At the start of the tour
Welcome to Cavern Point Loop
Welcome to Santa Cruz Island, in Channel Islands National Park. The Chumash called this island Limuw, and people lived here for thousands of years before the first European ships came by.
It's the largest island off the west coast of the United States, about ninety-six square miles, roughly four times the size of Manhattan. The National Park Service cares for this eastern end, and The Nature Conservancy owns the larger western part. Congress made these islands a national park in 1980, together with one nautical mile of ocean around each one.
Our walk follows the park's own trail guide from this beach to Cavern Point, then loops back along the bluffs, about two miles in all, with one climb. We'll pass the old Scorpion Ranch, a eucalyptus grove, a small canyon, the cliffs at the point and the bluff above this anchorage. There's no reliable cell service on the island, but this tour works without it. I'll tell a story at each spot and stay quiet in between. And keep an eye on the time: the boat leaves on schedule.
Point 1 · At the stop
Welcome to Scorpion Anchorage
This is Scorpion Anchorage. Nobody is quite sure how Scorpion got its name. The park says it may be the shape of the valley, or the small scorpions that live here.
Look around and you're seeing something rare: a stretch of Southern California coast with no development at all. These islands sit close to the mainland, yet worlds apart. Isolation let life here evolve on its own, a little like the Galápagos. The Channel Islands have a hundred and forty-five species found nowhere else, and sixty of them live on this island. One bird, the island scrub-jay, lives only on Santa Cruz and nowhere else on Earth. It's bigger, and a deeper blue, than its mainland cousin.
That same isolation shaped everything people did here. Before there was a pier, ranch crews brought freight ashore on small boats, with a team of horses on the beach hauling them in. In the early 1930s a wharf went up on pilings cut from eucalyptus trunks, and each year a thousand or more sheep were herded along it and onto boats bound for Santa Barbara. Winter storms wrecked pier after pier, whatever the design.
One island rule before we set off: there are no trash cans here, so whatever you bring goes home with you, and keep your food packed away from the wildlife.
History, on the way there
On the way: Scorpion Ranch
Our next story is Scorpion Ranch, the old heart of this end of the island.
Livestock ranching began on Santa Cruz in the 1850s. Around 1880, under Justinian Caire, it grew into an attempt at a completely self-sufficient island, with its own stonework, bricks, vineyards and gardens, and by the 1890s more than fifty thousand sheep. The island was too big to run from one place, so outlying ranches were set up. This was one of them. Together with the ranch at Smugglers Cove, it was called the granary of the island, for the food and hay grown on the plateaus of the east end.
Point 2 · At the stop
Scorpion Ranch
Here's the ranch. The two-story house was being finished in 1887: that year the company foreman wrote in his diary about work on the attic of the new house. People call it the adobe, but it's mostly rubble masonry, island stone held together with lime and cement mortar. At its west end is a small room with a big bread oven that could bake twenty-five loaves at a time. Today that room has a quieter job: in spring and summer it shelters a nursery colony of Townsend's big-eared bats. Downstairs, the house is now the visitor center.
The wooden bunkhouse dates from about 1914. On the night of December 5, 1997, more than twelve inches of rain fell on this end of the island, and the flood down this valley floated the bunkhouse thirty feet off its foundation. Another small wooden shop here was built between 1885 and 1892, one of the oldest wooden buildings on the east end. Digs around it turned up charcoal, horseshoes and nails, signs it may have been the forge. With the nearest mainland blacksmith more than twenty-five miles away, the ranch had to make and mend almost everything itself. Look for the old horse-drawn plows, mowers and hay rakes set out around the yard.
History, on the way there
On the way: The eucalyptus grove
Our next story is the eucalyptus grove, where the trail to Cavern Point begins, and the long effort to heal this island.
The Gherini family, descendants of Justinian Caire, raised sheep here until 1984, and in 1997 the Park Service acquired the family's last interest. Then came the cleanup. More than nine thousand sheep were removed from these eastern acres by 1999, and feral pigs by 2007. The pigs had torn up native plants and ancient Chumash sites, and their piglets drew golden eagles to settle on the island. The eagles then hunted the island fox.
Point 3 · At the stop
The eucalyptus grove
These tall trees are blue gum eucalyptus, more than a hundred years old. Ranchers planted groves like this across the island for windbreaks, firewood, shade and pier pilings. They aren't native, and neither are many of the plants underfoot: on this end of the island, nearly a quarter of the plant species were brought in, and they make up about three quarters of the ground cover.
