Mt. Shasta Vista was, well, different

In some respects the Vista was notably different from other rural subdivisions of the region forming about the same time: Lake Shastina (3,200 lots, started in 1968); McCloud area’s Shasta Forest (791 lots, launched in 1966); Juniper Valley subdivision (some 240 lots, founding date unknown); possibly Hornbrook region’s KRCE (2,050 lots, begun 1967; and Hammond Ranch (launched in 1969, some 430 lots).

One big difference, apart from relative water scarcity: the Vista, born a simple recreational development,  never hammered out a master plan for residential growth.

Its ruling documents (CC&Rs, or Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions), were basic and general. Once the place's first few residents rendered the original legal framework inadequate, it spelled almost certain disaster without extensive revision. Such a re-imagining plan was crucial if hoping to provide some avenue for building out with any rhyme and reason, create guardrails to steer the development in an agreed-on direction by firstcomer residents, subsequent board members and other involved owners.

It might've created, among other things, legal powers for the governing board to fine owners for infractions to the agreed on standards (always a two-edged sword), working to assure maintaining some agreed-on quality and style of community. This would've enabled putting a lien on one's ownership title for chronic nonpayment and thus work to establish at least a grudging respect for a local rule of law. 

Without any such overarching plan for residential growth, Mt. Shasta Vista was forever left struggling to swim upstream against strong currents and vagaries of changing residencies. Any efforts by the rotating flock of more civic-minded dwellers over time to transform it from a primitive recreational resort into an actual residential community proved little more than an exercise in futility.

Interest flatlines

As said, with so many parcel owners absentee and seldom, if ever visiting, from the start it seemed most title holders were simply betting on the hoped for actions of a few -- initially the minority of owners who'd actually vacation here and later the even tinier number who'd drop anchor, those who'd naturally be inclined to work to further the place along. Meanwhile they'd sit back and let things progress. Then at some future point they'd either begin enjoying the place themselves or, far more likely, simply cash in and make a good chunk of change for their troubles.

It proved far more troubles than they ever bargained for. Holders were destined to lose heart in droves not long after the development's one promising burst of improvement efforts. By the early 1970s visiting campers and residents-to-be had rallied and pulled together to establish an informal community well, off Juniper Drive. It included an enormous holding tank with giant overhead valve for quickly filling water trucks, and, with a spigot as well, equally served both campers and initially well-less home builders. (Collins, with his usual largess, had sold the association a water truck for a dollar.) About the same time many paid into a fund to get electric power lines extended to lots for their anticipated or already begun dwelling structures. (Covered in detail in part 6.) Also, a long mobile was pulled in in which to hold the initial mandated monthly volunteer board meetings.

Then enthusiasm for group efforts seemed to run out of steam. New residents had switched gears and scrambled to each carve out their own backwoods mini-kingdom.

As earlycomers built the first county-approved dwellings, the place was momentously shifting from shared camp land to the beginnings of actual community -- albeit one spread so thinly amidst the vast acreage, dwellings could appear surreally misplaced to any impressionable visitor. Former interest in enjoying one's parcel for camping vacations no doubt nosedived overnight, as the prospect of pitching a tent within view of someone's living room window couldn't have proved enticing.

The place was becoming neither fish nor fowl.

Fast forward and once various unapproved shelters began flooding the scene, the realm's fledgling legitimate rural community status was gravely imperiled. Without updating the CC&Rs or, at least every would-be resident toeing the line on meeting county health and building code requirements -- made difficult and pricey for the pronounced lack of easy water and power and waste disposal -- the place was at an impasse. It would from then on be stymied at every turn despite whatever efforts were made by the scattered code-compliant residency to continue evolving as some kind of normal, recognized community...or, as time passed, even the faintest facsimile thereof.

At one point early on, the association got it together to appoint volunteer block captains for each of the seven sections. They worked to keep informed of all the goings on in their respective sections, driving around and being apprised of sundry matters by other residents and visitors, then relaying reports to board members to suss over at monthly meetings and deal with if action was deemed merited. This phase of organized local government showed that, despite the unfortunate set of circumstances, there was some sense of community and cohesion among the earliest residency. Even if its primary motivation was likely to try nipping in the bud any blatant code violations, it at least showed a civic-minded spirit that might've served the place well in the long run had it transformed from mere reactive, law-and-order policing into more positive, feel-good avenues of cooperation.

But even such rudimentary grass roots efforts soon all but disappeared, victim of -- as they saw it -- too many barbarians storming the gates and an overwhelmed county code enforcement staff unable to keep said invaders out.

The flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants legal residency soon found itself between the devil and the deep blue sea.

The white elephant time forgot (or tried to)

As a result of the daunting series of snafus and resulting chaos, most outside interest in the wayward development flatlined for decades. After it had outgrown its originally planned use and then stalled trying to segue into anything more (at least by accepted standards), parcel values were lucky to even keep up with inflation. 

The development became an unmanageable white elephant of odd lots. More trouble than they were worth trying to move to the thinking of many regional realtors.

It was perhaps not unlike other failed rural subdivisions California developers had hatched over time. Like the controversial 15,287 one-acre lots of California Pines, outside Alturas. Or California City, "America's Largest Abandoned City," 204 square miles, all platted and roads made, in the treeless Mojave Desert. Like them, the arrested rec-land of Shasta Vista had become another place time forgot...or tried to.

In latter times this suited the few actual few residents just fine. Various dwellers grew accustomed to the rich solitude and relished the park-like setting. So few residents amid so much nature proved delightful. But it was terrible for investors and speculators. They found it hard to sell holdings no longer having anything going for them to entice would-be buyers beyond being cheap rural property with great mountain views. Lands were no longer dedicated to camping yet required huge outlays and serious investments of time and effort if wanting to legally stay more than 30 days a year without being made to feel like squatters on their own property.

It didn't help sales efforts any that the place had from the start gotten such a terrible rap, again, being strongly resented by the farming and ranching locals and seen as problematic by county government. Some supervisors had no doubt sided with the livid, bypassed Martin family members and embittered locals.

They refused to accept as legitimate the unwanted child suddenly squalling in their midst. 

"Just a matter of time"

Many parcel owners held onto their apparent boondoggles even so; in a dime, in a dollar. They doubled down, paying the piper, in the guise of ever-increasing annual road assessments, through gritted teeth, determined not to lose their shirts. As if in denial, they refused to believe their investment wouldn't pay off some day.

After ages, finally convinced the place had zero chances of getting itself together, many at last bit the bullet. As fed up owners scrambled to unload the clunkers, raw parcels flooded the market.

There were often few takers, though. Even at the modest $1,200 to $1,750 asking price and easy terms. Those who did snap them up were often only themselves disinterested professional investors making small side bets on the place by parking a bit of extra cash a while, knowing the right suc -- er, client would come along sooner or later. Others were similarly uninformed casual investors infected with the latest errant round of amateur speculation fever: "It was such a ridiculously low price, I couldn't resist." Or those thinking to maybe enjoy the parcels themselves once the place got itself together, as it surely must in time.

But beyond the calculated dice rolling and optimistic, "some day" purchasing were, again, the relative few who actually wanted to move onto the parcels right away. Some had resources, some not. To all the lots were pure catnip. Among them were those were eager to secure cheap country land to make like Thoreau, living simply and letting the rest of the world go by, some maybe in time building or relocating a home business or punching a clock in town. A few were still willing to build to code and thus fulfill a long-held dream of becoming country squires of sorts.

Others were only looking for an affordable  place to hide out a while on property they could call their own and avoid city rent, with its first and last and security deposit; maybe dodge child support or some outstanding arrest warrant or two. Even if it meant drastically downscaling living standards by hauling in an old mobile home or trailer, or setting up tents, or fashioning ramshackle structures on the fly, generating cesspools (at best) for waste and hauling in every drop of water. All had to either fire up generators or go without go-juice. Even if a power line encouragingly skirted the property, it couldn't be hooked up without first satisfying residential code requirements.

They'd cross their fingers and hope the powers that be would let them be.

Round and round

And so the mirage of a Mt. Shasta Shangri-la, a dreamy backwoods realm undervalued and under-exploited, kept proving itself irresistible to all sorts for all sorts of reasons. As it seduced detached speculators, hopeful investors and would-be residents alike, a predictable pattern of owner relationships with the parcels emerged.

Sporadic cycles of short-lived buying mania followed by long-term absences of any interest whatsoever often became the Vista dance. After decades, hundreds of parcels were -- apart from campfire stone rings and driveways roughed in, sometimes an outhouse or abandoned trailer -- still clinging to relatively pristine states. And so still luring new impulsive buyers, wowed by the land's subtle charms and dirt-cheap prices. Ephemeral fantasies soon abandoned, a long succession of initially jazzed owners and casual small investors over time lost all interest in the lots or belief in their potential profitability. Some parcels no doubt changed hands over half a dozen times during the place's first half century, always attracting a new flock of smitten, powerless to resist such extraordinary land bargains.

As said, the mountain in the place's backyard appeared to emanate a powerful, indefinable force. Those embracing new-age mindsets thought maybe it worked to over-stimulate a person's upper chakras if not better grounded. The thinking went that such people, coming from distant urban places, where lower-chakra energies dominated and upper chakras tended to atrophy, suddenly had imaginations and visualization powers wildly activated. Under the mountain's spell the mind reeled, bursting with fantasies of what all they'd do with their secluded properties, bought for a song.

The phenomenon was, in an offhand way, perhaps California dreamin' full tilt.

So the forlorn development spun round and round on its own short-boom-long-bust merry-go-round. Riders reached out for the ever-elusive brass ring of easy country living or fast turnover profits while select realtors, trying to make their nut moving such marginal properties, supplied the calliope's shrill but hypnotic tune.

Stymied by disinterested, soured speculators

It probably can't be stressed enough: seriously vying with the litany of all other problems -- water scarcity, lack of electricity, absence of development plans, resentful locales putting a whammy on the place, and the high cost of code compliance...on top of all these was the enormous, detached speculative force of a sea of absentee lot owners, many feeling stuck with lemons. It acted to undermine even the most determined efforts of more civic minded residents to try to salvage the place and move it forward onto some semblance of solid footing. 

All other problems aside, how could the Vista ever grow with so much of the 90% absentee ownership harboring such buyer remorse and indifference, apathetic to the notion of ever doing anything to help rescue the floundering development? Not if it meant sinking any more money, leastwise, through proposed special assessments to fund community projects. Not even if such projects might've served to increase parcel values by making the place more desirable to live in and visit.

Countless lot owners had fully disconnected, losing whatever faith they might've ever held for the development's potential to become a viable community beyond the chaotic, sub-standard, infrastructure-shy one it seemed to prefer being.

Nickel and dimed

Those who opted to keep the all but unsaleable parcels despite everything (or tried to unload them but couldn't), along with the latest round of new soon-to-be disillusioned parcel holders, felt burdened with dud properties in a dead-in-the-water rural development. Millstones around their necks. Not another blessed cent would they fork out beyond the mandatory association's annual property assessment and the county's annual property taxation. As it was, the former was often paid only amid much kicking and screaming and whines of "I don't even live there or drive the roads, so why should I have to pay for their upkeep?"

