Legends of the Ventana: Truth Makes the Strangest Tales -

The view from a ridgetop trail entrance to the Ventana Wilderness. The "Window" is a notch in the ridge, deep in the background. One can reach the Window on foot but few attempt it. This idyllic vista is deceptive-- the Ventana is unforgiving of visitors who don't know what they're doing.

Whenever I'm in California I try to spend a little time backpacking in the Ventana Wilderness. It's a spectacularly rugged labyrinth of redwood, oak and chaparral canyons hidden along the central coast. The Ventana, meaning "Window," is named after the little notch in the ridge on the far left side of this photo (circled). A land bridge supposedly connected one side of the notch to the other at one time, leaving an extraordinary aperture, literally a window, right through the mountain itself.

Truth really is stranger than fiction, and after a few days in the Ventana one begins to wonder which is which. The ancient place hosts more unnerving legends than any other wilderness I've hiked in, and people touched by the Ventana describe how the shadows of these legends still skulk the forest. It is as though nothing here ever passes into history, but remains to shape the unwitting realities of those who pass through...

So while I make no guarantees whatsoever about where reality ends and fiction begins here, and you should investigate any of these tales yourself before accepting them as true, I'll tell you about a few of these remarkable legends and some people who have experienced them.

In Steinbeck's story a fugitive escapes into the Ventana Wilderness to avoid arrest and is warned to beware "the dark watching men," mysterious beings lurking in these steep, rugged canyons and who emerge as harbingers of peril. According to local authorities, Steinbeck was making literary use of actual reports. Historic records do include people's accounts of shadowy, wraithlike beings who appear around dusk and peer at lone travelers passing through the remote interior of this wilderness.

Here is where I can actually contribute some eyewitness support. Over ten years ago a trusted acquaintance of mine-- let's call him "Jed," since he doesn't know I'm still telling this story-- was day-hiking through the Ventana region. He had heard rumors of natural hot springs near the source of the Little Sur River and was determined to make the trip from Bottchers Gap at dawn and to return before nightfall. Jed did find the upper headwaters of the river, but pursuing its source proved more difficult than he expected. The further he went the thicker the redwood forest became, until he was clambering from one fallen gigantic redwood carcass to another, with no trail in sight and the stream itself barely visible beneath the gargantuan logfall.

Jed had less time than he thought. He had estimated dusk based on the sunset in Carmel, forgetting that the sun disappears earlier in the steep granite ravines of the Ventana. To make matters worse, the sky was growing gray with fog, creeping in from the coast. Jed suddenly realized he had to make a decision-- to find a safe place to spend the night, or bolt back to Bottchers Gap immediately. But when he looked at the vicious terrain he had entered, the jumble of fallen dinosaurian redwoods choking the craggy gorge, he knew he couldn't hurry anywhere safely.

He climbed up from the ravine a short distance and found an oak clearing. Just as he reached it-- these are his words-- he felt as though a cold hand touched the back of his neck, and he looked behind him, westward up the facing ridge.

Standing, roughly equal distance up the opposite side of the ravine on the bone-white stump of a fallen sequoia, Jed says he saw a tall shrouded figure, "over six feet tall, swaying slightly, with dark eyes and what looked like a thin black mouth." Jed was stunned by the unnatural appearance of the figure and just as he decided to call out to it, it vanished into the surrounding forest.

Like I said, truth is stranger than fiction and this real-life encounter gets stranger still. Jumping ahead in the story, Jed tried to sleep in the oak clearing that night. He had a lot of outdoor experience and knew how to put together a bed-down with natural materials. After dusk, however, a lot of unnatural things started to happen. If you've ever heard a fox bark (okay, just believe me, foxes can bark), it is one of the eeriest sounds in the forest-- kind of a squealing "Yawp! Yawp!". Jed estimates that a dozen foxes visited the edge of his clearing through the evening, the air split with their shrill rasps. Then, as though on command, it just stopped.

