REAR-VIEW MIRROR : A Grand Canyon : The road to Laguna cuts through an open space that, despite its scars, is still treasured for its beauty and history.

Ancient animals and peoples probably valued it for its creek water.

Visitors four or five generations ago valued it as the path away from the oppressive inland heat to the cooling coastal breezes.

But today, people value Laguna Canyon Road for what’s left of its primitive beauty, one of the rarest commodities in Orange County.

Laguna Canyon begins soon after you turn off the San Diego Freeway. At first bordered by farm and grazing land among gentle hills, it ends as the rocky, steep-sided gateway to downtown Laguna Beach.

Along the way are a tree-lined creek, stunning rock formations, what’s left of the county’s only natural lake, and several distinct and eccentric communities whose homes and businesses are sometimes as eye-catching as the natural scenery.

“It’s one of the last large, open-space areas that is accessible visually to almost anyone who wants to drive down Laguna Canyon Road,� say Belinda Blacketer, 48, who was born and raised in the canyon and didn’t move “into town� until 1973. She is president of the Laguna Beach Historical Society.

There are scars. A broad, bare path has been cut across the upper canyon to make room for the San Joaquin tollway. Though preservationists were able to temporarily halt construction with court injunctions, the last was lifted Wednesday, and construction was scheduled to resume this week. Tollway authorities say any further injunctions are unlikely.

“It’s not as pretty as it used to be, but that’s all relative,� says Blacketer. “It’s still prettier than lots of places. The feeling of living here really is pretty much the same.

“You go from highly developed, overdeveloped, bumper-to-bumper traffic (on the San Diego Freeway) to this sort of idyllic, two-lane road that is absolutely beautiful any time of the year. And you end up with the Pacific at your feet. There aren’t very many places where you get to enjoy that kind of feeling without much effort.�

The canyon has been home to ancient peoples, who probably used its caves as temporary abodes while they hunted in the canyon and fished at the beach. Evidence of their presence has been found and studied in caves at Sycamore Hills. The caves still occasionally shelter the homeless, Blacketer says.

The canyon has seen other encampments--farms, religious cults, colonies of artists and craftsmen, even a mini-Woodstock. Many of the surviving houses are eccentric, even by Laguna Beach standards.

The canyon “used to be considered a very undesirable place to live,� says Blacketer. “People there used to be called canyon rats. The climate’s different: It’s cold. The demographics were different: generally lower income. The houses were cheaper. It was very disconnected from the city in a lot of ways. If you lived out in the canyon, you lived out in the canyon. You didn’t live in town. It was a very distinct neighborhood.�

The first canyon settlement by Europeans was a Mormon enclave of 50 to 60 people who farmed land near what is now Laguna Canyon and El Toro roads in 1876.

“They weren’t the least bit interested in the beach,� Blacketer says. “They had their own school, their own church. They lasted for about 12 years. I think they had a hard time supporting that many people on that little land--lack of water, you see--and they eventually relocated to El Toro.

“The canyon used to be all farms up to El Toro Road. That’s the important thing to know. Its character has always been rural, from the city to El Toro.�

Others, however, were interested mainly in the beach. Beginning around the 1890s, those able to get away from home obligations during the summer heat traveled through Laguna Canyon, the only practical route to the beach for many of them. They came even from Los Angeles and Riverside counties and pitched tents. Over the years they improved them with wooden floors, then walls, then roofs. Thus was Laguna’s cottage community created.

“It was a fashionable address even then, but as a summer resort,� says Blacketer.

But the canyon definitely was not. It was merely the entrance to the city, though a very pretty one.

In 1917, a paved road was built, then improved in the 1930s. Inadvertently, the road was laid across the county’s only natural lake, probably because it was a dry year and the lake had greatly shrunk, Blacketer says.

“That’s why the road floods,� she says. “It’s built in the middle of a lake. No one paid very much attention to the environment then.�

Blacketer’s father, Francis L. (Doc) Blacketer, was not quite 7 years old when he and his family moved from a Nebraska farm into Laguna Canyon in 1923. Now 79, he still lives there.

“I can remember my uncle--he’d settled in Laguna--telling my dad back on the farm, ‘You ought to come to California, where the money grows on trees.’ So we did,� he says.

“There were just a few farms, not very many houses. There were some cabin camps, tourists cabins, where the Sawdust Festival is. And there was a tent city on the beach.

“We were used to really cold and really hot weather, and this was just paradise. We’d run around town barefoot and in bib overalls. We’d never seen the ocean before.

“It was just great in those days. It’s a time we can never go through again. We were just one step away from the frontier. The country was beginning to change--roads and automobiles and washing machines.�

Gradually, people began building homes in the canyon nearest the city.

“They liked not being part of the cultural mainstream,� Belinda Blacketer says. “A lot of the canyon got settled by a combination of--what would you call them?--poor craftsmen who couldn’t make a living. That’s a good description.

