Unhappy Trails
Located on a gorgeous slice of National Park land, the Miwok Stables at Tennessee Valley have enjoyed a colorful history, but after years of infighting among riders and users, the future of the stables is now uncertain.

BY DAVID TEMPLETON

What is it about sitting on a horse that makes a beautiful landscape appear so much more gorgeous? We stand at the edge of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, near the spot where the Bobcat Trail meets the Marincello Trail, named for the sprawling, city-sized housing development Marincello that came close to being built here in the late 1960s; luckily, it was thwarted by local environmentalists who prized pristine open space over promises of the City of the Future.

This morning, as hawks and turkey vultures patrol the sky and bevies of quail dart in and out of the hillside bushes, our group of six—three humans and three horses—has come to a stop to take in a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, jutting up in abstract pieces from behind the hills of the Marin Headlands. As we rest here in silence, overlooking Strawberry, the Tiburon Peninsula and the San Pablo Bay, it is hard to believe there could be a more gorgeous or tranquil spot in the entire Bay Area. Had fate taken a different turn, had the wind blown another way in 1972, when the late developer Thomas Frouge, after years of battles with environmentalists, finally abandoned his plans and sold the land to a conservancy that in 1975 sold it to the Department of the Interior, these ridges and hills could now be sporting 2,100 acres of high-end apartments, expensive townhouses, luxury hotels and shops, a mile-long mall with pools and passenger trains, and a church-lined square that was to be called Brotherhood Square.

Horses, it seems certain—even the well-behaved Teddy—would not have been allowed, and this morning’s trail ride, led by lifelong horse fancier Julia Verdi of San Francisco, would not be happening.

Our journey began about 45 minutes ago, down near the Tennessee Valley trailhead, at the historic horse ranch and rustic one-time dairy farm now known as the Miwok Stables, another accidental beneficiary of Frouge’s failed plan. I am riding a sweet-natured Appaloosa named Teddy, one of 20 horses owned by the Miwok Livery, a popular riding school and sometime public trail ride operation that has been putting humans and horses together in this corner of the park for over 20 years. The Miwok Stables, which for years operated as a kind of cooperative boarding facility, is a grand, bucolic, storybook kind of place, a picture-perfect haven for people who love horses.

With our sojourn on the mountain having now reached its turn-around-and-go-back point, Verdi leads us back down the hill to the trailhead, where hundreds of cars full of bikers, hikers and hard-bodied runners will be jockeying for parking places. This is one of the most visited trailheads in the GGNRA system, used by thousands of people every weekend, many who will crisscross the stables on their way to their favorite trails, without thinking or knowing how close this place once came to becoming a private playground for the rich and entitled.

EVEN FEWER REALIZE that right now, another blistering brouhaha is taking place, though on a smaller scale than the Marincello battle; it will ultimately determine the way Miwok’s many horse fanciers, horse owners and horse riding-students will come together and co-exist at the stables. Depending on what takes place over the next few months, the future of the stables and the futures of those who work and play there will probably be changed. In a worst-case scenario, which is not at all out-of-the-question, the Miwok Stables and all of its ancillary activities could end up being shut down altogether.

“From the Park Service point of view, we’re strong supporters of equestrian use within the park,” states GGNRA Superintendent Brian O’Neill, who diplomatically calls the current situation at Miwok “a bit awkward.” Explains O’Neill, “We sort of inherited the existing stabling operation at Miwok when the park was established, but we wanted to add a public ride component to it, because we felt that it was really important for people who didn’t have access to a horse to be able to go to a place in the park and be able to go out on the trail system to ride. So a public ride program was established at our very strong urging.”

He acknowledges that the current conflict has become so hot that something must be done, and done soon.

“There are four or five issues that are in some contention with respect to differences of opinion,” he says, judiciously enough to win some sort of Solomon award. “People have hardened their positions. It’s a shame. They are all so close to this situation, and they’ve argued [their individual positions] for so long, they have a hard time seeing that, at a certain level, their arguments are almost silly.

“Over the years, the friction between the two elements has tended to come in waves,” he continues. “It’ll smooth out, and then rise up, and then smooth out again. But unfortunately, we’ve been going through a period in the last number of months, where that friction is at its peak. We need to bring this thing to a peaceful resolution, that’s for sure. This isn’t the Middle East, and it’s not the Wild West! Come on, people. Get a life! Resolve this like mature people!”

