Public Land

Urijah Wence and his friends were among the sweaty few who reached Matilija Falls high in the mountains north of Ojai on a recent hike. All four said the reward for the two-hour, boulder-hopping ascent was worth the effort. "You can't tarnish this place," said the 26-year-old Ventura student, cooling himself under the first of several waterfalls. "You slide in the water and it's so refreshing." For decades, hikers, hunters and fishermen have made the same trek up Matilija Creek, drawn by its pristine swimming holes and, near the top, a series of cascading, year-round falls.

ALL MY LIFE, I have introduced people to our nation's public lands, as a seasonal fishing guide in the Upper Midwest, as the head of the Bureau of Land Management and as the chief of the U.S. Forest Service -- agencies that manage hundreds of millions of acres of public land. One thing I learned was that Americans love their national forests, parks and grasslands.

Freida was always there to greet them at the gate. So when the German shepherd was a no-show, Antonio and Eleanor Gonzales knew something wasn't right. There was no sign of her along the dirt road to their home, and the front stoop was bare when they pulled up. A search ensued, and it wasn't long before they found her dead just beyond the tree line not far from the gate. She had been shot. The Gonzaleses say it could have been them. Or worse, it could have been one of their children.

When Bob Crostic bought his first pair of stone-washed jeans recently, he discovered a small chunk of pumice in one of the pockets. There was more than a bit of irony in the find. Crostic, a U.S. Forest Service employee, oversees an open-pit pumice mine in the Santa Fe National Forest that is at the center of a noisy dispute about the use of public lands.

In a Thursday afternoon ceremony, Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge and officials from the Trust for Public Land temporarily covered the Hollywood sign with the words "Save the peak" emblazoned in red lettering. The group left from Beachwood Market in the Hollywood Hills at 2 p.m., caravaning up to the sign. Over the course of the afternoon, a white fabric cover was chopped into letter-sized pieces that were placed, one by one, over each portion of the sign. The event was to publicize efforts to raise money to acquire Cahuenga Peak, the 138-acre parcel just to the west of the sign, and add the land to Griffith Park.

The West is an exquisite corpse. "There was nothing to see in the land in the way of a flower," remarked Georgia O'Keeffe when she first saw the high desert of northern New Mexico. "There were just dry white bones." A cow's skull floating in the sky became the painter's most enduring image. But there was nothing ethereal about the boneyard. It was the ruinous outcome of Depression-era drought, made all the more lethal by overstocking and overgrazing an arid land.

WELDON, Calif. - A few minutes after 4 a.m., agents in camouflage cluster in a dusty field in Kern County. "Movement needs to be slow, deliberate and quiet," the team leader whispers. "Lock and load now. " They check their ammunition and assault rifles, not exactly sure whom they might meet in the dark: heavily armed Mexican drug traffickers, or just poorly paid fieldworkers camping miserably in the brush. Twenty minutes later, after a lights-off drive for a mile, the agents climb out of two pickup trucks and sift into the high desert brush.

California coastal communities are continually caught in a tug-of-war between protecting a natural resource and exploiting one. With population increasing and available land decreasing, the pressures on local governments are formidable. The leasing of public lands for commercial uses adds money to local city coffers, but the price is paid by everyone whose natural resources are diminished. The heart of the conflict is land-use and who makes the decisions.

Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket. Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors -- each the size of a garage door -- are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

The Annenberg Foundation plans to build a $50-million interpretive center in the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve under an agreement to be signed Monday with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Officials aim to make the center a place for people to "come to learn how nature works and how each of them is a part of it," said Charlton H. "Chuck" Bonham, Fish and Wildlife director. The announcement marked rare movement in the state's efforts to restore one of Southern California's few remaining wetlands and open it to the public.