After that, silence was unnerving. It was late summer, and the coastal mountains are normally full of life, day and night, all through the season. If nothing else, the buzz of nightflies and gnats can be maddening, especially in those river gorges. But once the foxes stopped Jed did not hear a single sound, anywhere. Even the wind was utterly still. The darkness seemed to compress around him; no stars, no moon, even the nearby trees and stones were imperceptible. Jed eventually fell asleep, in spite of the chilling sense that he was most unwelcome there... Wait, it gets stranger still.

Jed awoke several hours later with a hundred painful sharpnesses pressing into his back. He felt around him and realized he was laying on a jumble of redwood shards. Bewildered and terrified, he sat up and fell off a wide, ragged stump. He had no idea how he got there, or even exactly where he was. He staggered away from the stump, and in the thick darkness its bleached pale image was the only thing he could make out.

He found a relatively flat spot of ground and curled up there to keep warm. But he didn't sleep. He laid there, listening and watching for hours until the sky finally began to lighten in the east. It was about five in the morning when he could see well enough to get up and take his bearings. After a minute he recognized the oak clearing where he had made his bed the previous evening-- on the opposite ridge. Somehow, Jed had wound up on the other side of the river gorge in the middle of the night. There was no path, no footprints in the muddy incline below him, no sign that he had ever walked across the treacherous jumble of fallen trees, not to mention the fact that he had absolutely no memory of moving from where he had laid down the night before.

Then he realized something more, an awareness so disturbing that it literally made him sick to his stomach. Where he had awakened so mysteriously was the very same dead stump that the dark shrouded figure had been standing on the prior day.

Jed made it back to Bottchers Gap in record time and without any further trauma, but years later when we became friends and he told me this story, the recollection still made him pale and shaky. This guy, a USMC veteran, EMT, and high-adventure nut who does inclement wilderness survival trips just for the challenge of it, knows his way around the wilderness and nothing in the natural world scares him-- but the supernatural world is another matter. Jed has never again ventured alone into the Ventana.

The Kazuka Man. Now this one is, by far, the most terrifying Ventana legend I have ever heard. That said, I can't tell you much about it-- because this tale comes with a curse. Apparently one should only be introduced to the Legend of the Kazuka Man if it is told in person, after dusk, in the Ventana itself. To share it under other circumstances brings a dreadful curse on both the teller and the listener.

So while I'm not superstitious, I shouldn’t take liberties with your mojo. If you find yourself in the Ventana some evening with locals familiar with the tale of the Kazuka Man, ask them about it. But be ready to have kittens on the spot-- it's that scary.

Old Al Clark's Lost Silver King Mine. When I first began hiking in the Ventana I stumbled across the legend of Alfred Clark, a hermit who lived there in the early part of the last century, tending his silver mine on the south side of Mt. Pico Blanco. The short entrance to his collapsed mine is still there; you can see the hand-hewn timber supports he erected way back in the day and the pile of rubble he collected over a lifetime of excavation, spilled like candle wax from the dark mouth of the mine. The mountain itself has sacred importance; native peoples all through the region believed that human history began on Pico Blanco when Coyote, Hummingbird and Eagle greeted the first humans after creation. Stately Pico Blanco engenders a certain awe and respect among its visitors today, and this was apparently the case in Al Clark's time, too.

Al Clark bet his life's work that the Silver King Mine would pay off, but despite this hope he scarcely eked out enough "wire silver" from the limestone mountain to sustain himself. Years of hard, lonely and disappointing effort took its toll and Al Clark lost touch with the world outside. Only a scattering of settlers lived in the Los Padres in those days, and few people knew Clark personally. Robinson Jeffers once encountered Al Clark while traveling the old coast road by stagecoach. He described Clark, somewhat unkindly, as a haggard toothless hermit who emerged occasionally from the forest to gather supplies. Others described Clark as a wild, solitary and misanthropic man who fiercely protected the Silver King, threatening to shoot those who came near. As far as anyone knows, no one but Clark himself ever did enter into the mine.

