Opening a Path to the Great Outdoors : Recreation: Blind hikers and wheelchair users will soon be able to visit a micro- wilderness on a specially designed pathway in Thousand Oaks.

Sunlight dapples a tree-lined trail in Thousand Oaks, where the ground has been graded nearly flat for wheelchair users and a guide wire awaits the touch of blind hikers.

The city and the Conejo Recreation and Park District plan to dedicate this new Whole Access Trail by July 1, opening up a micro-wilderness to handicapped people who have been denied the simple pleasure of a walk in the woods.

When complete, it will have restrooms and picnic tables wide enough for wheelchairs and 16 signs in Braille to tell blind visitors about the birds they hear and the flora they touch and smell along the trail’s quarter-mile length.

For wheelchair users confined to the flat world of asphalt streets, for blind people who rely on the narratives of sighted friends on hikes, the Braille Trail offers a breath of independence.

And to advocates for the handicapped, it represents a bridge of awareness between them and a fully able-bodied world that often misunderstands them.

“We’re confined to whatever they allow us to use,” said Mike Taylor, a disabled advocate who helped design the trail. “I’m confined to curb cuts and streets. I can’t go down Thousand Oaks Boulevard without going into the street.”

But last week, after wheeling himself from the trail head on Greenmeadow Avenue to the end of the path, Taylor declared his satisfaction with the project.

“This is like total wilderness for me,” he said as butterflies flitted through fragrant black sage around him and hawks wheeled overhead. “You don’t get to do this ordinarily.

“It’s hard for someone to understand the perspective of this trail if they haven’t been in a chair.”

Taylor has used a wheelchair for seven years because of a degenerative spinal problem. “We’re stuck to wherever we can go, and to me, this is fantastic. It’s something that will really be used.”

A quarter-mile is not far for hikers who can see, but for Nancy Smith, who is blind, it is long enough to walk in the woods without the aid of others to enjoy the solitude and learn about the flora and fauna all around.

“How often can a blind person go to a park or a museum and go through it by themselves and be able to read and know what’s there? That doesn’t happen too often,” said Smith, president of the Ventura County chapter of the National Federation for the Blind.

“I’m just looking forward to it opening up.”

The trail’s opening has already been delayed by spring rains and persistent problems with the company building the restrooms, said Shauna Welty, park planner for the Conejo Recreation and Park District.

The Redding, Calif.-based company, Shasta Systems Inc., delivered a fiberglass shell of a building that seemed flimsy and had no handrails for wheelchair users, Welty said. “We didn’t even take it off the truck.”

The district sent the building back. Shasta Systems is replacing it with a wood-frame fiberglass unit with the proper equipment for the handicapped, she said.

The replacement should be delivered by the week of June 7, so that J & H Engineering General Contractors Inc. of Camarillo can install it in time for the dedication ceremonies, Welty said.

Meanwhile, the district also has ordered a replacement for the vinyl-wrapped steel guide cable for blind hikers, 300 feet of which was stolen last month, she said.

This time, workers plan to fasten it more securely, Taylor said.

Local Eagle Scouts have also promised the district to smooth out the Braille Trail’s rough wood railings by planing, sanding and varnishing them to reduce the risk of splinters, she said.

The Braille Trail is not unique, Welty said. But it does combine the best elements of other trails like it--such as a trail for the blind at the William O. Douglas Outdoor Classroom in Los Angeles County and a wheelchair-accessible trail in Malibu Creek State Park that is rougher than the Thousand Oaks trail.

The district hopes to book larger groups, such as students from schools for the blind and the physically disabled, to visit the trail, she said.

Taylor predicted the trail will be popular.

“When this gets established, I imagine that the blind are really going to flock to it,” he said, rolling beneath a canopy of live oaks.

“To me, (it means) more freedom to see things I’m unable to see in a chair, the natural beauty,” he said. “It enables me to go somewhere really nice. I imagine once it’s finished, I’ll be out here two or three times a week. It’s a good place to hang.”