Under the wings of our plane, there are nothing but whitecaps and the Peter Pan shadow of the plane for 26 miles off the coast of Southern California till we reach San Miguel, the most remote, wild and mysterious of all the Channel Islands.
Not many people come to San Miguel in February. In fact, the 14-square-mile island, which has been a national park since 1980, boasts perhaps the fewest visitors of any National Park in the country — fewer than 1,000 a year.
For one thing, it’s a six-hour boat ride (only researchers and park personnel can come in by plane). For another, the wind on the island averages around 25 knots. On this day it’s 40 knots, which in less than 24 hours can shape a human being almost as easily as it carves the plants and dunes and rocks of San Miguel.
The body tries to go low by hunching or crouching. Sometimes the wind rips the oxygen from your mouth before you can suck it into your lungs.
This time of year, besides a few brilliant blooms of coreopsis, the main attraction on San Miguel are the 50,000 elephant seals (more than half of the world’s population) that come here to breed on Point Bennett and a few of the other quiet coves.
They arrive, in all their glory (males average 15 feet long and weigh about 3 tons, females 11 feet and a little more than 1 ton) sometime around Christmas from the North Pacific and the Gulf of Alaska and are gone by early March, returning to shed their pelts again in the spring.
The story of the elephant seals is one of the happier chapters in the endangered-species book. Whaling captain Charles Scammon wrote in the early 1870s that elephant seals could be found breeding along the California coast from Point Reyes to Baja. Between the 1820s and the late 1860s, hunting by American and Mexican sealers brought the species near extinction. In 1922 when, some biologists say, the population dropped as low as 20 animals, the Mexican government, followed by that of the United States, granted the species formal protected status.
We are shown around the island by 40-year-old Ian Williams, who has been the ranger on San Miguel for nine years. People who have worked with him say he knows just about everything there is to know about San Miguel. He walks very fast but stops for long breaks to show a view or a plant or wait for the sun to come from behind a cloud and change the color of the water.
“My goal in life was to get out of L.A.,” Williams says of a career path in the Park Service that took him to various historic parks in Texas and to Glacier Park in Montana, and finally to San Miguel. When I suggest that he has been here long enough to deserve a formation named after him, Williams turns and says, “On San Miguel, that usually means someone died there.”
The Channel Islands are the summits of a submerged ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains. Anacapa (which means, roughly, “mirage” in the language of the Chumash Indians who originally lived on all the islands), Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel were once a single land mass, though even from 1,000 feet up, today they have strikingly different topographies, colors and personalities.
Though most of San Miguel is relatively flat (with the exception of two hills, the higher 800 feet), for many of the hikes the visitor must be accompanied by a ranger, because of the site’s delicate ecology.
In the waters around the Channel Islands, 80,000 sea lions, 12,000 fur seals, 50,000 elephant seals and 1,200 harbor seals — all pinnipeds, meaning fin-footed marine mammals — rest and nurse and play in the waves. This week, marine biologist Bob DeLong is here with a team of colleagues and graduate students. DeLong, who has been coming to San Miguel for field work for 30 years, has studied and written definitive papers on elephant seals and fur seals.
DeLong works for the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S. Department of Commerce. He has also studied the effects of environmental pollutants such as the pesticide DDT and PCBs, compounds used in electrical transformers and conductors) on various pinnipeds, though he insists his observations are “strictly associational.” He is now looking at cancer in California sea lions and the relationship between the herpes virus (sexually transmitted in pinnipeds) and environmental pollutants. A high incidence of the virus has been found in stranded adult females. Some current cancer research, he explains, reveals carcinogenesis as the result of two insults to the DNA, each fixed and replicated for cells to become cancerous: (1) a virus and (2) a pollutant such as dioxin, or some other known carcinogen.
Just a short but hair-raising walk in the wind a mile down the point is a sandy bluff where researchers can see the two coves where male elephant seals (bulls) guard their harems (which sometimes contain as many as 1,000 females) and females nurse their pups before the trip back to Alaska.
Chaos reigns on the beach, though to the elephant seals it all makes perfect sense. Around every five minutes, it seems (in the morning and early evening, primarily) a lesser male will challenge the king of a particular harem. Bulls assume various postures indicating just how serious they are about crushing competitors, who hover on the fringes of harems.
It is not uncommon for pups to be crushed by bulls fighting over females. The males make a sound like a Harley-Davidson not at the top of its game; the pups screech like monkeys, and the females, drained from nursing, groan and bellow. Sea lions, which live here year-round, form discrete brown clusters between bull territories.
San Miguel is also covered in archeological sites, kitchen middens with shining abalone and mussel shell pieces from the roughly 100 Chumash who lived here for 1,100 years, until the last few were removed by the Spanish in the early 1800s.
Sea water was colder then, and since water temperature affects the growth of shells such as the abalone’s, scientists are learning how to date shells looking at growth layers like tree rings in carbon-dating.
“Taking a walk out here,” Williams says of the bluff below Devil’s Point, where the Chumash village of Tuqan once stood, “is like taking a step back hundreds of years.”
The island may be inhospitable to man, but San Miguel is a kind of sanctuary for marine mammals recovering from near extinction such as the elephant seal, and for indigenous plants that were wiped from the island by sheep grazing.
Even the Caliche Forest, another San Miguel attraction, is a testament to determination, transformation and recovery.
Solidified calcium carbonate deposits cling to old tree roots, fish bones and other spiny things that nature appeared to be finished with, making eerie forests and ghostly white rocks that from a distance, look like sheep.
In 1980, the Channel Islands were granted sanctuary status by the Carter administration, protection six miles around the coast of each island in addition to the national park status, which protected the islands themselves. Sanctuaries allow for a variety of uses, including recreation, research and conservation.