Clark did have friends, however, and he shared an amazing discovery before his death in the 1920s. His nearest neighbors, the Swetnams, owned a ranch several miles away, where he occasionally performed odd jobs when the mining was especially poor. One year he came to the Swetnam Ranch for another final purpose. Frail from years of hard work, he had fallen ill and realized he did not have long to live. He told an extraordinary story from his deathbed.

Clark announced that he had blown up the Silver King Mine, and that it was time to reveal a reason he had so zealously guarded it. Although the mine had proved worthless for silver, it contained a strange secret more valuable than the mineral riches he had sought. One afternoon many years back, he explained, he was excavating a deep passage when he noticed a draft of cool air coming in from around a boulder. He dug further and moved the stone aside. Astounded, he held his lantern into a natural chasm. What he found in the abyss amazed him beyond anything he had ever seen.

Keep in mind, now, that this man may have had little or no formal education (although I've also been told he was a rather cultured man prior to his mining hermitage), and much of his life was spent alone in distant solitude from the rest of the world. Geologic science was still young, and Clark would have probably known little about paleoarchaeology. Yet he described descending into a wide, sparkling underground chamber with toothlike stone structures descending from the ceiling and reaching up from the floor. A stream of icy water entered through the top of the chasm and formed a deep pool on the lowest end of the chamber. Clark held his lantern out over the pool and saw pale, eyeless fishes swimming in the abyss.

Clark found that the stream flowed from deep within the mountain through a series of similar chasms connected by tight passageways. Following the stream, he noticed that the ceiling was marked with the faintest trail of gray smudge where the passages grew tightest. Finally reaching the last chamber, Clark held out his lantern and was completely astounded. On wide, tall, dry limestone rock walls were paintings of animals he had never even imagined. He described images of brown elephants with "long curving teeth and manes like lions," herds of antelopes and, scattered around the outsides of these murals, multitudes of human handprints painted in relief.

Understanding that these paintings had been made by native peoples, Clark estimated that they were several hundred years old. But if his story was truthful and accurate, he probably had no idea just how ancient and extraordinary his discovery was. The fact that the most recent native peoples venerated Pico Blanco suggests that this special mountain may have been of great cosmological significance for earlier populations, as well. The elephants Clark described would have been North American Mastodon, creatures that did exist in this part of the prehistoric Americas-- but which went extinct some 15,000 years ago. The earliest evidence of human habitation in North America comes from the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania and radiocarbon dates to nearly 20,000 years ago. Thus, if native inhabitants fashioned subterranean murals of contemporaneous mastodon, these cave paintings would have to be between one and a half to two hundred centuries old. Al Clark's legendary discovery would be among the earliest evidences of native peoples' presence in the Americas, crafted long before history was recorded anywhere in the world.

Even if his tale is true, however, Al Clark's discovery will probably remain legendary. The mysterious painted abyss filled the old hermit with reverence and intensified his passionate sense of privacy about the Silver King Mine. When he realized he was nearing the end of his life, Clark filled the uppermost shaft of the mine with dynamite and detonated it, collapsing the entrance to within several yards of the opening. The mine itself ran deep and far into Mt. Pico Blanco, and it appears that Clark did this to block and protect the depths of the mine and the subterranean abyss rather than to destroy them.

I've personally visited the remains of his mine and have seen where the short opening passage is thoroughly blocked with fallen boulders. Someone apparently attempted to reopen the mine, digging from above to bypass the collapsed section, but to no avail. Old Al Clark knew what he was doing-- the original downshaft may have run a hundred feet deep or more, and if it is also filled with tons of limestone detritus then whatever lies beyond is safe, permanently beyond reach. (With apologies to fellow enthusiasts, these photos are not from Clark's mine; although it's not hard to find, I don't want to give a roadmap!)

