Charles Healey embodies quite the impressive triad: He is a Santa Barbara local, a recently published young author, and a link to Santa Rosa Island’s often-unknown history of cattle ranching and cowboys.
Louis Torres, founder of Polyverse Publications — where Healey’s new book, Santa Rosa Island: A Photographic Panorama was published — comments, “It's crazy, because so many people are like, ‘Oh, yeah, I stare at the Channel Islands all the time!’ But I never knew that there was a private airstrip for these ranching families out there, like a dirt airstrip….” In this sentiment, Torres is referencing the era of Santa Rosa Island history that Healey’s book preserves, where cattle were sent to the island and tended to by families such as Healey’s.
This time on the island, filled with excitement, dramatic landscapes, and the rise of the infamous Vail & Vickers cattle ranching operation, was fleeting, for when the Channel Islands National Park was established in 1980, it brought with it the end of cattle ranching on the island and the unique time in history that the ranches encapsulated.