For what it was worth, the annual owner assessment was worlds cheaper than that of other regional rural subdivisions except perhaps down-the hill Juniper Valley's. When the writer arrived in the late 1970s, it was only about $20. a year. (By 2021 it would grow to $219; while having become ouchy, it was still by far among the cheapest.) No matter. They still felt nickel-and-dimed to death. Shook down for the latest assessment every fall, they felt something like trailer park mobile home owners, the structures theirs but forever having to pay rent on the space they perched on lest they get snatched away in foreclosure.

Cynics thought the whole set-up smacked of being some kind of racket.

Left for dead

Perhaps predictably, due to the many absentee parcel holders' pronounced disenchantment with the arrested development  -- "left for dead" in realtors' stark parlance -- the association often suffered from late annual assessment payments and nonpayments.  Initial optimism for the place long ago having evaporated, the wording on annual billing statements grew a bit testy. Key words, in large boldface letters, defied its order for payment being disobeyed: PAY WITHIN 30 DAYS TO AVOID SEVERE PENALTY OR FORECLOSURE. The former lighthearted communication tenor, with its spiels of carefree vacations on charmed lands, had taken on a decidedly hard edge as the board grappled to keep enough revenue coming in to cover the constant maintenance needs of 66 miles of cinder roads that would otherwise return to nature.

Such chilly exhortations only seemed to encourage some to finally blow off paying altogether. They're daring me not to pay, huh? Well, maybe I'll just take them up on that; hell, they can have the damn parcel back...worthless piece of crap; why I ever bought into this screwy lotus land it I'll never know; 'Impossible Acres' would've been a more fitting name for this place...mumble grumble...

Sometimes iffy roads

As more people moved in and the endless cinder roads got more wear, the one-man road crew was often unable to maintain all of them. Not anywhere up the immaculate zen standards of earlier years that made the roads so pleasant to drive on at a mosey and drink in the tranquil scenery -- and so inviting for mischievous kids to gouge deep donuts in with their dirt bikes. Regardless, one good gully-washer of a rainstorm could wash away the cinder topping and cut hazardous mini canyons in the sand underneath on downhill stretches of a road even if it had been nicely groomed just the day before.

Again, this is turn caused various owners to protest paying for roads that weren't kept up -- leastwise not theirs -- the lion's share going to the most heavily trafficked. And the most problematic, like the steep quarter-mile uphill stretch of Perla Road in the front of section 13, often gobbling thousands of dollars a year to maintain. Sparsely settled and non-settled regions might not see the road truck for over a decade -- and then often only because some visiting owner who'd driven hundreds of miles to vacation here only to get stuck in deep sand on the home stretch and forced to call a tow truck. Rightly furious, they held the association board's feet to the fire, demanding they cover the tow bill. This at last would bestir the board to address some of the more seriously neglected roads within the realm's least visited hinterlands.

Problems like these surely didn't make for happy campers.

This was in dramatic contrast to the first visiting owners who'd relished camping on their lands and, later, those moving onto them with infectious high spirits. It was, of course, during extraordinary "God is alive, magic is afoot" time of the late '60s-early '70s. A time when waves of euphoria might wash over one out of nowhere even if your drug of choice was only aspirin or a good stiff martini.

Raise high the roof beam, carpenters

As mentioned, many Vista lots were fairly pristine. Some bore old rotting stumps from lumberman Abner Weed’s harvesting the area’s mature pines in the early twentieth century. And bulldozing needed to make the new networks of roads marred the fronts of some lands. (The KRCE development was born similarly, recycling tree-harvested lands into rec lots to solitude-hungry city folk.) But many parcels, largely left undisturbed for ages, possessed a rich, fragile ecosystem. They felt enchanted to any who appreciated their charms, those who didn't always need towering trees and crystal streams to embrace nature. The land held inviting groves of mature junipers, furry green lichen growing on shaded rocks, riots of tiny colorful wildflowers in spring and early summer, occasional stands of pines and dramatic rock outcroppings, sometimes perched on by mountain lions on the lookout for small deer parties that meandered through.

All lent select areas something of a rarefied atmosphere. It could feel like the place time stood still.

Fresh high-desert air, balmy sunshine, profound quietude and a giddy sense of freedom for being in such secluded back country, reigned over by the majestic mountain...all combined to inspire psyched repeat vacation visits from afar. Enough to eventually move some to want to chuck city living outright and retire here, free to enjoy the tranquility and seclusion of country living full-time. Thus, in the late sixties and early seventies the place indeed  briefly became something of a Shangri-la to every nature-loving retiree who'd made the leap and had the bucks to build to their accustomed comfort level (happily, more or less dovetailing with building code requirements).

Legend had it the very earliest comers in the late sixties -- among them one building on White Drive, another on Heinzelman Drive --  hadn't even needed building permits to construct their simple cabin and full-on home, respectively. Code enforcement had yet to establish a foothold in the more remote hinterlands of the sparsely settled, rural county. If true, this maybe set a precedent energetically for subsequent owner-builders to feel they needed only their own permission to build on their remote lots. And the building department was stuck forever playing catch-up, saying in effect, "Hey, you do need a permit now...no, we mean it. Seriously..."

No more sketchy subdivisions

Between 1970 and 1972, California passed a flurry of landmark regulations covering future subdivision formations.

 “...[A] new attitude of comprehensive planning and environmental protection emerged,” noted realty attorney James Longtin. The Vista barely got in under the wire before vast regulatory changes made it impossible to any longer spin out such bare-bones, quick-buck, often problematic rural developments.

From then on developers were required to make legally binding commitments to provide all basic infrastructure...plus, over time, they or owner association directors spring for public improvements like parks, playgrounds and community centers. It seemed that our place, though grandfathered in under the earlier, ridiculously lax requirements, came to feel pressure from the county -- in turn under the gun of the state -- whenever a law-abiding owner wanted to build an approved shelter on their one-time camp parcel.

As said, would-be Vistan homesteaders jumped through all kinds of complicated, time-consuming, expensive hoops to earn the right to live on their lots...the first and perhaps most daunting being, before anything else, bringing in an approved well...often a fairly deep one...sometimes a really deep one...and hitting water... hopefully good water. Plus oftentimes also having to pay a small fortune to get electrical lines strung to one's property to power the pump.

Who’d want to live in the middle of nowhere?

To build or not build community

Maybe county officials had crossed their fingers, hoping there'd never be any who, for some strange reason, actually wanted to live on raw, bone-dry lots out in the middle of nowhere. For each new building permit okay-ed would mean several long time-consuming drives to inspect and sign off each of numerous completion stages. They had better things to do.

Jumping ahead decades and residents had better things to do than work on building any dubious community. The polarized energies discouraged it at every turn. Bowling alone was in. More people seemed to move here expressly to do their own thing and be left alone: hermits united (or disunited). They'd at most often only reluctantly try working together. A visit to a monthly board meeting, where the place's often buzz-saw contentious dysfunctionality was on full display, offered a quick cure for anyone with a misbegotten notion to plug in and help the place along. Any vision beyond the usual volunteer fire department and rummage sales and such to support it, maybe seek a grant to fund making the area safer from wildfires, often just didn’t seem to go with the dirt-cheap lots with near-zero infrastructure. One paid dearly for those added features in more developed subdivisions -- paved roads, electricity, water, gas, sewage, security, fire department... When you bought land cheap, expectations of community could be low to nonexistent. Some people bought here expressly because of the lack of community.

Not so Vista’s cash-rich, starry-eyed pioneers of yore, of course. Bewitched by the region’s allure during simpler times enough to invest their time, fortunes and fondest hopes, they were stoked at the prospect of working together to carve out a nice rustic retirement community for themselves and any who might later be interested. An upscale hideaway sanctuary, far from the madding crowd. As a song lyric went, they wanted to believe they were “...going where the living is easy and the people are kind."

Kind of something, anyway.

______________________________________________

"Welcome all!" 

vs. "up the drawbridge!"

Some new Vista residents felt blessed. Swept up in the joy of service and the grand pioneering adventure of it all and living in the bosom of nature, they were eager to share their good fortune with new arrivals. They'd offer cheerful assistance whenever they could, wanting to see their fledgling backwoods community grow and flourish. Each new arrival in the sparse settlement was potentially a valuable addition.

Often these more altruistic souls were residents of homes that original inhabitants had moved out of once, er, the thrill of Vista living was gone. Newcomers hadn't experienced their ordeals of complying with onerous health and building codes, the willful vandalism by irate locals, or "illegal" residents kicking back hard to the former owners' efforts to get rid of them. They were more in the moment, relaxed, live-and-let-live, even inviting one to share an afternoon 'drinky-poo' on their shady porch.

Instant homestead

Not so others, mostly the first wave of residents. Strictly law and order adherents, they were a tad less egalitarian. They wanted to pull up the drawbridge post haste. They'd erect huge snarly warning signs everywhere, determined to keep the riff-raff out.  They’d majorly bank on Siskiyou county residential-code enforcement, whose public-service staff salaries their property taxes paid, after all, to duly protect their rural outpost from getting overrun by any misguided souls so brazen as to try invading their would-be respectable wilderness paradise on the cheap...especially revved-up younger folks of threadbare means...most especially pot-smoking hippies and beer-guzzling bikers that they thought they'd at long last left behind.

They knew such lot buyers would be worlds away from ever embracing their convention-locked, law-abiding, retiring ways and so would be devastating to their tight structured order of things. Thus they took on a sea of trouble. With a flinty insistence they demanded every property holder earn the right to live on the land  just as they had. They had to first meet all health and building code requirements, no matter what the cost, time or effort involved. If you couldn't afford it or didn't want to go down that path, well, the place obviously wasn't for you.

When various and sundry indeed started moving in on the cheap, they went bonkers. Pretenders to the realm -- erecting their tents, pulling in derelict mobile homes and building tumbledown structures and hanging their hats, figuring they were home -- had them fit to be tied. The brazen newcomers, in turn, appeared oblivious or indifferent to what a few scattered residents, now foaming at the mouth, thought of their sudden threadbare presence. It was "Mind your own business and I'll mind mine and we'll get along fine."  And many didn't seem at all concerned over the county ordinances they were either ignoring or in blissful ignorance of. It seemed that being out in the middle of nowhere on such secluded cheap land could dull one's perception to any felt need to conform to the T

The growling No this, No that signs were dismissed as largely bluff. Newcomers went their merry way,  "doing their own thing", that watch phrase of the rebellious countercultural era becoming more popular with each passing year, people leaving the times' fading, over-rigid law-and-order mindset behind...or trying to.

Whenever being rudely reminded otherwise by unpleasant confrontations with compliant residents gone nuclear or the soon-summoned, all-business county code enforcers, it did little to make them want to ever comply, perhaps even if some could afford to. The law-and-order firstcomers, bent into pretzels and spitting-nails mad in their struggle to preserve their La-la-land-ish, country club enclave, had such a zero tolerance for the scofflaw newcomers trying to sneak in that more free-minded land buyers, scoping the tight-wound headspaces, said screw 'em, we'll take our chances.

