I've spent some time recently studying this shot from season five of the TV series "The Virginian," which filmed in a lot of interesting locations during its nine-year run but made especially good use of the Conejo Valley region.
The same episode features incredible shots of what I call the Sherwood Valley — where the exclusive Sherwood Country Club is located today.
When I say "exclusive," I mean exclusive. For example, hockey icon Wayne Gretzky lived here for some time, building one of the fanciest estates you'll ever see right on top of the same hill seen in "The Virginian."
As fancy estates go, the Gretzky place is a nice one — and it benefits from a background made famous in "The Virginian," "Gunsmoke" and many other Westerns. I believe the property sold for about $23 million a while back.
We'll go into detail about filming in the Sherwood Valley in an upcoming post, but I'll leave you with a teaser before we get back to a filming location that's a bit more obscure.
Not that it needs to be circled, but notice this configuration of hills in the background in "The Long Way Home," another episode from season five of "The Virginian."
Now take a gander at this contemporary shot of the second hole at the Sherwood Country Club.
You may have already spotted it, but there's that same background feature, circled here in yellow. Again, we will be zooming in on this area in detail in an upcoming post.
But let's get back to that stunning shot from "The Virginian," which takes us almost 10 miles west of the Sherwood Valley and the Gretzky house, to a location that was pretty much off the radar of film historians until now.
The good news is that the location remains intact today, having eluded the residential housing boom that befell much of the region. Some of what we see here remains in private hands, but it is adjacent to a public hiking area.
Even with the vague backgrounds in this Google Maps photo, many of the features seen in the "Virginian" shot can be recognized — from a dip in the ridgeline at top left ("A") to a surviving U-shaped road at bottom right ("H").
The original "Virginian" shot from 1966 also contains those same features. Some of the best matches here are angular ridge C, tree-lined creekbed E, color-matched hilltop G and, of course, the U-shaped road, H.
But just matching up a Google shot will never do if it's possible to get out there in person. So even though it's been 100-plus degrees around here lately, we found our way to the Rancho Potrero trailhead the other day.
Some of the news was bad — mainly having to do with this fence, which kept us from our main objective. We had hoped to take a shot from the original camera location used in "The Virginian," which remains inaccessible.
But we still were able to get a decent look at some of the terrain seen in the "Virginian" shot. This photo from our trek includes several markers identified previously, along with at least one additional landmark of interest.
A few of the previously noted background features are no longer visible from this angle, but most still are.
Here's the "Virginian" shot again with the original markers noted, to compare with with the recent photo above.
Another landmark in the "Virginian" screen shot is the lumpy section of ridgeline noted here.
This landmark could not be distinguished in the Google Maps shot, but it's easy to identify in the photo from the recent Rancho Potrero expedition.
Another shot from our recent visit provides a more detailed look at this rocky section of the ridgeline.
The same rocky ridgeline can be seen as far back as 1958 in the long-running series "Wagon Train," one of the first major TV Westerns to film throughout much of the Conejo Valley region.
"Wagon Train" pioneered many locations that would turn up later in "The Virginian," "Gunsmoke," "Rawhide" and other Western TV shows of the period. We'll be taking a deeper dive into all those shows in upcoming posts.
Filming at Rancho Potrero may have gone undiscovered without the tireless work of location searcher Aaron St. John, who has been going pound for pound with me on the heavy lifting lately. Thanks, Aaron!
