A National Park, Once a California Ranch, Is On Fire
“It was taken to be preserved, yet today I watch it burn,” says Nita Vail. Her family was forced off Santa Rosa Island by the Park Service in 2011. UPDATED 2:30 PM
UPDATE (1:00 PM Tuesday): Shifting winds are threatening the historic ranch buildings on the north part of the island. Tankers appear focused on protecting Park Service headquarters, campgrounds, and possibly the historic buildings. The ranch house is thought to be the oldest standing wood frame house in Santa Barbara County; built in 1855.
A wildfire on Santa Rosa Island has consumed over 14,600 acres and is zero percent contained as of Tuesday morning. It’s the biggest fire in California so far this year, and the largest in the island’s history.
This island was once the home of Vail & Vickers, a cattle ranch. That was before the government took the land, forced the ranchers and cattle off, and shot all the deer and elk. Now, with no grazers left to manage fire fuel, the largely abandoned island is burning, along with some of the last remnants of its ranching era.
“It was taken to be preserved, yet today I watch it burn,” says Nita Vail, whose family ranched on the island for over 100 years.
“It breaks my heart. This island was once home. We knew its canyons, winds, grasses, and rhythms. Land remembers stewardship. Today I’m grieving not only the fire, but what is being lost—including the rare Torrey Pines that exist in only two places on earth.”
Heavy fuel load built up since grazing ended
Before the Vail & Vickers cattle operation, the island was given by Mexican Governor Manuel Micheltorena to brothers José Antonio Carrillo and Carlos Antonio Carrillo in 1843.
“The island has not seen a fuel load like this since the early 1900s when our family rested it after it was heavily sheeped,” Vail says. “It has been grazed since Carrillo gave it to his daughters.”
Cattle and horses were removed by 1999. In 2011, the Park Service slaughtered the last remaining deer and elk on the island.
The blaze was ignited by flares set off by a sailor in distress. The Park Service is leading the response with support from CAL FIRE.
Some reports suggest that response has been slow.
Russell Galipeau, former Channel Islands National Park Superintendent, told SFGATE he was concerned fire trucks hadn’t yet arrived: “Why is it taking this long?”
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Two historic structures have already been destroyed: The Wreck Line Camp Cabin and Johnson’s Lee Equipment Shed. The cabin is believed to be an old cow camp used by the Vail family.
All National Park Service staff have been evacuated from the island. It is not visited by many; the park is inaccessible except by private boat or plane.
The oldest human remains in North America were found on Santa Rosa Island in 1959. Known as the “Galapagos of North America,” the Channel Islands are home to numerous protected and rare species.
The official incident report for Tuesday states firefighters will “focus on defensible space preparation of the structures in the Main Ranch Complex.”
The sailor who started the blaze inadvertently on Friday was rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard and treated in a nearby hospital for minor injuries. After his vessel crashed into rocks on Santa Rosa Island, the 67 year-old set off emergency flares and scratched “SOS” in vegetation.
Ranchers forced off for Park Service
As reported by UNWON, the Channel Islands were slowly seized by the National Park Service, their former occupants forced out. Former Channel Islands superintendent Tim Setnicka wrote a tell-all series for a Santa Barbara newspaper, depicting the Park Service’s actions as underhanded and cruel. The Park Service, he wrote, and all of government, “has no soul.”
“Government is only as good as the people filling the ranks,” Setnicka wrote. “And who watches over the National Park Service during these events? No one.”
This dark history re-emerged in UNWON’s reporting on the loss of 12 legacy ranches on Point Reyes National Seashore in Northern California. Setnicka warned ranchers at the time that NPS had them in its sights.
“If you don’t stand up, you will be run over,” he told the Point Reyes ranchers at the time. Twelve years later, the Park Service announced the ranchers would be leaving the island in a secretive agreement made with a billion-dollar NGO.
Bygone era of Cowboy Island
For over a century, the island was home to a thriving cattle operation managed by the Vail family.
Famed Western writer Gretel Ehrlich immortalized the island’s ranching history in her book Cowboy Island. As the family left the island, she captured its final days as a working ranch.
“It is difficult to understand what is happening here,” she wrote. “Two families are losing a century’s worth of hard work, love, and nurturing. The island feels empty. No more cattle on the range and the horses are all corraled and settled.”
Ehrlich described the moment the island’s cattle ship, Vaquero II, left the island with its final load.
“The horses stand patiently in the open holds of the boat, innocent and good-hearted as always. As the Vaquero II pulls away, the windbreak at the edge of the island heaves and sighs, waving goodbye and beckoning the horses to come back home.”
It’s become painfully obvious that “climate change” is not an existential threat based on atmospheric carbon, nor is “rewilding” a legitimate management policy. Instead, both are merely buzzwords used to justify totalitarian programs that are more destructive and unscientific than what they are purportedly meant to replace.
If you’re bureaucrat who has a messy bed at home and you can’t look people in the eye then you get angry at those that can and can do. So you work with enormously wealthy people who are 3rd and 4th generation wealth who are painfully guilt ridden but not enough to give up the wealthy life style. You collaborate to destroy any and all things good. California is a giant Petri dish of failed government planning and overreach. Well they got their wish and are burning it all down. It works until enough people say no more. Of course we have been saying that about Cuba and North Korea for decades…