While it was all most unfortunate, it was the way things were. The modern day pioneers -- who'd diligently crossed every 't' and crossed every 'i', making substantial investments in time, money and sweat -- established residency requirements they fully expected every future would-be resident of Mt. Shasta Vista to likewise follow. Suddenly it seemed such rules didn't even exist.

Almost overnight, their one-time safe-haven backwoods retirement community started turning into its own madding crowd.

Some of those of lesser means and more or less law abiding -- who'd nurtured hopes of living their own, simpler version of idyllic country living but were poorly informed and had no inclination to try bucking the system -- found their fondest dreams dashed to smithereens on receiving an antagonized 'unwelcome wagon' visit by a delegation of crazed, overbearing hardasses who swooped down on them out out of nowhere and read them the riot act.

Others, thicker skinned and far less concerned with ever complying or rendering unto Caesar in general, dug in and kicked back.  One time, a unsanctioned neighbor with pronounced combative tendencies had been given his walking papers. He responded by tracking down the current board president and aggressively tailgating him for miles along the otherwise empty back roads. While the man was no doubt alarmed, maybe even terrorized on looking in his rearview and thinking he'd somehow gained the ire of a crazed madman, some might say he was only reaping what he and earlier board members sowed.

Home in the country

By the early to mid 1970s, after the first wave or two of settlers had settled following the few late sixties' early birds, a sprinkling of maybe thirty or so year-round, mostly compliant residences were dotting the landscape. While the code defiant had yet to gain a substantial foothold, momentum was growing. The genie was out of the bottle about the cheap remote Mt. Shasta lands. Various and sundry began leaping at the chance to make the Vista’s boonies their home too. In the bigger picture, the notion of not just visiting but actually living in nature was taking off. “Head for the hills, brothers!” was the clarion call as more and more city-weary, nature-hungry souls of all sorts joined the back-to-the-land movement then in high gear.

As interest grew in making  an exodus from city living, the Vista gained the air of a sort of time-release Oklahoma land rush. In leaps and bounds, excited new arrivals of all stripes began settling here. Or trying to. With the place having no master plan for development, each was winging it, flying blind on arrival to their snapped-up bargain lot. The land experienced fitful frenzied bursts of shelter construction, some to code, others not, sounds of hammering and whining circular saws flooding the air. Writer guesstimates that by the mid to late seventies maybe sixty to eighty residences of varying degrees of ambition and legitimacy were sprinkled among the roughly seven square miles of juniper and sagebrush backcountry. 

Those choosing to ignore code requirements, playing it by ear in the mad scramble, were intent on getting a toehold established while the getting was good. It was always harder trying to tell someone they couldn't be there once they'd built a shelter and moved in, fenced off their property and posted No Trespassing and Keep Out signs. It was territoriality writ large.

With so many hypnotized by the land once it grabbed them, eclipsing any more practical concerns, a strange wonderland, at increasing variance with mundane realities, seemed to emerge...despite the most dedicated efforts of the core of older, code-compliant residents busy going berserk trying to nip things in the bud.

CC&R revision?

It's unknown if some of the heavily invested first wave ever gave thought to trying to get the CC&Rs revised by a law firm. Conceivably this might've enabled an orderly growth into a standard community, one in which things were spelled out so each would-be resident knew the score. Before doing anything more than visit, one  would fully realize they were expected to put in an approved well (or share one with up to three adjacent residents); pay to have power lines extended if needed; and install an approved septic system -- all before becoming eligible to apply for a county building permit...and then fully conforming to the exhaustive health and building code requirements. The procedure would've assured the place established a solid footing and thus remained a 'respectable', law-abiding community that might eventually gain at least a grudging respect from the surrounding community.

A moot point, of course. With 98% of the property owners absent and living all over the nation, many already beginning to nurse serious buyer remorse, such residents would've realized they could never muster the needed two-thirds vote to tackle such a monumental and costly legal re-structuring move. And heck, they were retirees; their days of heavy lifting were done once the building of their homes was a done deal.

Bogarting Shangri-la

A more cynical view might've held that the founders, while realizing building full-on homes amid a sea of raw vacation parcels was bound to create certain problems down the road, didn't much care. They had theirs for whatever remained of their time left on earth. They'd earned it, by golly, after a lifetime of hard work and then having conformed to every last nit-picky, pricey legal residency requirement. So, stoked on the territorial imperative, they'd bogart the realm to the hilt, let the chips fall where they may. Their attitude was basically "Too bad if you can't afford to live here and build to code like we did, but the law's the law." Then later, while still loaded for bear even though realizing the system was spectacularly failing them, "And if we can't get you out, we'll at least make your lives a living hell."

For better or worse, the emerging neither-this-nor-that place was essentially left a blank canvas. One to be painted on and painted over and painted over yet again by whatever the latest in an ever-changing succession of residents aspired the Vista to become (if anything). Each among the more dominant and involved of current inhabitants advanced their own notions of how the place should be. They tried convincing others it was the best or only way to go. The situation was not unlike excited children building sandcastles on the seashore...until high tide rushed in and erased even their efforts. Then, later, new castles were built by others, likewise unmindful of the next high tide. Or like creating an image on an Etch-a-Sketch, then with a flick of the wrist even the most elaborate designs were shaken away, returning the screen to blank. 

While homebuilding efforts ostensibly fell within the bounds of county, state and federal authority -- ordinances and codes the development and its eventual co-owners were legally obliged to conform to as conditions for the place being greenlit -- these were never easy to enforce by the sparsely populated county's undermanned staff tasked with oversight and enforcement. A tiny dwelling amid the sprawling, 66-mile labyrinth of private unpaved roads, out in the middle of nowhere, was not easy to track. Or even be aware of existing without pouring over satellite photos. Or, as it happened, through outraged code-compliant residents burning up the phone lines reporting every last noncompliance infestation and demanding swift enforcement action to eradicate it.

It was a tall order. With the heady sense of freedom living in such secluded back-country enclave lent newly rusticating dwellers, compliant and outlaw alike -- often no one else living within a quarter mile or more  -- something of a pronounced libertarian, even anarchistic, spirit emerged. Especially among the more rebellious, minimalist lifestyle baby boomer crowd that, fast on the wings of earlier waves, had felt so irresistibly pulled to the mountain. They'd discovered plentiful dirt-cheap parcels for sale in a sleepy buyer's market, as more and more property holders cut their losses and shook free of what had turned out to be the worst investment they'd ever had the sorry misfortune to get involved in.

Parcels were going a dime a dozen. Eager buyers didn't stop to wonder too much why they were going so cheap. It maybe struck them as being one of the few remaining bargain land deals around and they'd been smart enough to latch onto them.

Doing one's thing

The free-wheeling spirit of some might’ve been fine had the place from the start built a solid foundation of infrastructure support and appropriate CC&Rs. But it didn't. Cheap land really could create cheap intentions. The place's recreational use had run its course and the disparate crowd of settlers pouring in were bent on going their own way and being left alone. Certainly, few if any longer bought into the de facto retirement community with its rigid mindset of how things should be. During the radical late 60s to early 70s, as different ages, headspaces, lifestyles, incomes, awareness levels, land-use intents and respect for rule of law were all thrown together into the cookie-cutter wilderness of a subdivision, it could seem the only common ground cultivated was agreeing to complain about each other.

It's probably fair to say that it was the unwillingness of many to build to code that, more than anything, became the deal breaker that prevented the place from ever segueing into your standard community. The resulting rebellious spirit would tear to shreds any of the place's threadbare social fabric and embryonic community sense, sparking a long pitched battle between the dutifully code compliant and mutinous code breakers. The former viewed the latter as illegal residents deserving the bum's rush; the latter viewed the former as uptight power trippers with too much money and a serious need to chill.

But all factors had combined to make for a place so festering with irreconcilable differences both within and without that it seemed it never had a ghost of a chance. A place built on such shaky footing -- lacking water, electricity and supporting CC&Rs; 'What building code?' attitudes and an overwhelmed county's inability and/or unwillingness to effectively enforce it; a place rife with contentious energies aimed at it by embittered locals, resentment it even existed baked into the place's very inception...all seemed to guarantee that whatever elusive hopes civic minded residents and property holders over time held to try turning the place around were forever doomed six ways to Sunday.

The board: hardball with a vengeance

Reflecting, sometimes magnifying, the place's many woes was the owner association's board of directors. Formed to fulfill the ongoing needs of the nonprofit corporation -- mostly road maintenance -- it was required by the state to meet monthly and normally was composed six volunteer elected members, each serving in staggered, two-year terms. Since all members had to live in approved structures to be eligible, the board naturally led the charge in declaring war on noncompliance in a struggle to save the fledgling backwoods community from degenerating into wrack and ruin. 

Universal health and building code compliance was also critical if one ever decided to move on and wanted to sell their place at a decent price.  Eventually realizing their ship was indeed sinking, their outrage was magnified for touching the money nerve, realizing they'd lose out on getting any decent return for all their hard work and expense in creating legal residences in now questionable neighborhoods.

Infuriated board members, reporting flurries of violations, determined to bust anyone and everyone not in strict code compliance, created a stony legacy of scorched-earth overreach and hardball action. Building a fence without a permit? Report the bugger. In the course of such hell-bent efforts, they alienated everyone who hadn't made similar serious investments to comply. Or even sometimes those who had bought compliant homes from those who did, having misgivings for having moved into such a disaster area in which it seemed everyone was gnashing their teeth. For decades the place experienced a mini reign of terror. Various board members went about with at times balls out ruthlessness, doing their damnedest to try stamping out the plague infesting the one-time law abiding backwoods enclave.  

Such intolerance made the place more than a tad less desirable to live in. It scared off even your like-minded, would-be-code-compliant owner-builders from settling, especially on hearing war stories from spitting-mad residents, or getting grimaces and rolled eyes from building department workers the second they mentioned the place's dread name.  

While time ultimately proved code conformity battle a lost cause, a whack-a-mole effort that did little to stem the rising tide of scofflaw building, it was  a cause celebre -- "the law's the law" -- a hardline stance that swept up everyone into the polarized fray, or tried to. There were no innocent bystanders. Those who refused to take a stand -- "Sorry, we didn't move out here to get mixed up in local politics" -- were scorned as do-nothing enablers and so part of the problem.

The enforcement system they'd depended on was failing them. It was allowing barbarians to storm the gates and stay. Shocked over their shattered dream once the regulating efforts proved mostly ineffective, they'd come to take a certain grim satisfaction exacting a pound of flesh from every transgressor they stumbled on, threatening dire consequences if they didn't toe the line. Even when they knew such threats were now largely empty, they must've felt expressing such open hostility might work to make at least some feel so unwelcome they'd want to start packing...if only to get away from such "neighbors from hell", most of whom lived miles distant.

Indeed, a few of your more unwitting transgressors, having no stomach for such ugly confrontations, promptly gave up and moved on, disillusioned and devastated. Those who at least vaguely knew they were courting trouble, left mumbling, "Oh, well, it was worth a try." Yet others, having thicker skins and more rebellious natures, dug in hard. They escalated right along with the enforcers, daring them to do their damnedest. They'd fence off their places and post their own gnarly signs. One of the more chilling: underneath a cross-hairs symbol were the words "Fair warning. You're within range."  Some actually seemed to enjoy taunting the enforcer crowd in a cat-and-mouse game.