The years-in-the-making discord—years that have been packed with strong accusations, threats, conspiracy theories and lawsuits on both sides of the issue—is essentially a battle for control of the Miwok Stables, a fight to determine who gets to use the facility, its training rings and its 43 horse stalls, how they use them, and how often. On one side of the conflict is the Miwok Livery, privately owned and operated by San Rafael resident Linda Rubio, the official provider selected by the Miwok Valley Association—the official “partner entity” with which the National Park Service (NPS) has an agreement—to supply the public ride program that the NPS has ordained as an important piece of the National Park experience. On the other side is a band of horse owners, renters of horse stalls and non-Livery riding instructors, some of whom have been lodging their horses and using the stables and training rings since the facility was acquired by the National Park system in 1975.

The issues are legion: With two outdoor training rings and one indoor ring (in the landmark barn NPS recently refurbished at a cost of more than a million dollars), there are constant skirmishes over practice time, with the Livery claiming first right to the rings in order to accommodate its 200 lessons a week, leaving little or no time for the non-Livery horse boarders to exercise and train. Because only 43 stalls are allowed by NPS (20 for the sole use of the Livery and the rest open to public horse boarders, with a few more horses kept in outside paddocks during the summer months), the waiting list for a stall can keep a person on hold for 10 years or more, and charges of “jumping the waiting list” have been made on both sides. The disagreements over ring time are currently being wrestled out in a costly arbitration process between the Livery and MVA.

The ring-time schedule is just the tip of the mountain, however.

WHEN OUTSIDE RIDING instructor Suzie Saldana—who lives in a house on-site with her husband Gabino, the foreman of the Miwok Stables for 17 years—applied for the right to teach her own non-Livery riding lessons 12 years ago, the MVA board (which then included Rubio) denied her request on the grounds that her proposed clients did not meet the expected qualifications and that the use permit for the land was in Rubio and the MVA’s names only. That decision was eventually, reluctantly, reversed and then upheld by the GGNRA after Saldana sued the MVA. According to Saldana, Rubio and several Livery-leaning MVA members have since accused her (Saldana) of keeping a horse in a stall she doesn’t pay for (more on that later) and for jumping the waiting list to gain a total of eight stalls, a claim Saldana insists is untrue. She keeps her own horses in only two stalls, she says, and has repeatedly challenged her accusers to prove their claims, demanding they name the stalls she has supposedly occupied. (Saldana insists that any horses she is paid to work with are in stalls that were obtained properly by qualified horse owners, while lawyers for the Livery have charged that Saldana has used her position as a former president of the board to jump the waiting list.)

It seems that at various times over the years, depending on whether the sitting board of the MVA held a majority of officers friendly to the Livery interests or to those of the non-Livery boarders and users, both sides have accused the MVA of conspiring to force them off the premises in order to let the opposing side take the stables over for themselves.

In January of 2005, after the aforementioned arbitration had been entered into by the MVA, the Livery submitted a letter to the Park Service demanding that the use permit be placed solely in the name of the Livery, giving Rubio full authority over the entire facility, an event Saldana fears would have meant the speedy eviction of all non-Livery boarders, or at least, all of those with whom the Livery has had problems in the past. In the same letter, the MVA was accused by the Livery of plotting to shut down the Livery, cancel classes and limit access to rings. The Park Service responded with a permit modification (dated January 19, 2005) stating that “Miwok Livery has the first right to all arenas and facilities in administering its public riding programs at Miwok Stables…” When Saldana protested that the choice of words was tantamount to gifting the federally owned stables to the Livery, the Park Service issued a “clarification” on February 15, 2005, stating, in part, “While it is the intent of the Service that ML [Miwok Livery] has a priority status for use of the arenas and facilities, both parties (MVA & ML) must work proactively to ensure advance notice and fair sharing for all users…” The Livery, according to longtime Miwok user and past president Gloria Anderson, nevertheless refuses to acknowledge the clarification, and continues to point to the permit modification as proof that they need not cooperate with the other users.

Contentious enough? It gets better.

At a public meeting of the MVA in June, Saldana read a letter challenging Rubio’s supporters to insist that Rubio’s accusations against Saldana be proven, and suggesting that the board had deliberately attempted to bankrupt the MVA in order to dissolve it so that Rubio could take control of the Miwok Stables. (The MVA has denied that charge.) At that same meeting, things became so heated, with strong words exchanged between Saldana and then-president Nancy Angelos, that Saldana slapped Angelos with a restraining order—an order that, after several courtroom hearings, was ultimately denied continuance.

