Sights To See

Anacapa Island

Crossing the channel to Anacapa Island, one begins to understand why the island's name was derived from its Chumash Native American Indian name, "Ennepah." Seeming to change shape in the summer fog or afternoon heat, the three islets of Anacapa look like an island of deception or a mirage. Almost five miles long, these islets (appropriately named East, Middle and West Islands) are inaccessible from each other except by boat. They have a total land area of about one square mile (700 acres). Waves have eroded the volcanic island, creating steep, towering sea cliffs, sea caves, and natural bridges, such as forty-foot-high Arch Rock—the symbol of Anacapa and Channel Islands National Park.

Exploring East Anacapa's 1.5-mile trail system allows visitors to experience the island's native vegetation, wildlife, and cultural history. Although for much of the year the island vegetation looks brown and lifeless, the winter rains transform the landscape. Emerging from dormancy, the native plants come alive with color. The strange tree sunflower, or coreopsis, blossoms with bright yellow bouquets that are so vivid and numerous they can sometimes be seen from the mainland. Vibrant red paintbrush, island morning glories, and pale buckwheat add touches of color to the island's palette.

Seabirds are probably the most conspicuous wildlife on Anacapa Island. Thousands of birds use Anacapa as a nesting area because of the relative lack of predators on the island. While the steep cliffs of West Anacapa are home to the largest breeding colony of endangered California brown pelicans, all the islets of Anacapa host the largest breeding colony of western gulls in the world. Western gulls begin their nesting efforts at the end of April, sometimes making their shallow nests just inches from island trails. Fluffy chicks hatch in May and June and fly away from the nest in July.

The rocky shores of Anacapa are perfect resting and breeding areas for California sea lions and harbor seals. The raucous barking of sea lions can be heard from most areas of the island. Two overlooks (Cathedral Cove and Pinniped Point) provide excellent spots to look down on seals and sea lions in the island coves.

Anacapa's rich kelp forests (ideal for kayaking, snorkeling, and diving) and tidepool areas provide visitors with the opportunity to meet some of the resident ocean animals up close. Visitors may also catch a glimpse of the fascinating undersea world of the kelp forest without getting wet. During the summer, park rangers dive into the Landing Cove on East Anacapa with a video camera. Visitors can see, through the eye of the camera, what the diver is seeing—bright sea stars, spiny sea urchins and brilliant orange garibaldi—by watching video monitors located on the dock or in the mainland visitor center auditorium. Divers answer questions from visitors while they are underwater with a voice communication system and some help from a park interpreter on the dock. This program is simultaneously transmitted to the mainland visitor center.

Anacapa Island has a rich human history as well. Shell midden sites indicate where Chumash people camped on the islands thousands of years ago. In addition, visitors can view the 1937 light station whose Mission Revival style buildings include the lighthouse, fog signal building, one of four original keeper's quarters, a water tank building, and several other service buildings. The original lead-crystal Fresnel lens, which served as a beacon to ships until an automated light replaced it in 1990, is now on exhibit in the East Anacapa Visitor Center.

Santa Cruz Island

According to legend, Santa Cruz Island was named for a priest's staff accidentally left on the island during the Portola expedition of 1769. A Chumash Indian found the cross-tipped stave and returned it to the priest. The Spaniards were so impressed that they called this island of friendly people "La Isla de Santa Cruz," the Island of the Sacred Cross. Today, the protection and preservation of Santa Cruz Island is divided between The Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service. The Nature Conservancy owns and manages the western 76% of the island, while the eastern 24% is owned and managed by the National Park Service.

In its vastness and variety of flora, fauna, and geology, Santa Cruz Island resembles a miniature California. At over 96 square miles in size and California's largest island, Santa Cruz contains two rugged mountain ranges, the highest peaks on the islands (rising above 2,000 feet), a large central valley/fault system, deep canyons with year-round springs and streams, and 77 miles of craggy coastline cliffs, giant sea caves, pristine tidepools, and expansive beaches. One of the largest and deepest sea caves in the world, Painted Cave, is found on the northwest coastline of Santa Cruz. Named because of its colorful rock types, lichens, and algae, Painted Cave is nearly a quarter-mile long and 100 feet wide, with an entrance ceiling of 160 feet and a waterfall over this entrance in the spring.