Now, about that fox. The island fox lives on six of the Channel Islands and nowhere else. It's about the size of a house cat, a small descendant of the mainland gray fox. With golden eagles hunting them, Santa Cruz was down to fewer than eighty foxes by 2000. So the park and its partners moved the golden eagles to northeastern California, bred foxes in captivity, brought back bald eagles, which eat fish and don't hunt live foxes, and removed the pigs. The last captive-bred fox was released in 2008, and in 2016 the island fox came off the endangered species list, one of the fastest recoveries of any endangered animal. With no natural predators, these foxes are often out in daylight, so you may meet one. Please don't feed it, and keep your pack closed.
History, on the way there
On the way: Top of the canyon
Our next story is the climb out of the canyon, and how these islands came to be.
These rocks formed on the sea floor and from volcanoes, between about fifteen and thirty million years ago. Around five million years ago, Baja California pushing into Southern California folded those layers and lifted the islands out of the sea, and they're still rising. There was never a land bridge to the mainland. Even when the sea was lowest, about seventeen thousand years ago, at least four miles of ocean lay between them. Back then, the four northern islands were joined as one big island, called Santarosae.
Point 4 · At the stop
Top of the canyon
Here, at the top of the canyon, the trail meets the North Bluff Trail, which runs west along the cliffs to Potato Harbor. It's a good place to catch your breath. On the way up, you probably noticed patches of bright white, chalky rock on the hillsides. That's diatomaceous earth. It's made from diatoms, tiny single-celled sea plants with skeletons of silica. When they die, their skeletons settle on the ocean floor, often in huge numbers.
From that silica comes chert, a dense, hard stone that breaks like glass. And chert made this end of the island special for the Chumash. They shaped it into arrowheads, drills and cutting tools, and above all into tiny drill bits. With those microdrills, islanders bored holes in olivella snail shells to make beads, and those shell beads were money, the currency of trade along the coast and throughout California. The east end of Santa Cruz had chert of just the right kind, and one site on this island shows the highest density of microdrill making known in North America. Some archaeologists call these places bead factories.
History, on the way there
On the way: Cavern Point
Our next story is Cavern Point, high on the cliffs, and the people who knew this island first.
People have lived on this island for at least nine thousand years. When Cabrillo's expedition sailed this coast in 1542, at least twelve hundred Chumash people lived in ten villages around the island's shore, and the largest stood near Scorpion Ranch. They lived mostly from the sea and crossed the channel in plank canoes called tomols. By the early 1800s, diseases brought by Spanish colonists had devastated the villages, and in 1822 the last islanders left. In 2001, their descendants paddled a traditional plank canoe they had built from the mainland back to this island, a crossing the community now makes every year.
Point 5 · At the stop
Cavern Point
Here's Cavern Point. Stay well back from the edge: these cliffs are crumbly and can give way without warning.
The dark cliffs below are volcanic rock, cut with sea caves. These cliffs, and the island's other shores and islets, are home to twelve kinds of nesting seabirds and shorebirds, among them ashy storm-petrels, Brandt's cormorants, Cassin's auklets, pigeon guillemots and black oystercatchers. Watch for western gulls and brown pelicans gliding along the cliff face, for California sea lions and harbor seals in the water, and, in season, for whales: Cavern Point is known for its whale watching.
The pelicans have had a hard road. They once nested on Scorpion Rock, the islet off the anchorage, but people disturbing the colony drove them away by the 1930s. Then the pesticide DDT nearly wiped them out as breeders on the West Coast. In 1970, on nearby Anacapa Island, pelicans made five hundred and fifty-two nesting attempts and raised just one chick. Since DDT was banned, they've come back, and today these islands hold the only major breeding population of California brown pelicans in the western United States.
Point 6 · At the stop
Above the anchorage
Before sheep and pigs arrived, the flat tops of these bluffs were covered with native plants: island buckwheat, coastal sagebrush, goldfields, and great stands of giant coreopsis, which bursts into bright yellow flowers each spring. Years of grazing left those plants growing only on the steep cliffs where animals couldn't reach. Now that the grazers are gone, the coreopsis and its neighbors have slowly been spreading back across the island.
The water below is part of the Scorpion Marine Reserve, which runs from Potato Harbor to Scorpion Rock. No fishing or harvesting is allowed there, so the sea life gets its own chance to recover.
That's the thread through this whole walk. The ocean that kept this island apart made it a hard place to ranch and a fragile place to live, and it's also the reason so much here exists nowhere else. The park was created to protect all of it: the Chumash story and the ranchers who came after, the plants that are coming back, and the seabirds on the cliffs. Thanks for walking with me. Enjoy the beach, and don't miss your boat.