The list of skirmishes goes on and on…and on. Anyone who’s spent time around horses can recognize a mess when he or she sees one, and there is no doubt that the situation at Miwok Stables has now become one gigantic, stinking mess
Caught right in the middle of it all is the National Park Service.

As to the disputed permit modification and its equally disputed clarification, O’Neill contends that everyone is making a bigger deal out of those two documents than is necessary.

“We’ve made it clear that, looking just at the scheduling of time, we wanted to give priority attention, at key core times, to the public ride program and the public lessons,” O’Neill states, once and for all. “We did not say there was no room for other lessons and use of the arena by the private horse owners there.

“When you look at the schedule, the differences amount to just a few number of hours per week,” he goes on. “It seems to me that people of good mind can look at the schedule and say, ‘OK, we’ll adjust this slightly here, and we’ll adjust it there, and let’s go with it in a spirit of cooperation and mutual support.’ It’s really just a matter of adjusting a half-hour or an hour a day.”

According to O’Neill, the Park Service has grown tired of the infighting, and is now very anxious to enter into a long-term agreement with just one entity, possibly an entity not currently in the picture, a concessionaire or other professional company that, in theory, should be representing all public users of the stables, the Livery students, the outside instruction students, the individual boarders and the occasional partaker of trail rides.

“At some point, if both sides can’t demonstrate a more mature behavior, they are leaving us in a very difficult situation,” he says. “We want to be horse friendly in the park. The last thing we want to do is to have to shut down the whole operation.”

SUZIE SALDANA HAS notebooks crammed with letters, court papers, transcripts and e-mails documenting the numerous conflicts that have been disturbing the peace for the last several years at Miwok.

She sits in the living room of the house she shares with Gabino and her teenage daughter, a tidy house built at the edge of the tree-lined stable facility. According to Saldana, she works with many of the 23 horses that are not part of the Livery operation. And she claims that despite the occasional disagreement over the years, things were reasonably peaceful at Miwok until about two years ago. That, she says, is when the accusations against her began to surface during MVA meetings and in various mailings and public discussions. She denies ever having done anything improper at Miwok, pointing to the Park Service’s upholding of her right to teach on premises, insisting that such claims are part of a Livery-sponsored plot to put control of the stables into Linda Rubio’s hands. As evidence, she grabs a notebook and turns to the letter from the Livery to the Park Service requesting that the use permit (currently shared with the MVA) be placed solely in the name of the Livery.

As for the evidence against herself, Saldana insists there isn’t any. Regarding the infamous issue of the eight horse stalls, Saldana says, “I haven’t the slightest idea which stalls [Rubio] thinks are mine. There are horses here that I work with four or five times a week, but they are sponsored horses. Their owners have all their paperwork in. I can barely afford my one stall. There’s no way I could pay for eight.”

Speaking of that “one stall”—at the rowdy MVA meeting that spawned the restraining order hearings (which were recorded and listened to, in part, by this reporter)—the pro-Livery members responded to Saldana’s defiant letter by chanting, “Pay for your stall! Pay for your stall!”

The stall in question is the one that was given in 1988, with great fanfare, as a lifetime gift to Gene Poole, a member of the MVA since its creation in 1976. Poole has been riding horses in this area since the 1930s, a beloved volunteer who’s spent hours every week working the ranch for free. According to the MVA newsletter dated June 1988, the gift of a free stall was awarded to Poole by a “sweeping vote” of the board. According to the newsletter announcement, “Gene is to receive complimentary board and stall cleaning for the rest of his career at Miwok.” Poole, who is now 86 and is still volunteering several times a week, at the time of the award owned a horse named ’Appy. When ’Appy died several years ago, according to Saldana, Poole invited her to move her horse Johnny B. Goode into his stall, with a verbal agreement to share care and custody of Johnny. This has been viewed by many as a bypassing of the waiting list. According to MVA by-laws, no horse may occupy a stable without consent of the MVA. In January of 2004, an attempt was made by the MVA to evict Johnny from the stall, to charge Saldana back rent to 1992, and to turn Poole’s stall over to the next person on the waiting list. When Poole retained a lawyer to defend his right to board Johnny in his stall, and after a huge outpouring of support for Poole, the matter was dropped, but as a court recording makes clear, there are still plenty of folks at Miwok who believe Saldana should not be using the stall.

