This article by Dick LaRue ran in the July 1972 issue of SURFER. One year earlier, the first Ranch parcels were put on the market. For over a century before that, the Hollister Ranch, with its eight-plus miles of beachfront housing some of the best surf in America, had been privately held and virtually inaccessible to the public. LaRue, noted below as the "ranch manager," worked for the Mortage Guarantee Insurance Company, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, new owner-developer of the Ranch property. Minimum cost for a completely undeveloped parcel at this time was $100,000—about $700,000 in 2022 dollars. Top-end parcels, also undeveloped, were $400,000 ($2.8 million).

SURFER's intro to what was more or less a 12-page sales brochure—part of which includes a plainspoken warning to non-Ranch-owners to stay away—reads in part as follows: "If you’ve got the money, you might consider buying a parcel and the lifestyle it would bring. If you don’t, you might find some small consolation in the fact that this land will seemingly be preserved in its present state of natural splendor for many years to come."

We have 14,360 acres comprising the Hollister Ranch, with close to nine miles of coastline. What we're doing is creating a controlled atmosphere on the ranch, and keeping it basically agricultural and cattle. We've formed a ranch owners' association and all the parcel owners will be in the association. They actually will control the ranch when we've finished selling the parcels. We've survey-staked and monumented all the ranch into parcels of 100 acres or larger. At this point, we have over 1,900 acres of "common areas." All the beach is common area to all owners. We have over 100 miles of private roads within the ranch, and we have created an area of 100 feet on either side of the roads which is a perpetual common area for owners; thus you can walk, or drive, or ride over the entire 14,000 acres without moving over someone else's property. And, of course, no matter where your parcel is, even if it's up in the back country, you have the same rights on these easements throughout the ranch and on the beaches. So you really don't have to buy right down next to the ocean to have the use of the beach.

When I say we've created a controlled atmosphere, we've accomplished this by deed restrictions controlling what the owners do on their property. There will be no commercial uses at all. The agriculture is even restricted. You can't have any commercial fowl, swine or dairies. [Hollister was] a cattle ranch for a hundred years, and we're leaving it that way. The deed restrictions also limit the number of guests that can be on the ranch at any one time. There's an architectural and ecological committee that governs what you do with the property, physically. We've eliminated motorbikes and things like that, so we do not bring "the city" out here. It's not a development in any way. We're not building any golf courses and I don't see that it will become a country club atmosphere at all—the people just don't want it. It's strictly a ranch that's being divided, and will be totally operated as a ranch.

In order to keep it that way, we have a security force. These men are all deputized by the County of Santa Barbara, and we strictly enforce the trespass laws. The ranch is only for the owners and their guests, period! There just isn't anyone else that will be allowed on. I might stay on that for just a minute because, in the past, due to articles in this magazine and because of word-of-mouth, and the previous lack of security on the ranch, a lot of surfers have walked in and whatnot, to surf the beaches. I'd like to get the message across to these people that the ranch is closed. We operate under the law and with the law. And now that the railroad has given us permission to patrol their tracks, there just isn't going to be a way to get in. We're not here to hassle the kids or to give them a bad time, but we are going to protect our rights and keep everyone off the ranch, except owners and guests. We have had a policy of warning a first time, and the second time they are caught, we do have them arrested and will prosecute them to the limit of the law. The judge they go before is a judge in the local area here, and is agrarian oriented, and also he's a property owner here. The boys are not getting off with light fines; they're getting the maximum fines—I believe it's $125 the first time, then $500 and five days the second time.

Again, the purpose of this security group is not to hassle the surfers, but to protect our rights. We have pretty well defined the mean high tide line as being the wet-sand area, and the judge has gone along with it. It's really sort of unfortunate that these surfing beaches are not down in some public area, but from what the surfers tell me, if it was, it would get so crowded it wouldn't be any good anyway.

