A California cult blew up Box Canyon. Now the land sells for millions.
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Some of the most well-preserved Indigenous cave art in California is hidden behind the gates of a Cold War-era rocket and nuclear research facility northwest of downtown Los Angeles, completely inaccessible to the public as it undergoes a massive, decades-long cleanup effort. The several-hundred-year-old pictographs, etched and painted into the sandstone near the Chumash and Tongva twin villages of Huwam and Jucjauynga, depict human figures in feathered headdresses, along with images of comets and other natural phenomena. The site was used to predict and celebrate the annual solstices.
A few miles away, a Civil War-era stagecoach road nicknamed Devil’s Slide was so treacherous that horses had to be blindfolded as they traveled north to deliver the mail to San Francisco. And today, a bit farther south, cities like Calabasas, Thousand Oaks and Hidden Hills use the contours of the land to hide mega-mansions for sports stars and celebrities.
You can still find these sorts of collisions of history and culture in the plateaus and canyons of the Simi Hills, a low, rocky mountain range less than an hour from Hollywood along the western frontier of the San Fernando Valley. The region, sparsely populated in some stretches and quintessentially suburban in others, hugs the Ventura and Los Angeles county lines. Different jurisdictions try to maintain order, but up in places like Box Canyon, many folks simply wish to stay off the grid as much as possible. Many of them are “less government” libertarian types, some of them are aging hippies, a handful are soccer moms and wellness lifers — and at least one local claimed to have been a modern interpretation of Jesus Christ, right up until the moment he was blown to hell with a bag of dynamite.
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