The Santa Monica Mountains power couple: Mary Ann and Ron Webster

If you’ve set foot in the Santa Monica Mountains at least once in your life, you may have walked on a trail designed and created by Ron Webster. In fact, it's highly probable you have.

Ron, 83, and the Sierra Club's Santa Monica Mountains Task Force, have worked to make the mountains accessible in a long circuit of different trails that come together as the Backbone Trail. The 67-mile thru trail creates a nonstop route from Will Rogers State Park in L.A. to Pt. Mugu State Park in Ventura County. 

In April, Ron received a Lifetime Volunteer Achievement Award at the 2017 California Trails & Greenways Conference. He was nominated by the National Park Service, specifically officials at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. 

On May 7, he and his wife, Mary Ann, will receive one of the Angeles Chapter's top honors, a Lifelong Service Plaque, for their collective work on conservation issues and trails.

“I don’t believe in a lot,” Ron says, “but one thing I believe in is [that] 'in wildness is the preservation of the world,' " he says, quoting Henry David Thoreau. The words perfectly describe Ron’s mission and his success in making wildness and accessibility his life's work.

The early years

Ron and Mary Ann have been deeply involved in the Sierra Club for decades, having received six awards from the local Chapter, including the Weldon Head Conservation Award in 2012 that they share. 

Their whole married life seems to be a loving personal partnership and a well-oiled working one as well. Ron coordinated trail plans with task force members; Mary Ann served as its chair and dealt with political threats to the land, issues that may be messier at times than trail building. 

Born and raised in northern Wisconsin, Ron was used to spending time in the outdoors long before he moved to Los Angeles in 1960. He soon was looking for ways to get his three children outdoors and active in his adopted home town. His introduction to the Sierra Club came from a coworker who sponsored him to become a member (in those days the Sierra Club required a recommendation to join). 

He started hiking with the Club around 1965, then assisting leaders, then becoming a leader himself. The Santa Monica Mountains at the time were a patchwork of inaccessible private lands and fire roads that did not go very far into the mountains. 

The idea came up to create a Santa Monica State Park, and a task force was created in 1972 to take people on hikes in the mountains to get them interested in protecting them. The monthly hikes led by Ron started as “Sundays in the Santa Monicas” and were even broadcast on TV.

Interest as a national park

Meanwhile the National Park Service had acquired the land that has become Topanga State Park, which was still largely inaccessible to hikers. Recognizing the need for some new trails to bring people into the mountains, Ron wrote to the park service about building new trails.

He was contacted by Bob Stevens, who taught him all he knew about how to build trails using the flagging system: 

" 'Here’s how we build these trails. I tie these flags eye to eye, you see? And you go up to a flag, you put your eye on the flag and where your feet are is where the trail is." That’s how I was trained!" Ron says. And with that, the Santa Monica Mountains Trail Crew was created. 

More trails mean more hikes

By that time the Sunday hikes had expanded to become a weekly hike. The first trail Ron and his crew built -- from Trippet Ranch to Musch Ranch -- within five years, the busiest and most popular trail in the Santa Monica Mountains. 

And the task force, initially created to demonstrate the value of the mountains by building public support, found ongoing environmental problems and concerns in the Santa Monica Mountains. It continues to this day and is more relevant than ever. Ron had exactly the right mindset that was needed to work in the mountains and to withstand the legal battles between environmentalists and developers. 

His goal takes on extra importance, he says, because the mountains are surrounded by a huge city, and thus subject to being targeted by developers. 

Ron says a trail should "lay lightly on the land," and that the trick to building them is to find a right balance between accessibility and caution, to impact the wildlife as little as possible. He and his crew come out every weekend for nine months of the year to keep the work going on different trails. It's an endless job of stewardship and protection.

Since its creation, the task force has acted to preserve the Santa Monica Mountains too. When you build public support by encouraging people to hike in the mountains, you also give them a reason to protect the wilderness from a firsthand side of the hill.

The task force works to head off  developers and builders who want to use the land to build homes, golf courses, hotels or roads that would truly scar the mountain sides. Thankfully, much of the wild land in the mountains is too steep to allow construction, but makes for terrific views for trails. 

Preservation, apparently, is mostly a political fight, with lawsuit after lawsuit determining what should be done with one piece of land. 

Ron and Mary Ann Webster say they "still continue viewing the mountains as a whole," without piecemeal development. By letting some fights go, they have been able to focus on the most important conflicts that have the biggest impact. It's a stance that sometimes puts them in conflict with fellow environmentalists. 

At 83 years old, Ron is still active in the maintenance of the Santa Monica trails, hiking every week to scout and work the trails with the crew. He is very passionate about the mountains and their wildness, and gladly talks about them at every opportunity. 

Trail workers respect Ron, usually hiding it behind jokes and teasing. “He’s a pain in the bum,” says one of the workers in his French accent, “but he knows what he’s doing." 

With no real training but deep environmental ethics, Ron has become a legend in his field, showing how motivation and passion can lead to a legacy. And among all the work Ron has done, he counts his proudest accomplishment as having succeeded in opening the mountains to people. 

“You go through life,” Mary Ann says. “And you contribute or you don’t contribute, but some of the things that Ron’s done are going to last forever."

Maddy Crawford is a Sierra Club volunteer on the trail and in the Angeles Chapter Office. She deeply believes in environmental causes and encourages all to volunteer and make a difference.