shop barn to ranching traditions preserved an that are still found here today. These undeveloped landscape that greatly buildings, built in the 1860s and 1870s, contributed to the decision by Congress are some of the oldest wood buildings in to include Santa Rosa Island in Channel Santa Barbara County. Islands National Park in 1980. In 1986 the federal government For almost a century after the Mores, purchased the island. Today, the NPS is Vail & Vickers operated one of the preserving and interpreting the historic largest and most productive beef cattle area so visitors will always have the ranches in Santa Barbara County. Four chance to remember and understand this generations of family members acted as unique part of the islands’ past. stewards of the land managing the ranch in the traditional system of vaqueros (Spanish for “cowboys”), tending cattle For more detailed information on ranching on horseback, and preserving the last history and the historic buildings, please see intact large Mexican land grant rancho pages 18–43 and visit the ranch exhibit in in California as well as the last working the restored schoolhouse. island cattle ranch in the continental United States. National Park Service 7 il Sto ra p T Return of the Natives 3 Location: Soledad Road—Bridge Over Cherry Canyon Creek Over time, the reasons for valuing the Native plants that develop in isolation islands changed and a new approach to are often vulnerable to competition stewardship emerged with the inclusion from nonnative species.
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