High strangeness is said to occur in Black Star Canyon when the sun goes down. Legends of death, darkness, UFOs, and its own Bigfoot have been passed around Orange County for years. While legends aren’t always true, the canyon’s incredible beauty is.
Countless hikers and cyclists traffic Black Star’s trail every week, seeking reprieve from the concrete grid we’ve inexplicably built for ourselves only a few miles away. One must brave the parking area, which is a daunting vestige of the civilization we’re trying to escape. The first mile or so of the trail is very crowded on weekends, most hikers getting only as far as the falls, which are thriving thanks to this year’s unexpected deluge of precipitation. The crowd thins and voices fade as you climb higher into the canyon.
Black Star Canyon was once home to the village of Puhú. The village was shared by multiple tribes from as early as the 1200s. The village existed until ~1830, when, it is told, William Wolfskill led a group of American and Mexican fur trappers in a massacre and destruction of the village as retaliation for claims that the villagers were stealing horses from the encroaching ranches in the area for food. There is some disagreement about whether this massacre truly happened. The claim that the villagers were consuming horse flesh was a common ploy by the Spanish to brand native villagers as savage. Furthermore, archeological digs and studies in the area turned up no evidence of the livestock the villagers were accused of stealing. Fact or fiction, the story of a massacre is a fitting allegory for the oft-brutal westward expansion and boom brought by railroads, vineyards, and citrus to Orange County. A boom that led to the development of the land that reduced our wild spaces. Beautifully, Black Star Canyon remains wild.
As you continue to climb and get closer to the main divide that connects the peaks, travelers pass Beek’s Place. The cabin was built by Joseph Beek, the founder of the famous Balboa Island Ferry, which is troublingly in danger of disappearing, but that’s a story for another time. Once, the cabins were in ruin and wholly abandoned, primarily because the Beek family could no longer keep up with the vandalism, but the property is being restored and now resembles something somewhat livable.
It is easy to understand how the legends of this canyon were born. Despite being heavily traveled and locked in by urban sprawl in every direction, it still feels disconnected. There are times when nobody is around, and the sounds of our cities are only memories, and you truly feel “out there.” Old, knotted trees jut out from the soil, rock formations stare disapprovingly, and stories of a troubled past linger in the quiet, and you begin to open to the strangeness of the place and understand why people hear and see things out here. If only there were more places like it around Orange County.