Chatsworth Land OKd as a State Historic Park

VALENCIA —  It took 28 years, $13.7-million and hundreds of volunteers, but the hills and sandstone ramparts south of Santa Susana Pass finally became a state historic park Tuesday.

With loud cheers from the audience, the California State Park and Recreation Commission voted unanimously to recognize the 670-acre tract’s storied past, where Native Americans once performed sacred rituals and stagecoaches trundled across steep rock roads.

Park volunteers, who have been working for Tuesday’s recognition since 1970, celebrated the occasion with hugs in the hallways outside the Hilton Garden Inn in Valencia, where the commission met Tuesday. Then they immediately vowed to focus on the future: finding the money to hire a park ranger and buying more land to preserve other wild areas near the park.

“I’m just ecstatic,” said Janice Hinkston, who founded the Santa Susana Mountain Park Assn. 28 years ago. “It’s a wonderful feeling.”

The Antelope Valley also gained a new state park Tuesday, with the commission unanimously voting to recognize 566 acres of Joshua and juniper trees as Arthur B. Ripley Desert Woodland State Park.

Located about four miles northwest of the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, the area is one of the last forested tracts in the desolate valley.

“You can walk in there and be lost,” said Milt Stark, a wildlife photographer who serves on the Poppy Reserve-Mojave Desert Interpretive Assn. that will suggest plans for the new park.

The question for both parks now is money. Though naming the parks is a recognition of their importance, the park service won’t be making any substantive changes to the areas for several years--perhaps for up to a decade.

Funding shortfalls the past few years have created a backlog in which more than 100 of California’s 240 state parks currently lack the blueprint necessary for their development. And even those parks with such blueprints don’t have enough funds for all the improvements needed.

Nonetheless, local state park officials were confident that the intense interest in the Santa Susana park in the hills above Chatsworth would help secure the money needed to hire a ranger and build park facilities sometime in the next few years.

In the short term, they pledged to step up patrols in the park, which has been plagued in the past by vandals and looters.

“I’m optimistic, not in the short term, but in the long term,” said Dan Preece, district superintendent. “The Santa Susana [park] would be a fairly high priority.”

The state park system began buying land in the Santa Susana Mountains in 1979, eventually spending $13.7 million to acquire the land now officially dubbed Santa Susana Pass State Historic Park.

The site used to be a border outpost between the Tongva and Chumash cultures. In the 1800s, it became one of the major transportation routes between southern and northern California. In more modern times, the park has also been the setting for western movies and other films.

The Antelope Valley tract, valued at about $300,000, was given to the state park system in 1994 by the family of Arthur Ripley, a local farmer who wanted to preserve the rapidly vanishing habitat.