Catalina Stables reaches end of the trail
Residents and ranch hands protest company's plans to close the stables, but they appear to have little recourse. Officials say the facility became a safety hazard after last year's fire season
An abrupt announcement that Santa Catalina Island's historic horseback-riding concession must close today has triggered an angry backlash from residents who cherish the aging facility as a symbol of their ties to a simpler time.
The fight to keep open the collection of corrals and wooden stables painted red with white trim -- not far from where "Riders of the Purple Sage" author Zane Grey once had a home -- underlines a defining characteristic of the island's close-knit community of 3,200 permanent residents: a deep resistance to dramatic change.
In years past, battles erupted over plans to eradicate thousands of feral pigs and goats that had destroyed vast swaths of natural vegetation on the island 22 miles off the mainland. It's not that the islanders were enamored of the animals, but they were used to them. A few years ago, hundreds of residents rallied against a proposal to remove a dilapidated miniature golf course.
"We don't like big change," said Margie Wahl, a bartender at Avalon's Locker Room sports bar and a local resident of 30 years. "We all live the same way, and think the same way, and we like it like that."
Wahl was among 1,500 Avalon residents -- about a third of the city's population -- who signed petitions circulated over the last two days in protest of the decision by the Santa Catalina Island Co., which owns nearly all the developable land on the island, to dismantle the stables in a canyon bottom adjacent to a golf course and Avalon City Hall.
"I think folks around here are rallying . . . just to stir things up," said Avalon Mayor Bob Kennedy. "But I'm not sure many of them understand what's really going on here."
Island Co. officials said they have no choice. Last year's devastating wildfires denuded the surrounding hills. J. Paul DeMyer, the company's vice president of real estate, said the fires had transformed the stables' 3.5 acres into "ground zero for potentially severe flooding, and a serious safety issue for horses, humans and everything else."
The announcement was particularly painful to Catalina Stables manager Rusty Connelly. On Monday he spent most of his time rustling up additional petition signatures and pleading with Island Co. officials to reconsider.
"I got sucker punched," Connelly said, striding past a dusty corral where 50 horses with names such as Chili and Houdini munched on clumps of alfalfa.
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