Grimes Canyon Residents Cling to Rugged, Rural Life : Communities: Area is refuge for those who cope with nature’s quirks in exchange for a peaceful existence far from the city.

In a rugged notch in the Santa Susana Mountains prone to mudslides, rockfall and predators, the people of Grimes Canyon have anchored their lives.

Straddling a ridge that slopes down into both eastern and western Ventura County, their neighborhood is united by treacherous Grimes Canyon Road.

The old stagecoach route ambles smoothly from Moorpark up to the crest, then plunges into southern Fillmore, clutching the mountainside in a ruthless knot of hairpin switchbacks.

Wrecked cars lie hundreds of feet down its embankments, proof of the danger it poses for unwary drivers. And lovers and egotists have carved proclamations of passion, humor and independence into its soft sandstone cliffs, proof that Grimes Canyon is many things to many people.

Along this four-mile stretch of California 23 live trailer dwellers, dog-shelterers, reclusive ranchers and a retired congressional lobbyist. It is also home to coyotes, deer, hawks, snakes and the occasional mountain lion.

Grimes Canyon spills forth and sustains abundant natural resources for the people tenacious enough to work it: sand, oranges, avocados, lemons, chickens, eggs, cattle, oil.

And in case they forget where they are, nature slaps the people of Grimes Canyon every so often with less-than-gentle reminders.

A cougar has been devouring pets.

The Northridge earthquake dumped tons of brittle sandstone onto the road.

And last month’s furious rainstorms left Mort Montazeri’s rock quarry underwater, Suzanne and Phil Kane’s dog kennels under a foot of mud, and Dale Wright’s oranges under the trees and worthless.

Like his neighbors, though, Wright clings to the canyon. He loves the living it provides and the broad, brilliant view of the Santa Clara River Valley that assures him city life is at a comfortable arm’s length.

If Wright has to keep giving free phone calls and rides to stranded motorists, then so be it. This is rich, stunning land.

“I grew up in the country, and this is what I love,” said Wright, 41, who ranches citrus and avocados on the canyon’s Fillmore side. “It’s never the same job two days in a row. It’s always something different.”

Many canyon dwellers relish the isolation.

“It’s quiet and it’s out of the city,” said Ralph Campbell, 53, a truck driver for Transit Mix Concrete Products Inc.

Campbell lives at the bottom of the canyon on the Moorpark side, in a ranch house nestled among orange groves.

The only irritation, he said, is Grimes Canyon Road itself as it curves onto Broadway. Harley-Davidsons thunder past on weekend rides, and too many motorists spot the stop sign at the last minute.

“It’s nice and quiet, except for the people that never stop for that stop sign until it’s too late,” Campbell said.

A nearby rancher said he values the remoteness of his 640-acre ranch, a lush, rolling swath of pasture tucked away from the main road just south of the pass.

“Next to being in the middle of Wyoming, it’s the best thing going--seclusion and privacy,” said the cattle rancher, a handsome, mustachioed 62-year-old who preferred not to be named. “If I want to stand out on the patio and howl with the coyotes, I can do it without anyone coming for me with the butterfly net.”

It is a vanishing commodity, privacy. Developers are devouring the last of Ventura County’s wild land, the rancher complained, as pregnant cows from his herd of longhorn-Brahman hybrids lingered nearby at the water trough and salt lick.

And don’t dare ask how many head of cattle he manages. He’ll snap, “That’s like askin’ a man how much money he has in the bank.”

Don’t ask how many chickens are laying eggs at Embly Ranch across the road, either.

That number is “classified,” said Dale Long, president of the company that occupies what once was the world’s largest egg farm.

Egg City was built in 1961 on the Moorpark side of Grimes Canyon, where the mountain breezes could keep the birds cool in hot weather. Once, it housed 3.5 million hens laying 2 million eggs a day.

But in 1991, amid harsh complaints about the stench of manure and a bitter court battle with the majority owner, a Japanese firm seized control of the company and downsized it.

Okura & Co. then leased out the sprawling complex to Embly Ranch, the second-largest distributor of eggs in Southern California.

Now, the ranch’s thirty 200- by 400-foot sheds contain what Long describes only as “upwards of a million birds.”

Fed a rich diet of corn, soy and shell-strengthening limestone, the chickens lay eggs that roll into trays beneath their cages for collection.

Workers cool the eggs and process them on-site. They wash, sanitize and then “candle” the eggs --passing them in front of a bright light to spot any that are cracked, blemished or otherwise unusable.

Then the eggs are sorted by size--from peewee to jumbo--and sent off to food-processing plants and supermarkets all over Southern California, Long said.

Complaints about the odor have fallen off since the ranch changed hands.

“Mainly, we have less chickens,” explained plant manager Bob Wagner. Also, plant employees work hard to dry the manure to a less odorous state and ship it off to fertilizer manufacturers as fast as possible, he said.

“When it’s wet, that’s when the odor comes,” Wagner said. “We just don’t let it pile up at all.”

The smell from Embly Ranch and the smaller Eggs West ranch nearby is far more bearable than before, neighbors say. But when it grows too strong, “normally it’s on the nights you want to have the windows open,” Ralph Campbell said with a chuckle.

The people of Grimes Canyon live almost intimately with its myriad industries.

In full view of most ranches on the Fillmore side, grimy pumps rock gently up and down, mining the terraced oil fields of the Dryden, Elkins and Capitol Crude leases.