Now there is one remote but interesting possibility for rediscovery of Al Clark's underground marvel. Mt. Pico Blanco is one of the region's major limestone deposits, and the bedrock surrounding it is largely volcanic granite. Where limestone and granite meet, one is indeed likely to find caves. And at the time of his discovery, Clark supposedly noticed a draft of fresh air coming from the natural chasm. So, even if an ancient original opening to these underground chambers has long since closed off, perhaps there are still other passages leading from somewhere on the surface of the mountain.

If rediscovery would jeopardize the sanctity of ancient native artifacts, then it would be better if no one ever finds the painted chasm. On the other hand, mining corporations have long had their eyes on the mountain for its limestone deposits. I have even witnessed industrial dynamiting and utility road construction on the mountain. This exploitation is not only painfully disrespectful of this sacred place but could permanently damage internal treasures... and would a mining corporation freely announce that it has found an ancient prehistoric monument in the middle of its mineral claim? A discovery of extraordinary archaeological significance could halt the mining exploitation of Mt. Pico Blanco. But who knows-- it might have pleased Clark to learn that his greatest discovery was ultimately the means to protect the mountain from other miners.

The Albino Raiders. From the mid-1980s through the early 1990s scores of backpackers in the Ventana claimed to have been attacked at night by a gang of albinos who snuck up on campsites, stole food and equipment, and ran away. They tended to prey on lone hikers or small groups of two or three, waiting until the campers were conveniently asleep, self-immobilized in sleeping bags inside tents. If you've ever been backpacking you'll know how hard it is to wake up in the middle of the night, get out of your bag and tent in a hurry, get your boots on and figure out what's happening. By the time hikers trained their flashlights on the visitors, there was little to do but watch them run off into the forest with the stolen goods.

Unfortunately, truth being stranger than fiction, that's all there really is to the story. Why albinos? I have no clue. Why are they in the Ventana? Beats me. And why don't they just ask for some food or batteries or toilet paper? Great question. It's not so much the content of the tale that makes it legendary, however, but the fact that it was reported so often. By 1997 I had personally heard Albino Raider stories from dozens of totally unrelated, pissed off and otherwise credible witnesses. These included incidents occurring as far north as the Carmel Valley and as far south as Big Sur.

Of course, while many hikers encountered the Albino Raiders during that period (and maybe still do, I just haven't heard about it), no one has ever managed to catch or photograph one. To do that, one has to expect them-- and who expects to be robbed by albinos at two o'clock in the morning in the middle of a redwood forest?

The Legend of "Lars!" Okay, this is another of the 'ask them yourself' vignettes, so I'll keep it brief. It's also another one I can't tell you everything about, but for the opposite reason as the Kazuka Man: if I tell you the whole story, you will want to harm me. It's that ridiculous. But if it's true, then the fact that something so absurd happened in living memory is further testimony to the other-worldliness of the Ventana.

In short (although I can't vouch so much for veracity on the basis of personal experience), in the summer of 1985 a kid named Lars got lost out in the Ventana when his troop was hiking out of the rugged little Scout Camp east of Pico Blanco. They looked everywhere for him, shouting "LARS! LARS! LAAAARS!," until the otherwise peaceful forest was ringing with the name.

They eventually heard the muffled report of his bugle, as though it was answering from some far-off location. But every time they would get closer to the sound, it seemed to be coming from somewhere else. (To be fair, deep-forest redwood acoustics are really weird.) After several hours the bugling grew more intermittent. A proper search and rescue team was called in but they had the same problem. By evening the bugling had stopped, and they eventually had to give up searching.

Years later, while performing maintenance on the Scout Camp's primitive sewage system, the Ranger found one of the camp's abandoned underground septic tanks. Opening it up, he supposedly discovered the skeletal remains of a kid clutching a bugle. Lars, perhaps playing hide-and-seek, had uncovered the old half-buried iron fliptop deep-tube "entrance," climbed down inside and got stuck. He slowly used up all his air, bugling for help. So all that time that the bugling had seemed to come from far off, it was really coming from an abandoned pioneering toilet project, underground, down at the far end of the camp.