These varied landforms support more than 600 plant species in ten different plant communities, from marshes and grasslands to chaparral and pine forests. 140 landbird and 11 land mammal species, three amphibian and five reptile species, and large colonies of nesting seabirds, breeding seals and sea lions, and other diverse marine animals and plants. Owing to millions of years of isolation, many distinctive plant and animals species have adapted to the island's unique environment, including the island scrub jay and eight plant species found only on Santa Cruz and nowhere else in the world.

The island is also rich in cultural history with 9,000 years of Chumash Native American Indian habitation and over 150 years of European exploration and ranching. Santa Cruz Island, known by the Chumash people as "Limuw"(translates to "in the sea") was home to a dozen villages that housed over 1,000 people. Many of these islanders mined extensive chert deposits for tools and produced "shell-bead money," used as a major trade item by tribes throughout California. The largest village on the island as well as on the northern Channel Islands, "Swaxil," occupied the area of Scorpion Ranch at the time of Spanish contact (1542). Large plank canoes, called "tomols," provided transportation between the islands and mainland.

Remnants of their civilization can still be seen in thousands of "shell middens" on the island. Remnants of the ranching era also can be seen throughout the landscape of the island. Adobe ranch houses, barns, blacksmith and saddle shops, wineries, and a chapel all attest to the many uses of Santa Cruz in the 1800s and 1900s. At the Scorpion Ranch adobe, the massive oven that produced bread for the entire island is still intact.

Santa Rosa Island

Santa Rosa Island was included as part of Channel Islands National Park upon the park's inception on March 5, 1980. However, it wasn't until December 1986 that the island came under the ownership of the National Park Service. Although the former owners run a private hunting operation a few months of the year for introduced deer and elk under a special use permit, visitation is welcome throughout the year.

Located 40 nautical miles from Channel Islands National Park visitor center in Ventura, Santa Rosa is the second largest island off the coast of California at approximately 53,000 acres in size. The island's relatively low profile is broken by a high, central mountain range, rising 1,589 feet at its highest point. Its coastal areas are variable, ranging from broad sandy beaches gently sloping toward a dynamic ocean to sheer cliffs plunging toward the turmoil of a sea intent on changing the contour of the land.

As on its larger neighbor, Santa Cruz Island, these varied landforms support a diverse array of plant and animal species. About 500 plant species can be found within nine plant communities, including six plant species that are found only on Santa Rosa and nowhere else in the world. One of these species, the Santa Rosa Island subspecies of Torrey pine, is considered one of the rarest pines in the world—the last enduring members of a once widespread Pleistocene forest. A remnant, mainland subspecies of Torrey pine also can be found near La Jolla, California, at Torrey Pines State Reserve. Santa Rosa Island also hosts over 100 land bird and three land mammal species (including the island's largest native mammal, the endemic island fox), two amphibian and three reptile species, and colonies of seabirds, seals, and sea lions.

Remains of an ancient endemic species, the pygmy mammoth, have been uncovered on Santa Rosa, along with Santa Cruz and San Miguel Islands. These miniature mammoths, only four to six feet tall, once roamed island grasslands and forests during the Pleistocene. The fossil skeleton discovered on Santa Rosa Island in 1994 is the most complete specimen ever found.

Along with extensive paleontological resources, Santa Rosa Island has rich archeological resources. Home to the Island Chumash until approximately 1820, "Wima" (as the Chumash refer to the island) contains thousands of significant and federally protected archeological sites. Archeological investigations on the island have enabled archeologists to construct a more complete picture of Chumash life on the islands. Radiocarbon dating on some of these sites indicates that humans have been using the island for more than 13,000 years.

Others have come to the island during more recent centuries to exploit its rich resources, sometimes making it their home. In addition to the native Chumash, European explorers, Aleut sea otter hunters, Chinese abalone fishermen, Spanish missionaries, Mexican and American ranchers, and the U.S. military all have left their mark on the Santa Rosa landscape. Visitors can see relics of these occupations in remnants of fishing camps, in the water troughs and fence lines, in the pier where cattle were loaded and unloaded since 1901, in the buildings and equipment of the historic Vail and Vickers ranch at Bechers Bay, in the remains of the military installations, and in a great diversity of sites to be discovered all around the island.