“A lot of artists ended up in the canyon because the land and housing were cheaper, and it was secluded. There weren’t any building inspectors--the county never bothered to come down and look--so no one paid much attention to them. You could build what you pleased.�

This engendered a sense of individualism and tolerance for your neighbors, Blacketer says.

“People respected each other,� she says. “That is to say, if you were doing something you shouldn’t be doing, you didn’t complain about what your neighbor was doing.�

Distinct neighborhoods evolved.

“There’s Canyon Acres; Woodland/Thurston Park between the Boys Club and Canyon Acres; and then there were little communities all the way out to Sun Valley Drive--Big Bend, Castle Rock, Stans Lane and Sun Valley. That was considered Outer Canyon,� says Blacketer.

Her family’s history, she says, would not be considered unusual in Canyon Acres. By the time Blacketer was born, in 1946, the neighborhood was practically an extended family.

“Everyone seemed to be related,� she says. “That was fun.�

As her father alternated between painting fine art and painting houses, she played in the caves and hills of the canyon.

“We used to hike all over those hills, play cowboys and Indians,� she says. “It was a kid’s wonderland, and it still is.�

But even then, her father was bemoaning the decline in the canyon way of life. In his youth, “maybe you’d see three or four cars go down the canyon all day. El Toro Road was a wagon path. There were no bridges then; you’d just ford the creeks,� he says. People in town came regularly into the canyon to fetch water from a well.

The good days for him were the days as a boy hiking into the hills to catch rattlesnakes or to the beach for a swim.

“I worked on our farm in the summer,� he says. “My dad would let me off from 1 to 4, and I’d run down to the beach, then go home and do chores. I had to go get the cows, help feed and do all those things. I’d hoe in the cornfield and catch gophers--my dad gave me a nickel a gopher. I stole my first horse in the canyon. My dad made me take it back.�

In the late 1950s, two canyon houses burned while Laguna Beach firefighters watched from within the city limits--there was no formal cooperation between jurisdictions then--and the canyon communities decided they’d better join the city, Belinda Blacketer says. The city annexed the canyon but zoned sections of it for light industry, figuring that while it needed an industrial base, it didn’t need it “in town.�

The zoning wound up with odd provisions, such as allowing light industry and up to five cows per acre within the same zone.

“It changed the character of the canyon forever,� she says. “That’s why you see these businesses that are not really business. There’s not enough land to support an industrial use. All the land is divided into little lots. And we’re so far from the shipping lanes that it’s just not economically viable to place a real industrial use in the canyon.�

So what few businesses sprang up over the years became as eccentric as the neighborhoods: Mr. Petticord’s junkyard. The Armitage Goat Farm. A dulcimer factory.

*

The hippies of the late ‘60s began to gravitate to Laguna Beach because of its reputation for tolerance. But it was Laguna Canyon that hosted the biggest local event of the love generation.

In December, 1970, a little more than a year after Woodstock, 25,000 people--nearly triple Laguna’s population--gathered at Sycamore Hills in the canyon for a spontaneous, unauthorized rock and drug feast called The Happening.

How it wound up there shows how Laguna still viewed the canyon. Originally planned for the city’s Main Beach, The Happening was moved because an undercover police officer convinced unwitting organizers it should be held in the canyon. Police wanted it there because they could easily block off the canyon at its mouth, thereby protecting the rest of the city.

Which is exactly what happened. On Christmas Day, six days after the event began, police sealed off the city boundaries. Officers in riot gear and singing “Here Comes Santa Claus� marched through the makeshift camp of people who still had not left and broke up the party.

Belinda Blacketer says the canyon never really deserved the reputation it acquired afterward of being a hippie haven. She estimates that perhaps 10 of the approximately 150 households whose occupants could have been considered hippies.

True, hippies were living in the canyon’s caves, “but they were no different than today’s homeless. The homeless are living there now.�

Still, drug guru Timothy Leary lived there for a while before he was arrested. Members of The Brotherhood, a cult whose members were convicted of large-scale drug trafficking, lived in the canyon.

But drug crackdowns and the passage of time ended the canyon’s hippie period, and the ecology movement took over. Efforts to prevent further development of the canyon began around 1968.

“The real passion for protecting the canyon comes from outside the canyon--from the people who live in Laguna, people who come and visit here,� Belinda Blacketer says. “It’s a much broader-based support than the people who live in the canyon. They appreciate the support, but this didn’t grow out of people who live here.�

Preservationists’ greatest victory was the agreement in 1990 to buy 2,150 acres of canyon property from the Irvine Co., thereby preventing it from building 3,200 homes there. Laguna Beach voters then approved by a nearly 80% margin bonds to help pay for the purchase.

But their greatest setback has been the San Joaquin tollway. Despite several defeats in the courts, tollway opponents are not ready to surrender, says Elisabeth Brown, president of Laguna Greenbelt. “We’re never going to throw in the towel.�

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Historic Canyon

Stretching from the San Diego Freeway to just short of the beach, Laguna Canyon has seen a succession of events, from prehistoric gatherings to a mini-Woodstock. Today it plays host to construction crews building a tollway and protesters wanting to preserve the canyon’s natural beauty.