Santa Monica Mountains

Eight years ago, Brian A. Sweeney, a Manhattan Beach real estate investor and developer, began buying land in the Santa Monica Mountains. As environmentalists watched, he persuaded owners to sell him 26 parcels of prime coastal real estate. Piece by piece, he got L.A. County permission to alter boundaries that added road access and filed plans to develop homes. When he was done, Sweeney had quadrupled the market value of the land, without hammering a single stick into the ground.

The federal government on Thursday took the first step toward a massive expansion of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area as President Bush signed legislation ordering the Interior Department to consider making additions to the protected area.

Jill Swift, a former teacher and hiking enthusiast whose love of the outdoors led her to play a central role in the creation of a national park in the Santa Monica Mountains, died Monday at her home in Tarzana. She was 79. The cause was multiple myeloma, which she battled for 12 years, said her sister, Wendy Averill of Los Angeles. Swift was one of a trio of women who were widely acknowledged as the prime force behind the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

Near midnight in Topanga State Park, seven hikers, head lamps strapped to their foreheads, scrambled down an oak-clad hillside. Dry leaves crackled under hiking boots. Branches thwacked faces. "Here's a closed trap!" Six beams of light bobbed through the trees toward Debra Shier and the long, skinny metal box she held in her hands Friday night. Shier slipped one end of the box into a plastic bag and released the trapdoor. She gave it a shake.

In less than two weeks, Andy Alatorre will have finished the fourth grade, will hopefully have beaten his speed-typing record of 61 words per minute and will be happily on a bus headed back to summer camp. "I felt like I was at home," Andy said of his first time at Salvation Army Summer Camp last year.

Milt McAuley, the patriarch of hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains whose guidebooks and guided hikes greatly popularized the trails that cut through Los Angeles backcountry, has died. He was 89. McAuley, who continued hiking until three years ago, died Wednesday of natural causes at his longtime home in Canoga Park, said his daughter Pat Romolo.

THE Santa Monica Mountains lie like Gulliver amid the scores of suburban Lilliputs that form Los Angeles County. Pinned down by development and penned in by sprawl, they still manage to give our ever-expanding city a fierce and untamed core. Author Matthew Jaffe and photographer Tom Gamache examine the paradox of this geological marvel in "The Santa Monica Mountains: Range on the Edge," a handsome new book from Angel City Press.

A few weeks ago, David Bennett turned off Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades and pulled into a nearly vacant parking lot at Temescal Gateway Park to use his cellphone. When he was finished, he passed a stop sign at Temescal Canyon Road and continued back to Sunset. Then he heard from the state authority that runs the park and other open spaces along the Santa Monica Mountains. "They sent me a letter telling me I didn't really stop," said the Malibu contractor.

After years of talking and planning and more talking and a little arguing, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a reversible lane for the Sepulveda Boulevard tunnel near the Sepulveda Pass. The tunnel has been a vexing problem for years because it can accommodate only three lanes of traffic, whereas the rest of Sepulveda through the Santa Monica Mountains is four lanes.

With Malibu enduring its third significant wildfire of the year, some residents say this weekend's Corral fire has strengthened their resolve to oppose a controversial plan to expand camping in the Santa Monica Mountains. The specter of new campgrounds in arid hills and canyons is "just a scary scenario," said Ed Meyer, a four-year resident of Malibu whose home overlooks Malibu Canyon. "There are no fire towers here," he added. "You're in a risky fire area.