The Vasco Caves A Walk Through Time July 2006

by Kathy Leighton
Photos by Russell Byrne

Many East County residents are unaware of the wonderful legacy that the flow of time has deposited in our own backyard. The area around the Vasco Indian Caves was a spiritual resource for long-vanished Native American cultures and a picnic area for my family when I was growing up.

I was born Dorothy Kathleen Armstrong and was raised on the Armstrong Ranch, which was located off Vasco Road 12 miles south of downtown Brentwood

I was a farm kid, active in 4-H, and got my first horse, named Lady Jane, when I was only four years old. I rode that horse until I was 20 years old. I joined the Horse Club when I was nine. At some point every summer we would rendezvous at the John Marsh house and Gus French would lead us on a ride to the top of Mount Diablo where we would spend a few days enjoying nature while surrounded by that spectacular panorama.

We didn’t get electricity until I was five years old and only got telephone service when I was in the eighth grade. Before that if we wanted to talk to someone we just visited them. The first phone system was an eight-party line, which meant that we shared the service with seven other local families. The phones would ring in all eight residences whenever any of us got a call. We knew who was being called by a simple code system. Our ring was 2-shorts and 3-longs. When we heard that sequence we would know to answer the phone.

The telephone party line was a great source of random information for nosey kids. If I heard 2-shorts, for example, I could quietly pick up the receiver and listen to Mrs. Caldera talking, perhaps to her sister. It wasn’t as good as TV, but I learned some amazing things about Mrs. Caldera that I’m sure my parents never knew.

I started driving when I was nine years old – taking one of our cars the mile down our lane to the corner where I would catch the school bus. Later I drove myself every day the 24 mile round trip to Liberty High School and back.

The Vasco Caves were a 15-minute horseback ride from our yard. In those days the land belonged to a neighboring family named the Suzas, who were running cattle just like my folks. They didn’t care if we went up to the caves; we treated them like they belonged to us. There are a number of caves in that area that were created by a strange geologic process. The entire region was an ancient sea. Over eons wave action ground stone into vast deposits of sand that now underlies much of the East County. The Pacific Plate has been sliding beneath the North American Plate pushing up Mount Diablo and flipping the Vasco Caves region over onto its top. Geologic pressures transformed into sandstone the sand that was now trapped beneath the harder surface rocks. The winds subsequently scoured the caves out of the soft sandstone. The area is strewn with these caves, some of which are too small to stick your head into and others, like the “King’s Palace” could hold 20 people.

Our Vasco Caves Playground
When I was a child we would go the Vasco Caves for picnics on a regular basis and have fun playing in the bright sunshine among those interesting hills. My mom would sit under an oak tree reading one of her beloved books while we played hide-and-seek in the caves.

Sometimes we would dam the creek and make a large swimming hole for ourselves. We would also swim in an old spring-fed horse trough. The water was cold but when the sun was beating down at 110°, splashing around in that thing was a truly marvelous and refreshing experience. I walked back into that area this spring and discovered that the old horse trough is still there. It even has water in it, but is sadly in need of a good cleaning.

When the buckeyes were out we would mount boys-versus-girls buckeye wars. Another word for buckeyes is horse chestnuts. They are about the size of golf balls and would really sting if you caught a fast one on your forehead. After the battle both sides withdrew in what each considered to be victory. There was never any hostility in these things; simply laughter and fun.

We were following in the steps of generations who had gone before. My dad spent a lot of time there himself as a kid. He and his siblings had mounted their own buckeye battles. Before him my grandpa grew up in the area, and I’m sure he threw buckeyes at his brothers and sisters. My great grandfather came into the place when he was too old for buckeye wars. When I take my grandkids into the area they are the seventh generation of my family to see those hills and caves. Sadly, the Buckeye Wars are over for good, however.

During the 1950s Cold War scare, when people in places like San Jose and San Francisco were building bomb shelters, my mom and aunt had determined that one of the large Vasco Caves would provide a perfect hidey-hole in the event of a war or any natural disaster. They developed an evacuation scheme and plans for food storage if the Russians ever came. If city folks ever started heading for their bomb shelters, we were going to head for the caves with our supplies and my dad’s double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun to take care of any Russian who should be foolish enough to show up in person in front of our cave.

I remember climbing to the highest point we could find from which on a clear day we could see the summits of Mount Diablo, Mount Oso, and Brushy Peak around us. And beyond everything else the snowy Sierras reared above the horizon like sharpened teeth towards the east.

On those long-ago days I knew that I wasn’t really seeing the end of the world, but at least I was seeing beyond anything that I knew about personally. We were homebodies. We had cousins who lived in town and a half-dozen of them would visit us in the summer because their parents wanted to send their kids to live for a while on the ranch. On the other hand, we wouldn’t go anywhere very often ourselves. What would we want to do that for? There was no place better than home.

During our picnics in the Vasco Caves area we would pick wild flowers and mushrooms. My mom always picked watercress from the spring, which back in those days was an actual creek. She would pack bread and canned fish and serve tuna fish and watercress sandwiches. As we ate our lunch my mother would sit under her tree spinning yarns and telling make-believe stories about things that might have happened among the trees and hills that surrounded us.

