New Cuyama, Calif. — IN the Cuyama Valley, I keep running into people I would like to be. If I confess this to my friend Jeanine, I think she is going to recommend therapy. She warns me not to lionize my favorite local, Emery Johnston, but that's going to be hard. Johnston is a big reason we're here.
Jeanine has been trekking through the canyons ringing this flat valley for decades, but she's never gone horseback riding with Johnston. He's been leading pack rides into Los Padres National Forest since the age of 15: geologists and biologists and Forest Service rangers and all manner of recreational riders.
If there were a name I would give this region it would be the Quattro Valley, because it's made up of slices of four counties: San Luis Obispo, Kern, Santa Barbara and Ventura. We're here in temperate April, but it will get mighty hot in the summer, when the fields turn bronze and what coastal air comes through the mountains (Cuyama is a transverse valley, running east-west) can't beat the heat. The valley floor is ranch and oil land through which flows the Cuyama River, a lion in the rainy season and a lamb any other time.
Three state highways wind into the Cuyama Valley: California 166 through Santa Maria in the west, 119 out of Bakersfield from the east, or 33 leaving Ojai from the south. We are coming in on 33, which is the prettiest. As I hug its curves, Jeanine reads to me from "A Traveler's Guide to California's Scenic Highway 33," which she assembled from extensive interviews with backcountry legend Jim Blakley. It's filled with the history of the people, the geology, flora and fauna.
We stop 6.6 miles from Ojai at a padlocked gate outside Wheeler Hot Springs, a rustic, late-1800s spa that's been closed for the last few years. Ancient palm trees are reaching for the ridgeline. We were hoping that Wheeler might have reopened in the same grand manner as nearby Bodee's, a restaurant that was closed when Jeanine worked on the book. The new Bodee's has rib-eye with Gorgonzola cream and porterhouse with roasted garlic horseradish reduction. I suspect that's not what the old Bodee's served.
We stop again at mile 21.7 to hike up the Potrero John Trail. There are bobcat and deer and weasel tracks. It's gorgeous scenery marred only by the skeletons of the cottonwoods killed in the 2002 Wolf fire.
