A “tidal wave” of water ripped through Colson Canyon Road, wiping it out entirely after the area received 10 inches of rain in one day during the January storms that drenched Santa Barbara County, Paul Antolini said.
“There’s 30-feet sheer walls where the road used to be,” Antolini said. “It’s going to take quite a bit of time and quite a bit of expenses [to repair it], but for me that represents my access.”
Antolini owns and operates G. Antolini and Son, a stone quarry mining operation that’s been selling wholesale stones to building material dealers since 1953. The Jan. 9 storms shut his business down “right then and there,” he said.
“As a small-business person, the thing that keeps me up at night is I hope I can stay solvent. With no income coming in, it’s tough, to be honest,” Antolini said.
Colson Canyon Road lies within the Los Padres National Forest, just east of Santa Maria, and is within U.S. Forest Service jurisdiction, leaving the agency responsible for the road’s repairs. Although the federal agency made significant progress, with most residents in the lower parts of the canyon able to access their homes, Antolini’s mining operation is farther up the canyon, and he can only access his business by foot.
“There’s no way I can get in, there’s no way I can bring product out or, for that matter, bring fuel into my equipment. It makes for a challenging situation,” he said. “Damage is great all over the forest and I know [the Forest Service] has a lot on their plate, but from my personal situation, I’m trying to stay solvent business-wise, and my employees would like to have their livelihoods back.”
Two months after that storm, Antolini’s business is still shut down and the road is still inaccessible. His two employees had to seek disaster-related unemployment benefits, and he has had to cut back on his own expenses in order to stay afloat, Antolini said.
“The sooner that road can get put back for me the better,” he said. “If I could start shipping products again that would make a huge difference.”
Colson Canyon Road is one of many that Los Padres National Forest is working to reopen in California’s third largest forest, which experienced more than $100 million in damages to roads, trails, campgrounds, and more during the January storms. Currently, the forest is working with nonprofits to assess that damage, search and apply for funding sources, and conduct trail and road maintenance. It will take years before the forest returns to the state is was in before the storm, and the cost of damages is much higher than the forest’s annual budget.
After the January storms, the Los Padres issued a 60-day shutdown order for four of its five ranger districts, cutting off the public’s access. Now, the service is looking at putting in place a new closure order listing specific trails, roads, and campgrounds that need to remain closed due to the extent of the damage, Los Padres National Forest Spokesperson Andrew Madsen said.
“Damage includes everything from the road no longer [being] there to roads with giant craters in them—debris, rockslides, branches,” Madsen said. “In those cases the road has not been undermined in some way, … we’ll be able to reopen those.”
Updated closure details were not available for release before the Sun’s deadline, but Madsen said that Colson Canyon Road was “completely obliterated” and would take about two years to repair and cost about $10 million.
“The impacts from the storm are well outside our budgetary allotment,” Madsen said. “In our budget, those are all discretionary [funds]. When we get it we know where it’s going to go—$100 million in overall damage, that’s four to five years of our regular budget money.”
President Joe Biden’s federal emergency disaster declaration will help free up funds, with the bulk of the Forest Service’s funding stream coming from the Federal Highways Administration’s Emergency Relief for Federally Owned Roads to repair forest roadways, Madsen said.
“Those monies will trickle down eventually once the designation has been made, and once it’s been determined they can flow,” he said. “We do obviously work with the county and the state, but the funding sources are all separate.”
Trails are a whole different matter, Madsen said. Those are maintained by some Forest Service staff and many nonprofits, like the Los Padres Forest Association (LPFA), which can apply for grant funding and take trail crews out to do maintenance.
LPFA’s Executive Director Bryan Conant said that he and his trail teams got involved with storm recovery shortly after the flooding and have assessed more than 206 miles of trails in Santa Barbara, Ventura, and parts of San Luis Obispo counties for any obstructions to trails, like fallen trees, chaparral overgrowth, or debris. Crews usually take photos of the damage, flag the GPS coordinates to send back to the Forest Service, and mark the trails with little plastic flags or stacks of rocks (cairns) to help future hikers find the adjusted path.
“Normally a downed tree is a big deal, a normal survey of 10 downed trees was a big deal,” he said. “Now, we’re dealing with mudslide sections where there used to be a ramp that led into a creek crossing and now it’s a 6-foot drop.”
Trail maintenance teams and volunteers flagged significant trail damage every 50 yards on average, with one crew in the Santa Ynez Valley area reporting 700 photos of trail damage, Conant said.
“As far as the trails go, there’s a few trails in the frontcountry where it’s outside of our paygrade. The Forest Service has professional trail folks on their team that are surveying these trails and cost analysis for what it takes to fix those trails. We’re relying on them for expertise and funding,” he said. “Most of the backcountry is about getting in there with as many people as you can, just swinging tools, taking it one creek crossing at a time, and chipping away.”
The storm’s impact forced the association to revise its whole work program from updating some of the forest’s backcountry trails to try and get the more popular trails back in shape and work out from there, he said.
“We’re having to start over again,” Conant said. “We’ve been working really hard over the last five to 10 years to get these trails in shape, and we have to start over again. We’re kind of going backwards, but it’s OK. It’s what you have to do.”
When the forest reopens, recreators should expect trails in rougher conditions with more obstacles and will find it more difficult to locate the trails, he said. Hikers should plan accordingly and know they are going to be moving slower than their normal pace.
“It’s going to take a while, but this isn’t something that hasn’t happened before, and most of us are familiar with these legendary years of giant rains,” Conant said. “Trees will grow back, dirt will return, and trails will return on the dirt again.”
Staff Writer Taylor O’Connor can be reached at toconnor@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 9-16, 2023.