San Miguel Island

Wind and weather constantly sweep across the North Pacific to batter the shores of the westernmost of all the islands, San Miguel. This extreme weather creates a harsh but profoundly beautiful environment. The 9,500-acre island is primarily a plateau about 500 feet in elevation, but two 800-foot rounded hills emerge from its wild, windswept landscape.

Although lush native vegetation covers this landscape today, a century's worth of sheep ranching and overgrazing caused scientists in 1875 to describe the island as "a barren lump of sand." With the grazing animals removed, vegetative recovery is in progress. Giant coreopsis, dudleya, locoweed, lupine, buckwheat, coastal sagebrush, and poppies are all recolonizing the island to their former extent, returning San Miguel to its more natural state.

Also making a comeback, after years of hunting, are the thousands of pinnipeds (seals and sea lions) that breed, pup, and haul out on the island's 27 miles of isolated coastline. Hikers who make the all-day, ranger-guided, 16-mile round-trip hike across the island to Point Bennett will never forget seeing one of the world's most spectacular wildlife displays—over 30,000 pinnipeds (including up to five different species) hauled out on the point's beaches at certain times of year.

Other wildlife include the island fox and deer mouse. Both of these little creatures are "endemics"—they are found only on the Channel Islands. The island fox, the size of a house cat, is the largest land animal on the island. In the waters surrounding San Miguel, the marine animals get much larger. Dolphins and porpoises are often spotted along with gray whales, killer whales, and the largest animal of all, the blue whale.

In the spring and summer the skies are filled with birds. Boaters entering Cuyler Harbor receive a greeting from western gulls, California brown pelicans, cormorants, and Cassin's auklets that nest on Prince Island. Black oystercatchers, with their bright red bills and pink feet, feed along the beach. Terrestrial residents include the western meadowlark, the rock San Miguel Island 18 Island Views wren, and the song sparrow, an endemic subspecies. Peregrine falcons have recently been restored to the island and are nesting successfully once again after years of decimation by the pesticide DDT.

In addition to the variety of natural resources, San Miguel hosts an array of cultural resources as well. The Chumash Indians lived on San Miguel almost continuously for over 11,000 years. Today there are over 600 fragile, relatively undisturbed archeological sites. The oldest one dates back to 11,600 years before the present—some of the oldest evidence of human presence in North America.

Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and his men laid eyes on San Miguel Island in 1542. Upon claiming the island for the Spanish crown, Cabrillo named it "La Posesion." Some stories say that Cabrillo wintered and died on San Miguel Island. No one knows where Cabrillo is buried, but there is a memorial commemorating the explorer on a bluff overlooking Cuyler Harbor.

Other outstanding island resources that visitors may experience on San Miguel include the caliche forest (sand-castings of ancient vegetation), fossil bones of the Pleistocene pygmy mammoths that stood 4 to 6 feet at the shoulders, 150 years of ranching history, and numerous shipwrecks. Whether you are interested in life of the past or life of the present, San Miguel Island has it in abundance. Visit, explore, and enjoy.

Santa Barbara Island

The smallest of the Channel Islands is deceptive. From a distance, this one-square-mile island looks barren, uninteresting, and forlorn. Upon closer examination, the island offers more than one would expect—an island of resting elephant seals, blooming yellow flowers, tumbling Xantus's murrelet chicks, and rich cultural history. Santa Barbara Island is the center of a chain of jewels, a crossroads for people and animals.

Santa Barbara Island is 38 miles from San Pedro, California. The smallest of the California Channel Islands, it is only one square mile in size, or 639 acres. Formed by underwater volcanic activity, Santa Barbara Island is roughly triangular in outline and emerges from the ocean as a giant, twin-peaked mesa with steep cliffs. In 1602, explorer Sebastian Vizcaino named Santa Barbara Island in honor of the saint whose day is December 4th, the day he arrived.

Visitors to Santa Barbara Island can witness the incredible recovery of the island's plant life and wildlife after years of habitat and species loss due to ranching and farming activities, including the introduction of nonnative plants, rabbits, and cats. Although non-native grasses still dominate the landscape, native vegetation is recovering slowly with the help of the National Park Service's resource management program. After winter rains, the native plants of the island come alive with color. The strange tree sun- flower, or coreopsis, blossoms with bright yellow bouquets. Other plants, like the endemic Santa Barbara Island live-forever, shrubby buckwheat, chickory, and cream cups, add touches of color to the island's palette.