Holy Ground
Not in her wildest imagination could my mother ever have guessed the reality that lay behind the lovely scenery of that place. That part of Far East County always seemed a rural pastureland, but during the centuries before the wave of European immigrants swept away the ancient cultures the area was a focal point for Native American tribes from the Sierras all the way to the Monterey Coast. The area was at the confluence of three distinct Native American cultures including the Ohlone that stretched to the coast, the Yokuts that inhabited the Central Valley from the Delta to Bakersfield, and the Miwoks who inhabited a region between the San Joaquin River and the Sierras.

In ancient times the caves no doubt lent an air of mystery to the region. Mike Moran, a local authority on the area, says that the native religions regarded the area as a combination of Mecca, the Temple Mount, and the Vatican. Vasco Caves was considered by some tribes to have played a role in the coming to earth of the first people and animals.

Religious figures, called Shamans, would journey into the area to fast, to conduct sacred rituals, and to offer prayers for the health of the tribe. The land was considered sacred and, except for the shamans, was off-limits to tribal members. Even today some Native Americans will not go near the area because of the engrained traditions that regard the place as unapproachably holy.

In 11 caves you can see Native American rock art that was created at some point in the past beyond both memory and legend. These ancient drawings of birds and animals might have been pictographs having some religious purposes by the people who drew them. Anthropologists have noted that there are a variety of styles indicating that the pictures were created over a lengthy period of time by successive cultures. In some places the pictures are overlaid by rude graffiti, signatures, and dates of people who visited the caves in fairly recent times. The Park Service regards such things as desecrations until they are 49 years old at which time they suddenly attain the status of priceless artifacts.

When I was a kid there was nothing special about Vasco Caves, as far as we were concerned. Their only claim to fame we knew about was that the legendary desperado, Joaquin Murieta, and his gang supposedly used the caves as a hideout while running from the vengeance of gold miners they had robbed. We never gave much thought to the people who had lived in the area before the Europeans moved in chasing after gold, adventure, and land.

We would sometimes collect grinding stones that were scattered about and would return home with pocketfuls of obsidian arrowheads that we found plentifully strewn throughout the area. Unfortunately, we didn’t recognize the value of these objects. They would end up in a cigar box in a drawer somewhere, and who knows where they are today?

Our careless looting of absolutely irreplaceable artifacts now seems baffling. How could we show such blatant disregard for objects that were old when our own ancestors were still planting seeds by the phases of the moon in some European country or other? Our ignorance was understandable, perhaps, but the memory of that careless and harmful behavior fills me with pangs of regret.

We never paid much attention to the wildlife that surrounded us either. The eagles and hawks flew over our heads and the foxes and squirrels ran around beneath our feet without attracting much attention or regard from us. There are a number of vernal pools in that place – pools that only have water during the winter and spring – with shrimp and frogs that exist almost no place else on the planet. Those little creatures were nothing that we cared about or even noticed.

It seems to me that there is more wildlife in the area now – more coyotes, golden eagles, and red tail hawks – than when I was young. That’s a hopeful thing, I think. The area is now owned by the East Bay Regional Park District. It is a 1,339 acre open space property called the Vasco Regional Preserve. Access is restricted and the public can now visit the place only by joining a guided tour. It took almost three years of effort for us to get Russell, who took the pictures for this article, into the area.

There are a couple shepherds on the property who care for the sheep that graze as part of an environmental-friendly method of controlling undergrowth and checking the advance of harmful exotic plants that threaten to overtake the native species. A retired ranger also works as caretaker on the place. Other than that, the park is deserted.

Balancing Nature and Fairness
I spent decades as an outspoken advocate of private property rights and have always felt that far too much California land is in public ownership, which removes it from tax rolls and from being put to some use that directly would help our economy and our society.

Finding the right balance between property rights and the need for preservation is a huge challenge for the government. Someone told me recently that he wished the whole corridor from Mount Diablo to the Delta could be reserved. “So that a squirrel,” he said, “could walk from the top of the mountain to the Delta’s waters.” He was asking for over 100,000 acres to be set aside.

I told him that my neighbors and I own some of those acres. “If you were a landowner you might look at it differently,” I said. A total of 83,000 acres of that stretch is already in public conservancy. That’s a lot of acreage removed from the tax roles that should be paying for infrastructure improvements and public works projects.

If you live in Marin or Walnut Creek it seems attractive to preserve all the land around the Byron Airport. But if you own the land that is being turned into a mitigation bank, you might have different thoughts. Land that is included within the Urban Limit Line is worth $15,000 per acre. An acre of county property, on the other hand, which the government is free to develop in any way they wish, is currently valued at $150,000.

So conservation of land is often paid for by extreme financial penalties imposed upon innocent landowners. This becomes a huge indirect taxation that many people, nevertheless, regard as an appropriate cost for the preservation of these areas. It reminds me of Shakespeare’s claim that it is easier to bear a toothache when it is in someone else’s.

I’m beginning to rethink some of these things, however. For sure, I’m really grateful when I walk through the Vasco Caves area and realize that it might be possible for my great-grandchildren to see them looking much the same as they do today. In my heart I’m glad that someone had the foresight to set this aside. I don’t want to see a Vasco Caves McDonald’s sitting in front of those beautiful sites.

It’s a great thing to be able to take a walk through time! I’m glad that people will be able to take that walk by the Vasco Caves for the foreseeable future.