There was yet another reason for having manned the battle stations, Klaxon horns blaring to wake the dead. Being a nonprofit mutual benefit common interest corporation, the Vista's board of directors was legally mandated by the state to make a good-faith effort to have association members abide by all county, state, and federal codes, laws and ordinances. Technically, they could be held liable for neglecting proper enforcement efforts; board members conceivably could be sued.

As if to show there could be no doubt they weren't shirking their duties, the board reported each and every infraction that their ongoing policing investigations uncovered.

Short of extra-legal vigilante efforts, the place was, again, fully at the mercy of county authorities to keep things on track...or, once that boat had sailed, work to make things right again. The board had no legal enforcement powers, so, as taxpayers, they demanded the stretched-thin county enforcement agencies address the problem and return the realm to 100% code compliance. For what earthly good were laws if not actually enforced?

Failing that, at least it'd all be on them. (Then maybe they'd get sued.)

Instantly radicalized

While each land buyer signed an agreement to abide by all governmental laws, regulations and ordinances on purchase of their parcel, it was of course buried in the boilerplate sea of legaleeze fine print. As mentioned, beyond the more blatant law breakers of latter times were those who, in the rush to pursue dreams of tranquil country living, had remained blissfully unaware they'd ever agreed to any such thing. They were shocked, then, when told, often with fire-breathing intensity, how you couldn't do this or that and don't even think of doing the other thing. People started to feel foolish and misguided in trying to settle in what had at first seemed a delightful and charming place but for some strange reason had gone off the deep end.

It could radicalize one against the local powers that be in an instant.

The more cash-strapped, instant sanctuary sort of newcomers only knew they'd snagged an affordable piece of rural California and were psyched to do their own thing and be left alone come hell or high water. Maybe over time they'd try for a well; maybe not. They'd connect with kindred souls who right away advise them, "Just ignore the board; I do -- hell, everyone does; it's a toothless tiger, just a buncha retired power-freak busybodies with nothing better to do than try telling others how to live. Screw 'em and the horses they rode in on."

The very nature of any good-sized rural subdivision, its crazy-quilt of lots tucked away out in the boonies, could be problematic by its very nature, even with supporting infrastructure and CC&Rs. While it enabled any so inclined to buy a bit of rural land affordably -- rather than going bust shelling out for, say, a pricey stand-alone 20, 40 or 80 acre parcel and then have to deal with road access and maintenance on their lonesome -- the hidden costs could be steep indeed. One found themselves living with a potluck assortment of strangers concentrated together in the middle of nowhere and mandated by law to cooperate, yet isolated from the high-density town and city lifestyle that had made the same plethora of rules and regulations feel normal. Now it felt intolerably oppressive.

It was that same crowded, super-regulated urban reality that many wanted to get away from and led them here in the first place. 

Sharing the fantasy

The fact that people wanted their own land and to live closer to nature and be a more respectable distance from one another made it difficult to warm to the reality of others sharing the land around them, despite a far thinner density than your typical urban environment. While you often couldn't see another house from your property, lending the illusion you had the area all to yourself, everyone, for better or worse, was inextricably bound together by the legal structure and its sundry edicts. Again, it was like a bureaucratic, intrusive city mindset superimposed on the untamed countryside.  As a result, thinking that the place offered independent country living at times could feel little more than a cruel illusion.

Steve, a late neighbor -- whose manner of speech bore striking resemblance to actor Sam Elliot --  once told the writer, "People need to learn to share the fantasy."  While many could feel like they owned maybe 20 or 40 acres or had at the least had one heck of a buffer zone surrounding their parcels, they perhaps needed to allow others to enjoy the same sense by being considerate and mindful of their well being needs as well as their own. Otherwise, the potential for ceaseless territorial squabbling and indifference to the rights of others could result in a chaotic, wild-frontier climate that ruined it for everyone.

The Vista's laundry list of neighborhood grievances at times was a formidable one.

Between barking dogs, roving packs of same, discharging firearms, blasting stereos, gunning engines, driving too fast and/or recklessly, vandalizing and stealing road signs, burning toxic materials in backyards rather than hauling them to the dump; tree poaching epidemics; juvenile dirt bikers roaring around on devices loud as chainsaws, making donuts in the roads and tearing through the unfenced lots of absentee owners; roadside littering and flagrant garbage dumping, letting winds blow one's property detritus to the four corners with zero concern for degrading the environment...  Between all of these there was always something to raise one's hackles.

In sheer frustration, residents forever complained to the largely powerless board, mostly to no avail. And to county authorities, who in turn were often so caught up in the swamp of slow bureaucratic procedure and reflecting an older populace's set ways that they themselves might also feel powerless -- and/or disinclined -- to work to try resolving the place's constant plague of problems. Or, among the more benumbed and burned out on elected public service, be well practiced in the art of the two-step avoidance dance in response to constituents' wails of "Can't you do something?!"  It seemed the buck never stopped anywhere, instead circling endlessly: "Well, unfortunately there's not a lot we can do"; "Sorry, but it's not my problem"; "You see, it's complicated"; "You might give Neighborhood Watch another go", "You could try suing"...

Beyond a certain element in local government hostile or indifferent to  the Vista's plight, possibly it wasn't so much supervisors and code enforcers not caring per se as it was, again, the county's rural population embracing such a relaxed, stand-alone country lifestyle. Some in government beyond law enforcement simply seemed to lack the disposition and inclination one cultivated living in more stress-filled urban climates to grab the bull by the horns and pursue thorny problems such as those routinely faced by residents living out in the boonies and eroding the charm of country living.

And, critically, they depended on the vast majority of residents to be law-abiding citizens. The rural county didn't have the public treasure to enforce its own ordinances, should enough -- for whatever reason -- chose to ignore them.

If so, they could quickly find themselves in deep doo-doo.

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​

Subdivisions not organic settlements;

no community center

For anyone whose imagination took a surreal bent, it might've seemed the state, in approving such rural subdivisions that each county then dealt with, was perhaps employing social scientists conducting some sort of weird social lab experiment. Like they wanted to know how many strangers could live together in the middle of nowhere and deal with state-imposed mandates before it drove them all nuts. "Hey guys, I think we have a new contender here."

Most people moved to the country for peace and quiet. To enjoy fresh air and quietude, to live more simply...and be left the hell alone. They didn't want to deal with any blasted bureaucratic mandates and so did their level best to ignore them, even if the downside was possibly encouraging an infusion of a scofflaw element attracted to the place as a promising hideaway. Some might say the very word 'subdivision' handicapped such developments from ever thriving, the very word sounding so, well, divisive.

Historically, when a settlement was founded by one or a party, it evolved over time; yhere was an organic process at work. New residents gained a sense of belonging and measure of empowerment and engagement within the slowly growing community they each played a role in. The Vista, in stark contrast, was founded by a realtor who lived six hundred miles away. He had every last bit of land cookie-cutter-platted into 1,641 lots before the first buyer ever set foot on them. It was his creation, such as it was, designed to be no more than shared recreational parcels. So, when it later began seguing into a would-be community, residential growth was chaotic. It lacked -- forget infrastructure -- crucial cohesive growth guidelines, self-determination and the abiding pride of any 'home-grown' community.

Vista's iffy situation was made iffier still by various former residents in time renting out their residences once the bloom of Vista living was off the rose. Such renters had zero say in how the place was run as far as board eligibility, even if in time one might've felt a strong vested interest and wanted to get involved and help the place along. At least, more than joining the volunteer fire department or do fundraisers for it.

The problem, once again, was enormously exacerbated by the legion of disinterested absentee parcel owners who'd long constituted over 90% of association membership, dwarfing the number of actual residents. They held equal voting power on any proposal. To many of the speculative, it was a gone-sour investment. So they'd scream over every cent of annual due increase, right along with many actual residents who'd become indifferent to the, by then, outlandish notion of lifting a finger (beyond the middle one) to help out the wilderness condo. Management was supposed to take care of everything and parcel holders paid their salaries. Even some long-established parties, having their own social scene wired, thank you, and having become well aware of how much the cards were stacked against the place, discarded as naive, if well-meant, pipe dreams any civic-minded ambitions for the Vista to pull itself together.

A prime example of how vast the lack of cooperative spirit could be: One day in the 1990's, dozens of unwanted-orange, plastic bagged phone books were dropped off below the mailbox complex -- or pushed off the box top to the ground by an irate resident -- at the busy Juniper Drive entrance. While it created an eyesore for everyone driving by, for over a month no one ever bothered to deal with it. The disbelieving writer (who didn't live in that part) held off, waywardly fascinated by such monumental indifference. (Finally I gathered them up and recycled them.) No doubt many had grumbled to themselves, Someone ought to clean those up, but of course never thinking to be that someone. They perhaps got a perverse rush raking the board over the coals for being so discombobulated it couldn't even deal with such a simple matter.

A more far-reaching example: In 1981, indifferent association members gleefully shot down a proposal made by then board president Eric Prescott. He'd envisioned The Vista building a modest multi-use community center on one of the hundreds of empty lots. for the mutual benefit of every resident and owner-visitor, at a time when the place was really starting to grow. Even though it would’ve only involved a modest extra assessment for two years to fund, the project cost being spread thinly among so many parcel owners, and undoubtedly would’ve benefited myriad over time, fostering a comforting sense of community and increasing lot value for the sea of absentee land holders, the owner majority chorused their favorite refrain: "Not One Cent More!"

Home free?

Many embraced the persistent, fond illusion that once they'd bought the land, except for annual property taxes (some no doubt not even aware of that persistent reality) they were home free. So they took strong exception to having to feed the parking meter, as it were, every year for road maintenance on roads absentee owners never even drove on lest their property get towed away by the Mt. Shasta Vista Property Owners Association for resale to the next likely equally clueless buyer.

Not that there weren't also absentee owners who, despite all, treasured the land and the elusive hope its promising early beginnings might re-blossom. But such hope faced the constant headwinds of a hopelessness born of long-entrenched indifference by the majority. Some maybe entertained wistful notions of moving here someday once it somehow, finally, miraculously, redeemed itself -- or perhaps even as-is and hoping for the best. And a few others still enjoyed periodic camping retreats on more secluded retreat properties located far from busy arteries and the established homes clustered along the few power lines, often relatively close to the blacktop.

But it seemed the overwhelming majority -- jaded residents and disillusioned absentee owners alike -- had grown terminally apathetic to the notion of ever trying to improve the place. That is, not if it meant one more penny pried from wallet or purse.

Some doubtless thought a portion of their annual assessment could go towards funding whatever civic improvements the more community-minded thought might help the place along. But the budget was almost always stretched to the breaking point over the high cost of maintaining the 66 miles of roadbed. Plus, the board was repossessing parcels that couldn't be resold readily and so their annual county property taxes was now covered by the association, eating into available funds. Then there were vandalized or stolen road signs needing frequent replacement (back when that was still done in an at least semi timely manner). And skyrocketing insurance rates. And thorny legal matters with potential lawsuits, requiring keeping a pricey attorney on retainer. And...