Anyway, true or not, if you're ever passing through Pico Blanco Scout Camp ask the old-timers about the Legend of Lars. There are a lot of finer details to the story, far stranger yet, that they can tell you.

But here's the best part: Lars' ghost plays hide-and-seek in the Ventana still. Just go out alone into the forest surrounding the camp some summer evening and start shouting "Lars! Lars! Laaaars!". On worthy advice I've actually done this myself-- and I'll be darned if after a few minutes I didn't really hear the mournful, muffled warble of a bugle, off in the distance. Scout's honor.

The Head Whammy and His Mysterious Order of the Hexagon. Okay, so if any of these legends so far is more than you can accept, then you might as well stop reading-- because in 1996, three friends of mine were backpacking in the Ventana when they claim to have had an encounter stranger than anything you will believe.

It was warm midsummer, and they had not seen another soul in half a day's journey along a quiet river trail. A breeze was rolling down from the ridges carrying the smell of wild sage, chaparral, juniper and oak-- it was like backpacking through paradise.

Now, enter the surreal. Around two o'clock, roughly six miles in from the Coast Road, my friends passed two dozen-odd people bedecked in togas and white capes making their way in the same direction up the river. (I hear it was even weirder to see than it is to read about.) They wore big hexagonal sunglasses, green sashes, and carried little wooden wands tucked into their sashes. Two of these characters bore a small trussed pig on a pole carried across their shoulders-- yes, it even had an apple in its mouth-- and two more people walked along either side of the pig carcass, swishing flies off it with little green frayed yucca fronds. They were all very polite, offering greetings and moving aside to let the backpackers pass. At the very front of the procession was a man who looked something like "Exidor" from the 1980s TV show Mork & Mindy. He was dressed like the others but in gray sweats, a white cape and scarf and a wide, green hexagonal disc on his head. And he was playing Pomp and Circumstance on a green kazoo.

I know it sounds unreal, and it certainly may be unreal-- but there were three people there to witness this, and they claim to have seen the same thing. They passed this bizarre procession, dumbfounded and a little spooked out, and made their way on to their destination camp for the evening.

They discussed and thought about what they had seen for some time, offering various explanations for the spectacle until they were gathered around a fire finishing their supper. Then they saw a faint glimmer coming up the river path. They watched as two of these strange characters approached the campsite, dangling candle lanterns from the ends of willowy alder branches. When these people were about thirty yards away from the campsite one of them called out, "Good evening, friends! The Head Whammy invites you to the farewell feast of Dean the Pig!"

The campers didn't say a word. It wasn't that these visitors were scary-- they seemed sincerely friendly-- but there was just no context with which to make sense of them. They repeated the invitation. "Tonight is the Head Whammy's farewell feast honoring our porcine departed, and there is plenty for everyone. You must join us!"

After a few more strained moments one of the backpackers asked, Who is the Head Whammy, and Why are we welcome to his party? The visitors explained (without really answering her question) that the Head Whammy was the leader of "the benign Order of the Hexagon," that they were celebrating the departure of Dean the Pig, and that their code of hospitality demands that all their neighbors come to share in the festivities.

Had any of the backpackers been alone they say they would have refused and probably moved camp. But for some reason these characters seemed harmless, and as a group the campers weren't so cautious. So they grabbed their flashlights and went to check it out.

They say you really had to be there to make sense of it. They followed the two Whammies about a quarter mile down the trail until they came around a bend and saw the whole gathering, with the pig on a fire in the middle of a clearing, carefully edged with clean alluvial stones.

"Ding-dong, the pig is gone!" they all cried with a cheer, and the Whammies each came and introduced themselves to their guests. They offered official-sounding nonsense names like "Orator of the Optic Oracle," "Licensor of the Lycanthropic Lariat," and "Terminus of the Telepathic Talents." The Head Whammy himself greeted them with a verbose but cryptic benediction and urged them to help themselves to roast pork, vegetables and mint tea.