“That story has been going around for years, that I have a stall I refuse to pay for,” says Saldana. “That’s not fair. I use two stalls here, one that I got by sitting on the waiting list and have paid for on time ever since, and then Gene’s stall, which he allows Johnny, a horse he takes care of, to use.”

Saldana sees the current situation as a David and Goliath scenario—she and the other non-Livery boarders are the little guy to the Livery’s giant.

“The Livery is a big business, and we’re just little individuals,” says Saldana. “We’re trying to preserve the place we work, the place we live, the house where we’ve raised our family. We just want to be left alone to live our lives and work our horses. I just want to be left alone to make what living I can here—but it’s getting harder and harder to do.”

LINDA RUBIO HAS been a part of the stables since the early 1980s, and she is obviously proud of the equestrian riding programs she has developed. She is also clearly pleased that her Livery business has built a devoted clientele that includes many of the wealthy and powerful of the Bay Area.

“Nearly 100 percent of my clients are either lawyers, the children of lawyers or the spouses of lawyers,” she says (at the exact same moment I am signing the multi-paged disclaimer before mounting up for the trail ride). Born outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, Rubio has grown up around horses, and considers it a blessing to be working with horses on National Park land in one of the most famous and celebrated spots on the planet. “I have people who have been riding with me for 20 years or more,” she says. “There are kids who started riding with me when they were 6 years old, as part of my after-school program, who stayed with me till they graduated from high school; they go on to college and work for me as a camp counselor during the summer, and then continue to ride with me as adults.” According to Rubio, there are 80 kids currently enrolled in her after-school program, and over 200 adults who ride with her every week. In addition to the riding lessons and occasional trail rides, Rubio has started a small nonprofit outreach program to give survivors of breast cancer the opportunity to learn to ride horses.

In answer to Saldana’s description of the Livery as a big business, Rubio laughs.

“I’ve never taken a dime out of this place,” she insists, pointing to her husband’s income as an engineer as being enough to sustain her lifestyle and her non-equine hobbies (gardening and traveling). “I reinvest everything, right back into my programs,” she says.

When I ask Rubio to comment on the numerous conflicts that have plunged the stables into controversy and acrimony, she politely refuses to discuss specific allegations, insisting that she is not part of any conflict currently going on at Miwok Stables.

“I am busy,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “I’m running the program, taking care of my staff and my horses—I really don’t have any conflicts. I don’t have time for it.” She also cites the ongoing arbitration as reason not to respond specifically to any of the documented disagreements currently taking place, but does say that she believes that the ratio of privately owned horses to those owned by the Livery and made available to non-horse owners for lessons, should be altered to favor the non-horse owners. Rubio describes her business as a “public program” as compared to the other Miwok businesses, which she characterizes as “private.” (According to Saldana, her lessons are just as public, given on horses that either she owns or are owned by the boarders and sponsors who allow her to use them for lessons.)

Despite Saldana’s characterization of the Livery as a would-be monopoly, Rubio insists her goal is for Miwok to be a happy place for the public to be with horses.

“I’m not out to hurt anyone,” she says. “I don’t want to throw anyone out. That’s not what I’m doing.” Asked about the letters from the Livery stating that Rubio’s business and all of its programs were in imminent danger of being shut down by the “private interests,” Rubio replies, “I don’t think the Livery is in jeopardy. I believe the National Park Service will protect its public program, and I believe that everyone will be OK in the end. I have a positive feeling about it all.”

The Park Service, for its part, is also maintaining a positive attitude.

“If you talk to the public, the people who avail themselves of this facility and take the opportunity to enjoy a horse ride out on the trails, they feel it’s fabulous,” says Brian O’Neill. “Some of them have gotten sucked in, unfortunately, trying to take sides, but now it’s time to put differences aside and try to find a way to allow all components of the public to feel some place, to have some opportunity to experience the joy of riding a horse in a National Park.”

Does O’Neill believe such a compromise is possible? He does, and states strongly that such a compromise will be reached soon, probably with the Park Service taking a firm hand in concluding the controversies.

“I’m an optimist, I know cooperation is going to be possible,” O’Neill laughs. “And if they can’t decide for themselves what is best for everyone, we’re going to have to decide it for them.”

PHOTO OF GENE POOLE BY KEN PIEKNEY

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