Disinterested association managers &

board presidents with conflicts of interest

In the 1980s, the association started shelling out for the annual salary of a professional association manager. Things had grown too complicated and time-consuming for volunteer board members alone. Most were unversed in legal matters to grasp the intricate procedures in running the development according to Hoyle once the state legislature in 1985 enacted a flurry of new regulations for subdivisions with its Davis Stirling Act.

But it would add insult to injury when, over time, such salaried managers (we've had two) -- whom residents might, not unreasonably, assume would work for the good of the place, helping preserve the Vista's relaxed livability, keeping residents' best interests at heart -- themselves speculated on lots. Or worse, actually brokered lot sales serving as a realty agent on the side, eventually to parties intent on turning aforesaid tranquil lifestyle upside down and inside out. 

And while some, maybe even most, board presidents kept the well being of the residency in mind, balanced with the valid concerns of the many absentee parcel holders, one (who shall remain nameless) was part of a realty outfit aggressively working to turn over parcels. It later ramped up and exploited the frustration of hundreds of stuck property holders by mounting what in time was a successful campaign and making a bundle by recycling parcels to buyers with ready cash yet obviously expedient intentions. She long held that the right of a property owner to do with their lot whatever they wanted trumped any consideration for the well being of the community as a whole. 

Though the development was technically a nonprofit public benefit corporation, at times it instead seemed such a callous, for-profit, make-money-anyway-you-can-off-the-turkey, hustling enterprise by many involved it beggared belief. 

No there there

Many residents, having low expectations going in, accepted the fact there wasn't more there there. Nothing beyond the trees and sage and simple roads and signs. Maybe even relieved, as it suited some just fine. Various parties were simply using the place as a temporary perch, planning to move on when something better opened up. Again, to the thinking of many, trying to create community awareness and involvement seemed to hold negative potential for becoming an intrusive force spearheaded by a bunch of bored, power-hungry busybodies hellbent on trying to tell others how to live. Such a powerful negative spiral at play prevented any brief-lived virtuous cycle from emerging more than it did.

Many people that the wayward realm could attract seemed of an unconventional bent. They'd moved here to get as far away from over-complicated, peace-eroding bureaucratic urban forces as possible and yet still not be too far from town. As a late section 13 Pilar Road resident, then president of the Siskiyou Arts Council, said of the place during a public radio interview, "We live out in the middle of nowhere and we love it!"

Those who'd dutifully conformed to code requirements, or bought places that had, ostensibly had greater peace of mind with which to enjoy them for being dutifully law abiding. But even those who hadn't and were hunkering down hopefully under radar likewise seemed to feel they had an inviolable right to enjoy their parcels any way they chose and not be hassled -- possession, after all, being nine-tenths of the law -- even while blatantly ignoring any laws and ordinances that didn't suit their fancy and seemed unlikely to be enforced.

Handy place to perch

The Vista, an arrested subdivision that had spectacularly failed to segue into any sort of normal community, an embarrassment of empty lots and increasingly unenforced health and building codes, struck all kinds of burnouts from urban living as a dandy place to perch. Cheap and remote. But not too remote. The compliant among them could enjoy simple stand-alone country living, while the non-compliant could more than likely get away with not conforming to code,  perhaps suffering singed feathers at worst. Both paid the mandatory annual dues (usually) and as idle pastime demonized the volunteer board as the source of all ills. With a shortsightedness the place seemed to cultivate, it was THE fly in the ointment preventing any more carefree country living.

The most cynical felt the board setup was bogus. Probably illegal. Corrupt as hell anyhow. "Someone oughta sue", "Why I ever moved here...", "This place would be just fine if it weren't for...", "they can't do that", ad infinitum. Unfounded rumors of board members dipping into the treasury were rife.

Though such gnarly energies weren't always evident, it could often feel that way. There were in fact respites, pleasant lulls when the dread fire-breathing beast of contention seemed to slumber. During such more peaceful times -- especially in magical spring weather -- a  laid-back spirit prevailed over a land that felt richly blessed. Grateful people relished their solitude amid sunshiny,  largely unspoiled nature. All was well with the world. A tenuous live-and-let-live attitude almost seemed to prevail, denizens so used to the place being dysfunctional it felt normal.

But such contented times could seem few and far between.

Perennial joker in the deck

While there was something that made everyone feel like the king or queen of their own regal rustic wild realm, their own little backwoods hideaway bought for a song, one had to continually tune out the joker in the deck: the unending battle over code compliance. It could make said royalty feel more like would-be serfs, nonconforming residents under the yoke of would-be oppressive overlords who'd met county legal residency requirements and, duly vested in upholding law and order, were relentless demanding others do the same or else.

Alas, this joker, like a rude Jack-in-the-box, kept popping up, crimping the lives of non-complying dwellers during the long intolerable years that roughly spanned between the mid 1970s and the mid 1990s. While domains tucked furthest out along the endless back roads often had so few inhabitants they might've imagined their digs more like pioneer homesteads of yore -- rather than any dratted modern-day subdivision parcels, subject to a slew of nit-picky, spirit-stifling rules and regulations -- the latter sooner or later showed up to put a decided damper in one's day.

Some board members and their cohorts, their fondest hopes for the place in tatters and, consequently, minds unhinged and drunk on the limited power being a board member bestowed, were running amok like so many little T-Rexes. They'd try wielding absolute authority over the domain with barred teeth and razor claws, intent on terrorizing any hapless inhabitant who had the unmitigated gall to try living here without first paying the piper.

Fast forward and the latest board members, though still hostile to  the non-compliant in their midst, became at least semi-resigned to suffer the now seemingly unsolvable situation. Board meeting attendees, many mindful the tragic legacy of Shangri-la lost, could sink into deep depression. And even with its once iron authority now rusting away, residents could still feel that one couldn't do diddly-squat without first getting board approval -- and then grow old waiting for it. ("Matter tabled til next month, yawn; motion for adjournment?")  Same thing if one wanted to start a new volunteer service to help out the place.

Example: at a meeting held in then-president Bonnie Jolly's living room, the writer volunteered to become unpaid custodian for the subdivision to deal with road litter epidemic despoiling the countryside. Though they formally voted me into the position, it was strange. It was almost as if they were sleepwalking. They wouldn't address any details of the post, like supplying trash bags, or dealing with dump fees. I 'quit' my imaginary position before I started, knowing I needn't say anything to anyone, as clearly their hearts weren't in it. Burned out volunteering the board operation, they wanted to do no more than cover the routine, thankless, calling-it-in matters like road maintenance. (I 'd keep gathering road litter on my own, as did a few others likewise concerned.).

The way board members could possess such a tired, defeatist, no-can-do air, some residents tuned out their existence and tackled things as they saw fit. Like setting right a road sign that was struck and precariously listing or repairing a stretch of road in front of their place rather than wait months going through stupifyingly sluggish official channels.

Apathy and a sense of hopelessness in the place was so epidemic, at times it felt like we were like a half-sunken ship, with only the will to bail just enough water to keep from going completely under.

What rules?

Jumping back to earlier, intolerant years again... Despite the seemingly gone-bonkers board throwing its weight around and on constant red alert, remote circumstances had still somehow lent a tenuous assurance one could do (or should be able to do) whatever they wanted on their land. No uptight board lacking credibility and legal fining power or getting any more thorough enforcement response from the county could stop them.

Private-property rights were sacrosanct, after all. With more scofflaw dwellers blocking from mind the reality of being part of any external world's bothersome rules, the mundane reality of needing an elected board of directors to take care of business simply didn't register. It just felt too invasive, too arbitrary, too self-defeating to the very reason people moved here.

Again, the illusion of anything goes manifested in great part due to the vast majority of raw-parcel owners living far away and rarely, if ever, visiting their lots. To actual dwellers they held no more than an easily tuned out phantom presence. Inhabitants had come to view the thousand-some vacant, undeveloped, seemingly unsellable parcels almost as some sort of permanent common park lands; each dweller was sovereign over their own inviolate mini fiefdom of two to three acres, plus a luxuriant buffer zone to equal that of one land-rich.

On the subtle, though, some residents, beyond the board members who were in contact with them, must've vaguely sensed the absent owners' displeasure over how the place had become such a dead-in-the-water, dysfunctional development. One with firewood-selling tree poachers raiding absentees' unprotected lots, sometimes even harboring actual squatters. Though perhaps having no one to blame but themselves for being such suckers as to buy into an obviously ultra-problematic place without first doing do diligence, it was easier blaming the residency for appearing to not care diddlysquat about the sorry situation.

Whether or not one sensed this yet one more pernicious force, on one level absentees' combined ire over the dismal state of affairs added to the overload of contentious energies at play. Though subtle, it might gnaw at a resident's peace of mind no less than the in-your-face, code compliant dwellers waging war on the many and sundry non-compliant.

Early pot grows and vigilante episodes

inside the intractable tract

In the early 2000s, one of the few residents then furtively growing illicit cannabis to sell on the black market before pot laws were further decriminalized found himself with new neighbors on Starling Road. They were keen on doing the same thing. Wanting to avoid increasing the likelihood of bringing unwanted attention to his own operation, he persuaded them to leave by promising violence in no uncertain terms if they didn't.*

_________________________

*California had, of course, legalized medical marijuana in 1996, first in the nation. In time, before it legalized recreational pot in late 2016 and changed the game rules yet again, a few enterprising Vistan residents had pooled together scrip from the sea of registered medical marijuana 'patients', entitling them to grow six plants a year for each. In effect, it let them grow up to 99 plants and technically still be in compliance with state law before triggering possible federal interest if growing more.

Reportedly, after 2016 this 99 plant figure later would become the tacitly agreed-on limit, barring any filed complaints, by a seemingly overwhelmed (and/or under-motivated or empowered) county sheriff's department for illicit commercial grows. The six plant limit the state specified for all but licensed commercial grows would be gleefully ignored by the flood of later growers and, eventually, even the 99 plant limit. (The civil misdemeanor fine was the same whether growing 30 or three thousand plants -- $500.) 

Siskiyou county, for what little it seemed to matter, would decide not to allow ANY commercial grows in the unincorporated county, i.e., beyond incorporated city limits. A town's people would have the option to vote to approve legal commercial grows and sale dispensaries or not; the towns of Weed (of course) and Mt. Shasta both would.

The Vista's few early state-legal grows no doubt would help set the stage for later developments, proving yet again how the relatively remote place was forever an irresistible draw to all sorts, for all reasons.

_______________________

Between a critical handful of your more anarchistic-leaning residents ignoring any and all rules and regulations interfering with doing whatever the hell they wanted; a county seemingly throwing up its hands, abandoning the place as a lost cause and, later, deleting its residency code enforcer position for years; and radicalized times in general -- between all these, respect for the rule of law in the Vista could get on pretty shaky ground.