In 1890, Union Oil--now Unocal--began sinking 57 of the 90 or so oil wells there. Now Unocal draws 25 barrels a day each from oil pockets a mile and a half beneath the mountains.

“It’s one of our older producing areas, and it’s still producing at a fair rate,” said Dick Marshall, Unocal’s field superintendent for the region.

A pump thrums away not 30 yards from Shirley Riley’s modest trailer home. She does not seem to mind the mechanical intrusion into Grimes Canyon life.

“I like it, it’s peaceful and quiet here,” said Riley, 58, whose 2-year-old grandson, Anthony, lingered around her knees in a pool of sunlight.

Then she added, “It’s nice except for the traffic noise” that swells to a near-constant whoosh in the morning and evening rush of cross-canyon commuters.

In the go-go 1970s, there was talk of shoving a freeway from the mountains near Malibu straight through Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and the Grimes Canyon pass to Route 126 in Fillmore, said Caltrans spokesman Russ Snyder.

But dwindling budgets and more pressing problems like earthquake retrofitting scotched that plan. Today, everything from whining dirt bikes to lumbering tandem gravel trucks still must use the twisting two-lane road at a peak rate of about 475 vehicles per hour, Snyder said.

Every few years, storms snatch back what man so brazenly took when county workers built the road in 1915.

January’s rains chewed out a 40-foot-long segment of the pavement, severing the tie between Moorpark and Fillmore.

Caltrans contractors dumped rock and sand into the resulting gash for eight or nine days straight before they could stabilize the steep hillside and lay down enough gravel to reopen the road, said David Servaes, regional maintenance manager.

And it could happen again, Servaes said, any time there is enough water flowing under the lip of asphalt to wash away the supporting rock.

As mud flowed down from the mountains and swamped equipment in his quarry last month, Mort Montazeri hopped up into his front-end loader and cruised out to help Caltrans clear the road.

“That was the logical thing to do, because that’s where we get our customers,” said Montazeri, 59, owner of Best Rock Products. TV reports on the storms ignored Grimes Canyon, focusing instead on massive rescue and property-protection going on in upper-crust Malibu, he said.

“It took us three days to get over to the Fillmore people that half the road was gone,” he said.

Mud flows buried Montazeri’s rock processors and dump trucks up to their axles. Until they could be dug out, the business was paralyzed--no more sand and gravel for contractors around Southern California, no more burned diatomite for Dodgers Stadium, where base paths are paved with the crumbly red processed rock.

Since fleeing the Muslim extremist takeover of Iran in 1979, Montazeri said, he has been working 80 hour weeks and dawn-to-sunset days. “I come dark, I go dark,” he said.

He abandoned a huge road-building firm that had grown rich on Iranian government contracts. And he took hold of a smallish quarry with 22 years left on its lease that runs at the mercy of vicious weather and a skittish construction market.

Sad-eyed Montazeri watched an employee dig out a mud-mired rock-processing machine and worried that it may need rebuilding.

“It’s life, you get used to it,” he sighed. “You forget who you were. You just adjust.”

But he said of working in Grimes Canyon, “It’s wonderful. It’s very nice, secure. We’ve never had any problems here.” And he said of his neighbors, “I like them, I think they like me.”

Indeed they do, said neighbor Suzanne Kane, adding, “Mort’s a wonderful guy.”

Kane and her husband, retired CSUN professor Phil Kane, run the Humane Animal Rescue Team. The team tries to find homes for dogs that have been abandoned, abused or orphaned by the illness or death of their owners.

It all started when Suzanne Kane was 2, she said. Someone was offering beagle puppies for adoption, and she could not bear to see the mother sent off to the pound.

Now, she tries to find homes for most unwanted dogs that cross her path, from a boxful of puppies she found in a Tennessee drainage ditch while vacationing to the half-dozen dogs living in the Grimes Canyon pens because they are too sick or vicious to place.

Shiloh barked savagely at visitors, biting the cyclone fence--until Kane walked into her pen. Then the fierce German shepherd melted into wags and licks, and Kane patted her, chiding, “Yeeees, you know why you haven’t been adopted, don’t you?”

Every two months, she and her husband publish 6,000 copies of the Muttmatchers Messenger, a paper that ties together a network of similar shelters.

And they cherish their life in Grimes Canyon, despite the thick carpet of mud from last month’s rains that forced them to put most of their dogs into kennels until the pens can be shoveled out.

“You have to be sort of a strange bird to live out here,” said Kane, 54, said, gazing at her front yard’s panoramic sweep of orange groves and the view of Fillmore beyond. “You’ve got to be willing to accept the fact that we’re at the mercy of the elements.”

Down the road, Monty Winkler stood on the sun deck of the grand Spanish-style hacienda his grandparents built, the house where he grew up, and pondered his new life as a Grimes Canyon citrus rancher.

After toiling in Washington, D.C., for Rep. Bob Lagomarsino and predecessor Charles Teague, after lobbying for years on behalf of the California fruit industry, Winkler said he retired a year and a half ago and is glad to be rid of the stress.

Heat, rain, pests and twitchy citrus prices are his biggest worries now, said Winkler, 62, who shares the house with his wife, Maio.

“It’s just a lovely life out here, if you can put up with the floods and the earthquakes,” Winkler chuckled. “As my grandmother used to say when people used to complain about the switchbacks, she’d say, “You should have seen the OLD road.”