This recovery of native vegetation, along with the removal of non-native predators, has aided in the re-establishment of nesting land birds. Today there are 14 land birds that nest annually on the island. Three of these, the horned lark, orange-crowned warbler, and house finch, are endemic subspecies found only on Santa Barbara Island. Unfortunately, the island's recovery did not come soon enough for the endemic Santa Barbara Island song sparrow. The destruction of this sparrow's sagebrush and coreopsis nesting habitat and the presence of feral cats led to the extinction of this species in the 1960s. This sparrow, which was found only on Santa Barbara Island and is now lost forever, was one of the smallest forms of song sparrow, differentiated by its very grey back.

Seabird colonies have also benefited from the recovery of Santa Barbara Island. The island is one of the most important seabird nesting sites within the Channel Islands, with 11 nesting species. Thousands of western gulls nest every year on the island, some right along the trailside. Fluffy chicks hatch in June and mature to fly away from the nest in July. The steep cliffs also provide nesting sites for the endangered brown pelicans, three species of cormorants, three species of storm-petrels, and one of the world's largest colonies of Xantus's murrelets.

The rocky shores of Santa Barbara Island also provide resting and breeding areas for California sea lions, harbor seals and northern elephant seals. These marine mammals feed in the rich kelp forests surrounding the island. The raucous barking of the sea lions can be heard from most areas of the island. Overlooks, such as the Sea Lion Rookery, Webster Point, and Elephant Seal Cove, provide excellent spots to look down on seals and sea lions. Visitors can also jump in the water to see what lies beneath the ocean surface. Snorkeling in the Landing Cove, visitors can see bright sea stars, spiny sea urchins, and brilliant orange garibaldi fish. California sea lions and occasional harbor seals frequent the landing cove waters, and the surrounding rocky ledges.

All of these incredible resources can be experienced by hiking the six miles of trails and by snorkeling, swimming, or kayaking along the island's coast.

Kelp Forests

Ecology and Importance

Kelp forests are true forests providing shelter and food for over 1,000 species of animals and plants that live within them. Fish such as rockfish, kelp bass and California Sheephead hide among kelp fronds to avoid predators and to search for smaller prey. The tall fronds rising to the surface provide substrate and protection for many invertebrate species. Others, like the sea urchins, wavy turban snails, and abalone are there to dine on the kelp blades.

Giant kelp, Macrocystis pyrifera, may grow at depths below 100ft, sending their leaf like fronds to the surface to create a dense canopy. Holdfasts, root like structures that anchor the kelp to the bottom, are excellent hiding places and act as nurseries to juvenile invertebrates such as spiny lobster, sea cucumber, and sea urchins. The blades of kelp help slow water movement within the kelp forest, providing more refuges for smaller organisms such as juvenile rockfish.

Kelp forests of the Channel Islands experience both warm water currents from the South and cold water currents from the North. This mixing of currents creates a highly productive system and a diversity of organisms that is only found over a much greater area of the California coast. Some examples of warmer water species include Garibaldi, moray eels, and the spiny lobster. Examples of colder water organisms include black rockfish, and the sunflower star.

Kelps are harvested for alginates, products that are used as thickeners and stabilizers in many foods and other products from ice cream to soaps and shampoos. Kelp forests also provide the diversity, color, and structure that make them a favorite of divers and photographers.

Rocky Intertidal Zone

Undisturbed tidepools are one of the many exquisitely rich seascapes greeting a visitor who ventures into an island's splash zone at Channel Islands National Park. Covered and uncovered twice each day by tides, the Park's rocky intertidal (roughly meaning "between tides") is home to an abundance and diversity of marine life, unparalleled by even the most unspoiled, remote shorelines along California's mainland.

Few other places promise such a captivating and wonderful array of marine life in such a relatively short distance — from the lush intertidal algal and plant growth that provide habitat for so many marine animals, to the strange and wonderful invertebrate creatures that lie beneath.  Whether exploring the tideline by foot,  kayak or snorkel, or just spending an hour or two with a naturalist at the pier on East Anacapa Island, one can't help but come away with an heightened appreciation of just how remarkably rich and diverse these islands are for its intertidal (and subtidal) habitats and inhabitants!