More examples: as mentioned, some less than civic-minded entrepreneurial residents, as well as invasive outsiders, routinely poached trees from vacant lots to sell as firewood, cutting down scores of standing snags, sometimes even felling living trees, including some of the few mature pines that long graced the region, leaving unsightly stumps and slash piles on once-pristine parcels. (A forestry department rep once showed the writer a regional map with a rash of hundreds, if not thousands, of red dots, each dot representing an illegal cut.) Another party set up a huge dog-rescue kennel on unimproved, treeless land in section 21; neighbors up to half a mile away suffered the endless barking of the unhappily caged residents, often baking in the sun, for over a year until the operation was finally shut down.

Bolder souls tried taking the law into their own hands. When a resident towards the top of White Drive discovered a surveyor had made an error decades earlier on his lot boundaries, he tried to close off the major through road outright with a sign-posted gate -- despite it being ages too late to legally remedy the error. One scofflaw neighbor who regularly used the road didn't think twice when encountering the sudden barrier: he backed up his bad-boy truck and smashed his way through, problem solved.

Yet another neighbor, furious over certain parties routinely roaring by his place, raising clouds of dust just to tick him off, one evening furtively dug a slanted trench across the road. That night they sped by as usual, promptly lost control and ran into a tree. Walking back, stunned and furious, to confront him, he shot at them, missing, and was later arrested. On another occasion a resident, seeing red on learning his outlaw neighbor was hitting on his young teen daughter, descended on the culprit's land late at night while he was known to be on vacation in jail. The father and others he rounded up then proceeded to wreck and loot the place to a fare-thee-well. And when a Black man briefly occupied a vacant stone cottage on McLarty Road and was discovered by the owner late at night, the latter held a shotgun on him for some 40 minutes until the sheriff deputy finally arrived.

Obviously the place's auspicious start during simpler times, with its relatively homogeneous, convention-minded, law-abiding dwellers all sharing a warm bonhomie, had long ago sunk in utter and complete oblivion.

Blame it on the mountain

One could maybe in part blame the energy of the massive mountain for residents not working any better together. Through its natural force field, vortex energy, or whatever one felt it emanated, it was, as mentioned, thought by some to stimulate one's upper chakras. While initially revving up one's wildly visionary imagination, in time it could pull one meditatively inward. Bolstered by the development founder, who as fellow camper in the early years also relished the freedom to do whatever wanted on the land (within prevailing law-abiding limits, of course), the mountain's influence could work to make one feel their parcel was a veritable Fortress of Solitude.

Long after the honeymoon camping years faded into history and increasingly casual, quasi homesteading took off in earnest, people in the 1990s for a while actually campaigned to get voted onto the board. While some no doubt hoped to somehow mellow the place -- maybe willing to turn a blind eye to unenforceable county ordinances if residents were otherwise peaceable -- hoping to make the best of a bad situation, others, still grinding the ax over blatant code violations, were still loaded for bear, bound and determined to reinforce the now age-old, wary hardline stance on unsanctioned dwellings, illicit dwellers, and pretty much anyone who even looked at them cross-eyed.

This relatively community-active period passed soon enough. Fast-forward a decade and the place was so overwhelmed with non-compliant, often anarchistic, sometimes outlaw, residents that it entered the dispirited period of pronounced civic indifference. A lawless air, in good part perhaps only reflecting the times' high national crime rate, was punctuated by helpless wails from the code compliant of “What’s happening to this place?”

Lost in a fog, we'd become a ship at sea without sail or rudder, aimlessly adrift. "Water, water, everywhere / nor any drop to drink." 

Rambunctious Whitney Creek

This, even as in supreme irony residents periodically had to scramble to keep snow melt and mud out from next door's seasonally running, sometimes rampaging, Whitney Creek that flooded parts of  the adjacent section 28 lowlands. The Association had long ago sued the Forest Service for allowing the course of the creek -- actually more a snow melt wash -- to be diverted towards the new subdivision by removing a dam built above highway 97 by people in the area that later became Lake Shastina and who no longer had need of it -- or even wanted to deal with it.

The ensuing periodic floods washed out vulnerable Vista roads and adjoining parcels. The development won the suit, and the quarter-million dollar settlement went to funding the massive earthen berms, still along Buckhorn Road and Rising Hill Road, to protect the place from future flooding. Between summer bulldozing efforts to repair erosion from previous year's water action and the creek cutting new courses through the silt now and then, it was mostly diverted out of harm's way.*

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* But not always. In August 2022, part of the berm was again breached after prolonged, record 100 degree weather generated extraordinary amounts of snow melt (plus likely glacier melt), flooding land on both sides the of berm and prompting a Code Red evacuation alert.

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Bored writer joins the board

In the early 2010s, after over 30 years feeling little fondness indeed for the board -- at times being demonized by some of its members in return, short fuses being common all around  -- the writer warmed to the notion of actually serving on it. At the time volunteering for the board had hit an all-time low. It was hard-pressed to fill out more than three of its five seats, three being the legal minimum needed to legally conduct essential business, like approving road maintenance outlays.

They weren't too picky about who volunteered just so long as one was a code-compliant resident. If not rallying, the place could go into dread state receivership as a failed subdivision and face monumentally unpleasant and costly consequences. As I was one of only a few who even sporadically attended monthly meetings, one evening in 2012 I got roped into serving on it as secretary by president Pamela Simpson before I even knew it.

While it turned out the development's actually defaulting was never a serious threat, it had at least flirted with such an ignominious fate from time to time. It could feel like no one at all cared what happened to the place. No one appreciated or respected how various residents were volunteering their time to try to meet the state's mandate to help the place along by doing what needed to be done. Or were jaundiced over the whole structure of the place and the state mandates hamstringing Vista livability. For all their troubles, volunteers were vilified as power-crazed busybodies.

With so many members -- resident and absentee alike -- routinely damning the board or at the least being supremely indifferent and non-supportive to it, all but its more determined and thick-skinned members burned out fast, becoming either overwhelmed, jaded and/or embittered in record time. Those who hung in could, over time, become charred remnants of former selves, sleepwalking through meetings, but, like a dog with a bone, determined not to let go of the reigns, for fear no one could or would could replace them and do a credible job. Indeed, from time to time the board did attract volunteers who had shameless private agendas in mind to use the place to their own best advantage or who idly sought some dubious prestige being a member might bestow without having to do much work for the honor.  

As the writer was to learn, the board's pressure-cooker meetings could be detrimental to one's peace of mind. One had to be in full psychic armor, as it were, ready for battle if some outraged resident attended to vent his or her spleen. Or, alternately, endure soul-crushing boredom.  And one could sometimes be made to feel like cannon fodder, if, for instance, told by the manager to sign a stack of legal foreclosure papers on property owners who'd given up on the place or were in dire financial straits, or both.

One struggled to rise above the endless sea of paperwork and dry formal meeting procedure -- endured in the cramped, cold-fluorescent lit firehouse backroom -- if hoping to accomplish anything one might conceivably be proud of. Spirits usually were subdued, sometimes to the point of our seeming to be in clinical group depression. It was as if everyone felt the thankless grand futility of it all, but plugged away anyhow out of a misplaced sense of civic duty.

All is futile...

born under a dark star?

No doubt like many well-meaning board members before and after me, I'd hoped to somehow help turn the place around. The situation just seemed so ridiculously depressing, so needlessly downbeat, so all-is-futility. Surely it wouldn't take much to break free of such a dispirited operation. While some of my eventual newsletter features and editorial write-ups seemed appreciated, the boat had, by then, not only left the dock but sailed half way around the world. The die was cast. The dismal course was set. The key lost. Barring some miracle, the situation appeared so irreversibly dire it was purely wishful thinking to imagine members could ever pull themselves out of the hopeless quagmire we found ourselves in.

We were dinosaurs stuck in a tar pit, lamenting our sorry fate.

Though mindful visitors over time might've sensed the land's special healing qualities -- some overnighters reported having the best dreams of their lives -- cynics, not without some justification, came to dismiss the beleaguered realm out of hand with a sneer: “No water, no trees, nothing but desert and rattlesnakes.” It was just a cheap, substandard rural bedroom community; a hideout for hard-drinking loners, small-time growers and spaced-out nature freaks; maybe a few more respectable, hardworking residents hoping to play out their elusive dream of idyllic country living and obviously having built in the wrong place...

The way so many came to routinely slam the place, one might've thought it born under a dark star, a wicked witch’s cauldron boiling over with gnarly contention. Any effort to reverse its dismal destiny was folly. Resistance was futile.

A bit of esoterica:

Vista's astrology and cardology

Those into astrology might appreciate the celestial forces at work the day the place legally came into being, November 3, 1965. This calendar date was the birthday of TV's Scorpion Rosanne Barr, along with football's Collin Kaepernick and actor Charles Bronson. Some might say the resulting brooding, super-wound energies imprinted on the development at its moment of birth practically guaranteed the place would always be a tad on the intense side. (Lightening the mix, both Mars and Venus were in nature-loving Sagittarius, along with a compassionate, dreamy Pisces moon.)

Then there's cardology, the study of planetary influences forming a unique DNA signature for each day of the year and symbolized by a playing card (some days sharing the same card). Its 4 of diamonds birthday, according to the book Cards of Destiny by Sharon Jeffers, created "innate restlessness, possible dissatisfaction with what one was doing," and could make one "...a dreamer who doesn't always allow dreams to become reality."

The last surely fit the Vista to a T.

Perfect storm

Somewhere along the way the once openly shared, carefree vacation land had reached a critical tipping point, a watershed moment. It passed the point of no return. Scofflaw residents were determined to do their own thing, and hundreds of landholders with buyer remorse had little or no interest in the place except to cash out. The scene got so sketchy, next to no one was any longer building to code. (Why bother when the county dropped its residential code enforcer position and a code-built place couldn't fetch much in the realty market for being in such a sketchy place?) All these daunting factors, heaped together along with all the rest, would converge over time to create the perfect storm.

The coalescing situation was already letting any so inclined have a field day pursuing whatever dubious land uses they might dream up -- junk yards, dog kennels, meth labs -- for being off private dirt roads, tucked far away from all but the prying eyes of maybe a few nosy neighbors. No matter such dubious uses upset the peace and quiet and country solitude of those compliant who'd dropped anchor for and invested decades of blood, sweat and tears in establishing homesteads. The wayward realm was, clearly, becoming anything goes.

Without any more pro-active, harmonizing force, one with at least a semblance of community concern and respect for the rule of law, a lawless spirit was gaining an outsize influence over the place. The majority of less invested residency, used to the place being dysfunctional -- a quirky, low-key hideaway with a powerless board and unresponsive county authorities -- either couldn't, or wouldn't, read the writing on the wall. The place was leaving the door wide open for even greater calamities.

One didn't need the omniscience of 20-20 hindsight to realize that by the early teens two things were crystal clear: our lotus land was a rudderless ship left vulnerable to drifting into perilous straits; and residents either didn't care or felt powerless to do anything to safeguard an enviable rural lifestyle. 

It was taken for granted.

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Further reflections on peculiar 

 Mount Shasta Vista's first 50 years  

Knowing where the Vista came from could go a long ways in understanding where it went. Had the place’s metaphorical foundation, as it were, gone full circle? First tents and trailers, set on sand; then evolving to conventional homes, built on rock; then going sideways to trailers and makeshift shelters --  set on sand once again.