Apparently it was actually a very interesting evening-- the food was good, the people were clearly eccentric but totally friendly, clean and sober. Even the tea was decaffeinated and made only of local herbs (no, no, herbs meaning river mint and madrone bark).

My friends stayed for about an hour, a really bizarre hour. It was impossible to get straight answers about who these folks actually were and what the pageantry was all about, but the visitors got the impression that "Dean the Pig" was not the actual roast pork but some character represented by the pig. The Whammies shared memories about "old Dean, that pig," with a certain mirth-- apparently an inside joke-- so the guests mostly just listened to their surreal conversation. The Head Whammy then began to read literary excerpts starting with an account of otherworldly funeral food etiquette from Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles," pausing for occasional cheers from the Whammies and stopping between chosen excerpts to eat more food and offer random commentaries on the evening so far.

Then at one point the Head Whammy produced the green kazoo and trumpeted a little fanfare. "Twelve minutes until Lucinda Botullini's apocalypse!" The Whammies cheered in response. Again shortly after that, "Six minutes until Lucinda Botullini's apocalypse!" More cheers. Finally he kazooed the overture to Also Sprach Zarathustra-- something I never would have thought possible-- while the Whammies drummed their wooden wands against their cups and plates. He commanded: "Bring on Lucinda Botullini's grand apocalypse!"

A Whammy arose and brought up an empty catering platter, the kind that normally comes with cold cuts from the supermarket. The others came forward with little jars of marinated artichoke hearts, which they opened, strained, and poured onto the platter.

The Head Whammy, uttering some prolonged incantation about "conjuring a delectable delight to commemorate our coniferous reverie" stood behind the platter and prepared the marinated artichoke dish with whipped cream, hot fudge, marshmallows, pineapple, strawberry sauce, cherries, chopped nuts, sliced bananas and other dessert toppings. When he finished he cried, "Behold! What have we wrought?" And the Whammies roared in response, "Hot fudge artichoke delight! Hot fudge artichoke delight!"

They gathered around the platter and feasted on the nauseating concoction while my friends agreed it was time to leave. They thanked their escorts, asked them to pass on their appreciation to the Head Whammy, and quietly ran back to their campsite.

Hearing the stories about this bizarre encounter has left me really curious about these folks. Who in the world are these characters and what is their purpose? What is their relationship to the Ventana Wilderness? And who really is the Head Whammy?

Once again, truth makes the strangest tales of all and there seems to be no end to the strangeness where Whammies are concerned. Other people have apparently seen Whammies running around in the forest doing strange things. A Sierra Club hiker once told me that she ran into to a gaggle of them making a pilgrimage to the Window-- where they blew bubbles, sang Kum-ba-ya, and performed their artichoke ritual. In another case a park ranger directed me to a hexagonal structure out in the middle of the forest, supposedly the Temple of the Head Whammy. He said that the Whammies have been conducting their activities in the Ventana for many years...

2006 UPDATE: Since originally writing here on the enigma of the Whammies, I have had the opportunity to get to know several of them in person and the particular fortune to have befriended the Head Whammy himself. Now I am deeply grieved to state that, after forty-seven years visiting the Ventana Wilderness, the Head Whammy tragically and unexpectedly passed away this July-- only a few weeks after his last great ascent to the Window. He was a colorful and much-beloved part of the Ventana community, and the exceedingly wide circle of his family, friends and enthusiasts has only begun to mourn his departure. He now lives forever among the host of legends which make this region truly magical.

Visiting the Ventana. I can only hope that I've piqued a healthy interest in this remarkable region. If you're an experienced, low-impact trekker, I certainly encourage you to visit the Ventana in person. One last observation will serve you well: of everyone I've known who has been touched by the Ventana wilderness, those who enjoy it most (and most safely) are those with the deepest respect and recognition that we are visitors and guests there. That wilderness is alive, and it knows your heart... but if the trees of the Ventana smile on you, you're certain to have the experience of a lifetime.

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