Several major factors contribute to the richness of sea life around the Channel Islands: 1) their location near the boundary of two major biogeographic provinces (the Oregonian and the Californian); 2) their diversity of habitat types and exposure to varying oceanographic conditions; 3) their high productivity resulting from upwelling of cold nutrient-rich water off Pt. Conception; and 4) their isolation from the mainland, leaving the islands' coastline further removed from the risks of some human-induced impacts.

However remote, trampling by visitors, harvest of resources, foraging and/or invasion by alien species, and episodic (or chronic) pollution including oil spills remain the biggest threats to this fascinating group of marine flora and fauna occurring among the islands' remote rocky intertidal boulder fields, headlands, sandy beaches, and within surfgrass or kelp-dominated habitats. These strangely wonderful plants and animals — mostly resilient and adapted to the rise and fall each day of the tide and to the variable nature of the area's ocean currents - remain ever vulnerable to rapid and/or irreversible changes affecting the adjacent marine ecosystem.

Anacapa Island Lighthouse

The thick fog and strong currents of the Santa Barbara Channel have proved treacherous to maritime traders and other vessels for centuries.  Sea captains traveling to San Francisco along the west coast of Central and South America avoided the narrow passage for much of the nineteenth century, for fear of colliding with one of the islands in darkness, fog or stormy conditions. Since its completion in 1932, the Anacapa Island Lighthouse has helped guide sailors through the precarious Channel waters

Located on the highest point of East Anacapa Island, the Anacapa Island Lighthouse became an indispensable resource to shipping and passenger boats. At the top of the 39-foot concrete cylindrical tower flashed a third-order Fresnel lens, one of the most advanced lighthouse beacons in the world.

From 1931 through the 1960s, the light station housed a crew of between 15 and 25 people who maintained the lens, fog signal and tower, hourly weather and radar monitoring and reports, and a radio tower. When the US Coast Guard automated the station in the 1960s, the need for a fully manned station ended and the light station was able to be operated from the mainland.

For 57 years the light station aided ships traveling through the Santa Barbara Channel. In 1989, the Coast Guard replaced the historic Fresnel lens with a solar-powered acrylic lens. These modern lenses are small versions of Augustin Fresnel's invention, using the same technology employed by the nineteenth-century physicist.

You can visit the original Fresnel lens at the Anacapa Island visitor center. 

Winfield Scott Shipwreck

The Winfield Scott lies beneath the clear waters of Channel Islands National Park. The large steamship sank off the shores of Anacapa Island in 1853.

The Winfield Scott was owned by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Loaded with over 300 passengers and crew, bags of mail, and $1 million in gold, the steamship departed San Francisco for Panama on December 1, 1853. The next evening Captain Simon F. Blunt chose to pass through the Santa Barbara Channel to save time. The fog was dense, but he knew his course. Believing he had passed the islands, Blunt turned southeast, an unfortunate and tragic miscalculation. At 11:00 pm, the Winfield Scott crashed into a large rock off Middle Anacapa at full speed, striking two holes in the bow. The stern then struck, knocking away the rudder, and the ship began to sink.

Captain Blunt sent a boat to find a place onshore for the passengers and ordered everyone on board to abandon ship. The large group was brought to the beaches of Anacapa where they camped for nearly a week. Another ship, the California, saw the smoke from the passenger's fires and rescued the women. It returned on December 9 and removed the rest of the passengers. The company of the Winfield Scott was left on the island to attempt to recover mail, baggage, furniture, and some of the machinery from the wreck, but there was little hope of saving the ship or of getting it off of the ledge.

Over forty years later, Captain Maginn and Colonel Baker of the San Pedro visited the wreck in hopes of salvaging some of the copper, iron, and brass that could bring substantial amounts of money. Some of the ship had to be blasted apart by dynamite. Others returned to the shattered site searching for gold and other "treasure."

You can explore the watery remains of the Winfield Scott shipwreck, though divers and snorkelers are prohibited by antiquity laws from removing any artifacts. The wreck is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

For more information about the Winfield Scott and other Channel Islands shipwrecks, check out the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary Shipwreck Database (http://channelislands.noaa.gov/).