Whatever happened, all along the lack of water played a major role. Klamath River County Estates (KRCE) landowner Will Jensen, long ago reporting in a blog covering an exhaustive search to find the ideal rural home property with inspiring Mt. Shasta view, noted, “No matter who we talked to we were warned away from Mt. Shasta Vista...we were told repeatedly that Mt. Shasta Vista was bad for wells…”

To try to remedy the chronic water shortage, in the early 2000s a few solution minded residents applied for a government grant to fund their proposed centralized water distribution system. It was rejected, deemed too much effort and expense to help too few. (More on water situation in part 6.)

Back to the ‘80s

By the mid 1980s Vista’s resident population had grown to maybe 150 or 200 residents. Scattered over the vastness of some seven square miles of high-desert woodlands, it was still a mere sprinkling; the development was still worlds away from even beginning to get built out. Dwellers still felt like land barons, especially if on parcels far from the relative concentration of structures amid the few power lines -- and the highway.

Some city owners were seemingly addicted to paved roads and adverse to the idea of rugged, shiny, all-terrain pick-up trucks getting dust on them and so could't get into driving five miles over often narrow, winding cinder roads to reach properties in the furthest reaches. A half mile of country backroad was enough to endure and not fret about ruining the latest car wash. It seemed the desire for seclusion was outweighed by the desire for easy and fast in and out. So, between the sparse dwellings, some clumped near to each other, others scattered in the deep hinterlands, there was a grand buffer of over a thousand empty parcels. This lent many regions a decidedly tranquil, park-like ambiance.

No matter how much pristine land one might’ve enjoyed, though, it seemed a dangerous undercurrent forever lurked just below the surface. One that could jam one’s peace of mind and ability to any better experience the elusive joys of country living. Between the region never accepting the place and the hellbent resolve of imperious code-compliant residents waging war on code violators, one always seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop. Even if one was compliant, an almost palpable tension could fill the air. On the subtle it felt like one was living in a crowded tenement, angry landlord pounding on the door.

It was one of the grand ironies of living in the Vista. Either you detached and became philosophical about it all or you found yourself perhaps over-identifying with artist Munch’s screamer.

It would drive more than a few to drink.

Missing word sank efforts

About 2012, a way overdue effort was launched by some of the more civic-minded residents. A committee  was formed to try to revise the woefully outdated CC&Rs. Not overhaul them, but at least tinker around the edges to try to make them a bit more relevant. After much slow sledding, a glitch in a progress report sent out to everyone promptly sank all efforts. The pamphlet cover’s title was supposed to read: “Proposed Changes to Mt. Shasta Vista Bylaws”. The all-critical first word was, of course, left out, making the changes sound like a done deal.

This prompted a barely peaceable pitchforks-and-torches crowd to storm the next monthly board meeting. Residents who normally avoided meetings like the plague came out of the woodwork. They suspected the forever maligned property owners board was trying to stage some sort of coup.

Long and winding roads;

part-time Whitney Creek revisited

While you had your own private parcel, the modest annual ‘road dues’ assessments were, again, deeply resented and even contested by those not getting their own roads better maintained (if at all). Various absentee owners, as said, had added to the chorus, claiming they could barely reach their parcels located in more remote and unsettled regions because their roads hadn’t been touched in ages. Most-neglected stretches could develop deep dry pools of tire-grabbing, quicksand-like silt, so bad AAA tow trucks eventually refused to come out to rescue trapped vehicles after once getting their own rig got stuck in turn and a monster tow truck having to be called in.

It didn’t help matters that summertime neighbor Whitney Creek, rambunctious when temperatures soared to 90 or 100 degree F. weather and melted a heavy winter's snow pack, could cut new courses and flood its banks. It once actually put most of Section 28 under nine inches of water, forcing an evacuation and making regional TV news. The worst of the many floods over time until a massive earthen berm was finally built, it washed away some area's roads so badly the board abandoned them outright and eventually bought the parcels of those who could no longer reach their parcels short of driving a Hummer. They figured it was cheaper than having to keep rebuilding the remote, little used roadways. Three-fourths of Rising Hill Road, southernmost road in the Vista, no longer exists, and the area is still vulnerable to flood. Delivery people and first-timers using an obsolete map probably still get confused, looking for the phantom road.

Train wreck of a place

Vistan parcel holders by and large were a frugal lot: bought the land cheap, moved in cheap, wanted to keep things cheap. Many had stand alone inclinations. It seemed futile to even try to build a sense of community with such a bare-bones, ornery social climate. The situation was (yet again) seriously compounded by the sea of absentee owners who kept parcels as investments, then came to feel their holdings as an albatross about their collective necks for the ouchy annual assessment fee and chronic sleeper-market conditions. Their disenchantment with the place further arrested any inclination one might have to try to pull the development out of its discombobulated straits.

At some point, having no legal foundation blueprints with which to build any standard community, the place, caught between a rock and a hard place, simply shorted out. It was a broken development that first-time visitors routinely dropped their jaws over. It was such a spectacularly failed, "left for dead", train wreck of a place, set amid otherwise often charming backwoods, that it struck many as surreal. Like some long abandoned film set for a budget Western gathering mothballs in outdoor storage. Or as if maybe the place had grown too big for its britches, trying to rise above its lowly station born to, and was paying the  price for its rank impertinence.

Those who had early on built code-approved homes -- almost everyone who first moved onto the land -- were pragmatic in assessing the situation early on. They knew it would take everyone following health and building regulations and working together if the development were to continue be a standard community.

Once people started moving in on the cheap, whether displaying innocent "Hey, I'm just building a little vacation cabin here, it's no biggie" airs, or more defiant, "Whadarya goin' to do about it, hee-hee?" attitudes, no matter. They knew their one-time retirement hideaway faced mortal danger. With residents dishonoring the rules, Its very survival depended on the county stepping in with no-nonsense code enforcement.

Failing that, the place was toast.

Still a nice place to live, kinda sorta

Over time, the realm -- now a broad, haphazard mix of approved living structures and unsanctioned, makeshift dwellings and derelict trailers -- stabilized, of sorts. It became perhaps not too unlike a quarter-risen cake that stopped rising in the oven, partially collapsed, dried out and solidified. Though caught between worlds, it was de facto recycled, its residency becoming a bit like hermit crabs, moving in among the abandoned rec land shells. Many and sundry came to consider it a nice place to live, despite all. Sure, it was a failed subdivision, but it was our failed subdivision.

Living in the Vista was like wearing a comfy if disreputable-looking old pair of sneakers yet to develop any worrisome holes in the soles.

No such kind regard was felt by most of the now some eighty percent of property holders constituting the absentee membership scattered all over the nation. They were clearly not enjoying the land. Some, possibly hoping for a miraculous turnaround, had, as said, clung to title deeds for decades, gritting their teeth and doubling down, shelling out each year for upkeep of roads they never drove on lest their land be repossessed -- as countless hundreds indeed were over time.

This churn rate of lot ownerships created extra billing time for the salaried manager processing the sea of legal paperwork, driving up association dues plus generating quick commissions for expedient realtors who kept low-keyly offering the embarrassment of beleaguered lots as sleeper land steals to the gullible and undiscriminating land-hungry. They often didn't have to say a word; the remote dirt-cheap lots with fabulous views and exceptional seclusion sold themselves.

Meanwhile, absentee parcel holders, like characters in Waiting for Godot, stood by, waiting for values to rise so they might finally lose the clunkers at a decent profit. Or the place finally got itself together beyond its sketchy schitzy state so they might enjoy the lots, too.

Beginnings re-visited: 

ten-cent parcels with million-dollar views

Earliest campers in the newly formed wonderland savored it like fine wine. In spring the realm delighted the eye with surprise splashes of lavender, purple, red, and yellow wildflowers. Rich lichen moss on aging and dead junipers seemed almost magical, dazzling the eye with its bright, near-phosphorescent green. After rains the pungent earthy scent of damp juniper and sage was mother nature's perfume.

Abundant wildlife included deer, jackrabbits, cottontails, plentiful birds, ever-friendly and curious chipmunks, less friendly polecats, porcupines and, yes, rattlesnakes; a rare mountain lion and other wildcats; tiny, endangered kangaroo rats with their impossibly long tails, hopping about at dusk...

The place's first vacationers returned home refreshed, anticipating next year’s visit to the shared wilderness hideaway and all the improvements they’d work on during rendezvous with friends new and old, eager to make the new private retreat nicer for all.

Seldom heard: a discouraging word

The early parcel owners gathered at night to enjoy campfire get-togethers. Coyotes sometimes yipping up a storm in the distance no doubt time-warped the more suggestible back to the days of the Old West, prompting spontaneous choruses of “Home on the Range”, "Red River Valley" or maybe "I've Been Working on the Railroad." And they enjoyed daytime potlucks and barbecues under the unfailing majesty of Mt. Shasta’s northern side, offering such staggering views that local photographer Keven Lahey would later race over to snap spectacular, almost surreal, lenticular clouds flying off it, or an impossibly huge one hovering above it like a mothership.

Judging by the writings in the association's twice-annual Vistascope newsletters, visitors shared euphoric waves of feelgoodness that swept the land during those rarefied purple-haze days of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s (along with gnarly uprisings, wars and protests, of course).

...and the saucers flew by-y-y all night

Even if one was a hard-line Nam war hawk, hostile to the emerging counterculture with its sometimes outlandish, convention-jarring, free-minded ways, spirits ran high...no doubt aided and abetted by their own mind-altering drug of choice, alcohol. And the group buzz might’ve been further heightened by something quite extraordinary: unknowingly copping a contact high from parties aboard the then-frequent UFOs sighted darting about the mountain and nationally reported on.

The embryonic community might have gained a rarefied super-charge from curious advanced extra-terrestrial beings checking out the singing earth people camped out on the mountain's then still sleepy side.

Dreamland

To any susceptible to the subtle charms of the land -- magnified for being under the mountain’s spell -- it was a nature lovers’ paradise, one new parcel holders naturally worked on to make the place nicer. Light-duty cinder roads were immaculately groomed by the membership’s workhorse road truck, flowers planted at highway entrances, the welcoming archway lifted up. As recounted, group civic improvement efforts seemed to peak on establishing the de facto community well and extending power lines to parcels that owners had committed to drilling approved wells as the first step to gaining residency. (Covered in depth next part.)

It’s said in metaphysical thinking that the imprint of earliest inhabitants on a land establishes a subtle vibration signature it then forever resonates with -- no matter what might later happen on it. If accepting this as possible... Prehistoric indigenous people had seasonally hunted game here but didn’t settle, probably over lack of water and not daring live so close to such a powerful and sacred mountain. Beyond them and the isolated first white settlers on the land ,like Eli Barnum by Sheep Rock in the 1850s and later hunters and livestock grazers, it might be said that the first major indelible imprint on the land was made by none other than the modern-day-pioneering Vistans in the mid to late 1960s.

If true, they bestowed on the land an euphoric, industrious, conservative yet somewhat topsy-turvy energy, a DNA signature the land henceforward always resonated with, even if getting buried under the surface by future events. (Another example: often wild, free-spirited San Francisco: reportedly in nice weather its first inhabitants loved nothing better than to roll about in the mud and then run around naked.)

