The GeekHiker

Santa Cruz Island is so, well, different from my normal hiking grounds (i.e. the Santa Monicas and the Angeles National Forest) I thought it deserved a little introduction all of it’s own.

Santa Cruz Island (cropped from public-domain NASA image here)

Sitting only twenty miles off the coast of Ventura & Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz is the largest of the eight islands that make up the Channel Islands of California. Five of the islands, including Santa Cruz, make up Channel Islands National Park; Santa Catalina is a mixture of private and public use (with the only major settlement on the islands); the remaining two are Naval installations.

76% of Santa Cruz Island itself is owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy, making it the largest privately owned island in the U.S.

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In the heyday of the Twenties and Thirties, the mountains above Los Angeles were littered with resorts and private getaways. The natural combination of destructive forces in Southern California, earthquakes, fires and floods, eventually ended the life of most all of them, leaving little but ruins in their wake.

Ben Overturff came into the mountains in the early part of the century, building a popular lodge where Twin Springs Canyon enters Sawpit Canyon in a location near Deer Park. He ultimately abandoned the lodge in 1945 due to his declining health. The Forest Service dynamited the lodge in the 1970 to end unauthorized use, but a few remains can still be found in the forest.

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