We're going into a lot of programs on the ranch. We will have a common cattle herd operation. We're also working agriculturally with the farm bureau and the university. There will be experimental plots of avocados and wine grapes and field crops, and utilizing parts of the ranch to a higher and better use than cattle grazing. It's been a cattle ranch for a hundred years, and one of the most successful ranches in Southern California. That's what we want to maintain. Some [owners] plan to be actual land users; we have one big horse ranch under construction now. These people own, raise, train and sell cutting horses, and there will be several other owners in that type of category. Some will set up for pure breed cattle and horse operations, and some are into farming and grove operations.

Other people (including some well-known surfers) are buying for the recreational end of it, and also for the long-term investment end of it. The deed restrictions virtually eliminate further subdivision for a ten-year period. But as far as the investment goes, you can look anywhere along the coast of the United States and not find land as cheap as this land on a price-per-acre basis. Nor will you find beautiful land like this with the amenities we are offering. What separates the men from the boys is that the buy-in is a minimum of one hundred acres. Prices range from the back country, which is not the best agricultural land but with tremendous views. [Those parcels are] in the thousand-per-acre bracket, or a $100,000 minimum per parcel. And then the middle ground on the ranch—the inland valleys and creeks, the grassy slopes—those are in the two-thousand-per-acre bracket, give 0r take. And then we have some virtually flat areas—we call it the west mesa—out above St. Augustine, next to the ocean there, that cost four-thousand per acre.

We own the ranch free and clear, so we can work about any terms that a man needs. In my opinion, there is a much higher use for land than subdivision, and this unique piece of property along the coast here in Southern California—there just isn't any more of it, and I think that what we're doing with the land will preserve it in its natural state for many, many years. The good Lord made it this way and we're not gonna change it. Some of the people that can afford this property really don't relate to nature and the ranching aspect of it at all. They'd rather be sitting down at the club with a drink in their hand. They like to drive through the country, but they really don't want to be a part of it. However, many people do relate to it; they want to bring their kids up in it, and want to have a place to come and really get away. People who do relate to what we're doing really fall in love with it here. Most of the people coming up and buying are not ranchers. They are city people who want to be gentlemen ranchers, and they've been coming out of the city areas and coming down Highway 101 at 70 mph. We all travel around like that in Southern California. And then when you have to slow down to 15 mph when you come through the ranch gate—I think it's helping these people to mentally slow down.

The terrain is absolutely beautiful. Every parcel has an ocean view. There must be 20 or 30 places on any of the 100 acres where you could build a home and have fantastic views of the ocean.

The wildlife on the ranch is really something else. The coastal end of it is in a very natural state. The ranch is so isolated that the public just hasn't been able to get in here and clean it out and destroy it. We've got lobster and abalone, big abalones, blacks, reds, greens; they're here. You can get 15-, 16-year-old bugs, easy. I get that kind of sea life without using tanks in 8 or 10 feet of water. The surf fishing is excellent, and if you go out into the kelp, you'll just get tired of catching them in a hurry. The Parks and Recreation people tell me that the last of the big giant kelp beds is right off our coast here. As far as the land-based life goes, we've everything you could have found on this coast over a hundred years ago; deer, cougar, bobcat, coyote, wild pig—we even had a bear here around the office back in August. I recently saw my first California condor. All kinds of birds, dove and quail are really quite plentiful. However, we have no hunting on the ranch and no shooting—except where we do trap shooting up at Drake's Point. But even there, we've developed frozen ice targets to use rather than the usual ones which leave debris scattered around.

You know, I call myself a conservationist and ecologist. I've never put any tag on myself, but I've felt it. I've ranched all my life. We've spent a lot of time in cleaning the ranch. Most ranchers aren't the tidiest people in the world as far as leaving debris laying around. But we've pretty well manicured the ranch and intend to keep it that way.

I know this article's going to come out in a magazine that's read by all the surfers in the world, and I just have to tell the kids—the only way they can use the ranch is to buy a parcel and become a part of our good life here.

"THE RANCH REALITY," SURFER MAGAZINE (1972)

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