Apart from such possible influences, whenever a mindful visitor unwound and tuned into the land they could sense a pronounced soft, almost-otherworldly dreamland quality about it. In spots beyond earshot of highway wash, no jets droning overhead or rumbling train in the distance, the land held a profoundly deep quietude. One might've felt they actually heard the earth breathing. Repeat visitors and residents alike, once adapting to the at first sometimes eerie silence, came to embrace the tranquil realm like a long-lost lover. (Explorers of Pluto Caves, just beyond one of the Vista's border, might've experienced something of this etheric quality.)

Naturally, the dreamy atmosphere came with a downside. Tenuous new residents, wowed by the woodland parcels bought for a song, could get so caught up in rich fantasies that they never integrated being here with doing what was needed to be done to get things legally squared away and so give their brainstorms a chance to actually manifest. Instead, they remained just so many pipe dreams that the region's rarefied energies seemed to inspire.

Over time countless one-time owners came and went, happy bubbles burst after a few months or years of either ignoring or being ignorant of the mundane realities created and enforced by the powers that be, which legally obligated  any would-be resident to first establish a certain standard of living...until they were suddenly shocked awake like a bucket of ice water over the head.

It was phenomenal. The serene, almost mystical land kept grabbing newbies as affordable and enchanting, getting them wildly enthused over wondrous possibilities, until -- like a 'Star Trek' television episode where the landing team finds a planet that at first appears a wondrous paradise -- they're disillusioned to discover its fatal flaw.

A fine place by George;

speculations on why things went so south

Developer George Collins, smitten by the land's subtle charms no less than other earlycomers, actually joined vacationers during the first visiting-only years.  He became the glue that held the place together, being midwife, cheerleader, first board president and daddy moneybags all rolled into one. He informally pitched in with funds and resources to help the place along at every turn. “...I consider myself privileged to be a neighbor to each and every one of you,” he said with apparent sincerity in an early newsletter, going on to wax poetic how the place was “...our home away from home, our frontier, our Shangri-la...there should be a constant flurry of barbecue parties, coffee klatches and just informal get-togethers all through the year.”

While he might’ve only developed a bare-bones recreational subdivision -- one lacking critical infrastructure to facilitate ever growing into anything more and causing endless headache and heartbreak for countless of the latter-day would-be community -- at least he wasn't just some disinterested land developer who took the money and ran.

He was central in the place's beginnings on so many levels that other property owners undoubtedly got used to the place being in his capable hands. To some degree they maybe became something like passive land tenants, dependent on him to do whatever needed to be done,  "Let George do it"  effectively became the response to any matters cropping up. He was in essence the place's benevolent overlord, doing all the heavy lifting, sparing everyone else the bother. In return, he was acknowledged as the main man by his willing, grateful subjects. As a result, so long as he stayed in the picture few probably felt motivated or empowered to ever take on any major matters themselves to further organize and grow the place according to their own lights.

When he finally faded from the picture (for reasons uncertain), new owner residents, their 'father' having abandoned them, suddenly had to scramble.  Left to their own devices, they were faced with a steep learning curve, assuming responsibilities and dealing with ongoing realities, some of which they probably never knew existed, now staring them in the face. One might speculate that it was at this point that the association began to founder. They'd been abandoned by their captain and were left struggling to keep bearings and steer a course under their own steam while having to bail like crazy to stay afloat. 

Over time, the development might've now and then gotten back on track (as much as a track even existed) under more on-the-ball, altruistic board members who'd scramble to get things tenuously up to speed once tackling remedial catch-up work. Then it'd derail again under the endless shuffle of new, sometimes less motivated, capable and/or knowledgeable resident volunteers.  There was always a lot of slow, on-the-job training involved. By the time new volunteers got the lay of the land they were often burned out, and so the learning process began all over again with other newbies from an ever-shrinking pool of willing residential volunteers.

One might wonder if perhaps originally Collins did have loftier ambitions for the place and had considered launching an actual, infrastructure-supported residential development. Or if he'd only decided to try playing catch up on seeing how next door Lake Shastina was suddenly going full-tilt residential, as well as other Mt. Shasta area rural developments taking off about the same time. Perhaps he'd thought it was too far from town, amid a sparsely populated farming community, with water too scarce to attract enough people to want to actually live here -- but then later changed his tune, feeling it might indeed be a nice place to retire to "bye 'n' bye". The pipe-dreaming mountain influence likely had him under its spell no less than others.

Maybe he'd begun to hope the place would become an actual rural community, despite not having dealt with water, electricity and waste disposal needs (let alone any more far-seeing CC&Rs) to support such an evolution at the front end. Then he lost heart when inevitable squabbles erupted once people began digging in and actually dropping anchor and getting territorial and testy.

It was always easy to come but go but hard to stay.  From parcel holders' perspective and knowledge, perhaps the first real trouble in paradise was over the power and light fund (covered in next part). Various owners wanting to move on the land realized they had to forge ahead on their own steam, each needing to supply their own water, power and septic at great expense, and so started telling him where to get off. He'd perhaps become little more than a tiresome cheerleader by then. Feelings hurt after all he'd done to help the place come into being, he might've at last just said the hell with it and his blessing turned into a curse.

Or maybe the grand parting of the ways happened later (if still here, writer's not sure exactly when he exited the picture), over the gnarly clashes beginning to brew between code compliant dwellers and outlaw builders. If so, he might've come to the sad realization that the rural county simply wasn't equipped to keep a handle on residential compliance, despite the most dedicated efforts of code-legal residents to work with authorities. Foreseeing this thorny dilemma  -- maybe even taking heat for indirectly having allowed such a thing to happen -- he beat a hasty retreat and his and others' vision for the place began a sad, irreversible decline into nothingness.

In any event, something seemed to happen between Collins and his one-time fellow vacationing lot owners now emerging as independent homesteaders that turned the wine into vinegar. Something -- or series of somethings -- changed the tenor of the ephemeral idyllic kingdom from dreamland to emerging nightmare.  

Lookin' for a sign in the road maze

Vista’s raw parcels on a per-acre basis were some ten times cheaper than those of next door's exurb of Lake Shastina, started a couple years later in 1968. The Vista first attracted an equally solvent if more rough-and-ready vacationing camper crowd than the second-home buyer group Lake Shastina's developers initially wooed with its full-on infrastructure and relative closeness to town amenities.

Road signs were critical inside Vista's endless 66 mile maze. Even longtime residents like the writer could get lost if hazarding off one's accustomed route. One night driving, I suddenly realized I had absolutely no idea where I was. On getting to an intersection and spotting a stenciled 4X4 wooden road sign post, I climbed out and shone my flashlight on it, expecting to regain my bearings with the help of trusty road map. The painted lettering had faded to illegibility, done in by the elements, and I was still lost in a place I'd called home for decades.

Second generation signs were small, four-foot tall vertical metal affairs that soon rusted out. Delinquents would steal them -- and the third generation's tall, elaborate, rust-proof, reflective green metal signs too. Perhaps they felt the latter's slick, citified quality clashed with the place's rustic ambiance. Or they just wanted to make it harder for anyone to find them if they didn't want to be found, leaving those unfamiliar with the roads feeling so lost, they'd give up the search and switch focus to try finding their way out of the labyrinth.

Place 'haunted' by sheer number

of 'phantom' parcel owners

As said (probably too often), many lot holders never set foot on their properties. They'd snapped them up in pure speculation -- and maybe for the excitement of gaining bragging rights of owning a piece of the golden state -- hoping either eventual improvements like central piped water and extended power lines would finally skyrocket parcel values, or that, at the very least, they'd have something interesting to leave their family.

Over the decades property titles traded like so many baseball cards at school recess. If each parcel on average changed hands just three times over its first 50 years (probably an underestimate), the place up to 2015 had experienced a rotating ownership of some 5,000 individuals, from all over the nation. If you include two family members per parcel also getting involved, the number increased to some 15,000 people each holding varied interest in the place.  

That's a lot of absentee ownership. One guaranteed to permanently keep the place more than a little sketchy around the edges. It seemed it was always more about being a congregation of commercial commodities -- simple stand-alone camp grounds soon all but obsolete -- than any place with  a vision and determination to work together to ever grow an actual community.

Once the original retiree clique faded away and a diverse population came to dominate, civic interest all but disappeared over time. Many latter-day newcomers who'd first plugged in and involved themselves experienced  the realm's dread undertow and resulting Mt. Everest of inertia. Such forces shattered dreams and lent an overwhelming sense of futility to ever bother trying to fix anything. The place was like a big budget movie, where everything went wrong soon after a promising start, the project's creative vision never realized. 

Initially involved newcomers either gave up in shocked disillusionment or hastily dialed back their involvement. The few undeterred, more thick-skinned and unwavering could appear like so many Don Quixotes, valiantly tilting at an army of windmills.

By the Vista’s fiftieth anniversary, in November 2015 -- a milestone noted by few, if any, much less celebrated -- absentee parcel owners still outnumbered residents seven to one. For residents to get involved in such a crazy-quilt of mostly absentee owners indifferent to the realities and needs of the few actually calling the place home, many just passing through slowly, appeared a losing proposition.

Setting the standard

As related, the first wave of firstcomers, maybe seven or so couples, were recent retirees flush with cash from selling their city homes. They were psyched at the prospect of becoming something of modern day pioneers by establishing a retirement community in the near wilderness.*

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*Among them the Nortons, Sheltons, and Smothermons. The last surviving one, Bill Waterson, died at his Meadow Road home in 2015 at age 98; future residents claimed they sensed his spirit haunting the place. (Note how all names ended with '-on.')

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They nurtured hopes of the place blossoming into a respectable relaxed backwoods community. One they, as founding members, would've established a comfortable living standard that other retirees would be attracted to and naturally want to emulate.  

But its very success as a bonafide community hinged on every newcomer generating their own infrastructure and conforming to health and building codes.

“You gotta permit for that?"

Health and building codes were then rigorously enforced in Siskiyou County. The first wave of owner builders, staunch, law abiding citizens, never thought twice about conforming. They'd jump through every last hoop (albeit some no doubt some gritting their teeth). Anyone else wanting to stay longer than 30 days a year -- ostensible legal limit for staying on unimproved property anywhere in California -- had to earn the right, just as they had, by gum. It was only fair.

Seeing how such firstcomers soon went so bonkers as various parcel owners overextended camp visits into permanent occupational forces to be reckoned with, the philosophical might've thought it more than a bit odd. The place, after all, had started out by championing primitive rec properties. Now it was now busting the chops of anyone for camping too long like they were a plague on the land.  The fact that it had turned a full 180 degrees -- residents becoming so wary of owners camping out, especially if seeing structures suspiciously going up and mobiles rolling in overnight, that they furtively checked on them like so many wanted criminals, keeping track of permissible days left before throwing them under the bus in righteous fury -- was a situation rich with irony.

The place had started as do-your-own-thing recreational lots, then began transforming into a residential community, then the overall purpose of the development became so muddled it ended up supporting neither.