An updated list of the Seven Wonders of the World was unsealed on the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year.

People across the globe had cast ballots for the most elaborate public works projects in history.

These voters mostly rounded up the usual overachievers — the Great Wall of China, the Roman Coliseum and the Taj Mahal. But they thoughtfully picked two monuments of the New World — the Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru and the Mayan temple of Chichen Itza in Mexico.

If Ventura County has seven wonders, I'm not sure what they would be.

But it is home to a few you-gotta wonders.

There's Bottle Village in Simi Valley. For 30 years, Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey toiled to create a small world out of no deposit-no return empties.

One woman's trash is another's treasure. Some call her masterwork folk art worthy of preservation; others just want it heaved, Nehi Soda bottles and all, into the green bins.

And then there is the 10-story great wall of Thousand Oaks. Or anyway the Civic Arts Plaza would have had a great wall if someone had spared it the Copper Curtain.

Someday, someone just might build a gigantic refrigerator and wonder where he can get a great big grate to cover the motor. Only then will the city recoup its cost on a public-art project the public long ago gave the cold shoulder.

My husband, however, would nominate a rock formation.

He maintains a profile of George Washington has been carved into the sheer wall on the south side of Highway 101, atop the Conejo Grade and across from the truck scales.

"Can't you see George Washington?" he asks me as we whiz by on that pulsing connector of the county's coastal plain and inland valleys.

"I'm not sure," I say. "Is he wearing a powdered wig?"

"No, no wig."

"Are we talking about the same freedom-loving, Potomac-crossing, hatchet-bearing father of our country? That George Washington?" I ask.

When I fail to see it, he tells me the lighting isn't right. Or that I looked too late.

Perhaps I lack imagination, but even after several drive-bys I failed to spot this Mount Rush Hour.

So recently he pulled precariously over to the shoulder and grabbed a few shots.

Others tell me they can see the face in the photos just fine. OK, I have been known to flunk Rorschach tests.

To qualify as a seventh wonder, George would have to be made by man.

So was this facial feature created on purpose by a patriotic artist or as an accident by a Caltrans explosives engineer?

After browsing the file at the Thousand Oaks Library special collections, I can tell you the Conejo Grade qualifies as a wonder all in itself.

The Chumash established the trail as the easiest way up the 840-foot incline — one of the steepest grades in the state — according to a history written by the late Pat Allen, a meticulous Thousand Oaks historian.

And, oh, the things George has overseen.

The grade was widened in 1902 at a cost of $3,000 plus a tax charged to farmers transporting their harvest to the Port of Hueneme and the Southern Pacific Railroad depot on the Oxnard Plain.

This will surprise no one who navigates the incline with any regularity: It was the site of Ventura County's first auto fatality in November 1910.

It was paved around 1914. A couple of decades years later, the California Department of Transportation finished a $550,000 revamp, eliminating 37 of the grade's 49 switchbacks.

This will surprise no one who navigates it, but 10 hours after that much-ballyhooed reopening it was the site of another auto fatality.

Caltrans added lanes to the snaking roadway again in the early 1950s and declared it a freeway.

Thirty-five years and $26 million later, it was widened to its current state of congestion.

Carol Bidwell, a former city editor at the old Thousand Oaks News Chronicle, marked the occasion by writing a history of that stretch of highway.

The shape of the grade has changed with time and progress, she pointed out. But, Bidwell added, "the rocky face of an Indian chief carved by nature still looks over the roadway."

So you have to wonder when one man's first American president is another's first American, period.

— E-mail this Star columnist with your nominations for the seven wonders of Ventura County at cccason@aol.com.