Offramp Ahead for Paradise?

Time was, surfing one of the world’s most famous breaks required driving to the boondocks, bushwhacking through a reedy marsh and confronting armed men who threatened arrest.

This wasn’t Baja, but northern San Diego County in 1958. That summer, Leo Hetzel was a 17-year-old Long Beach kid looking for adventure. He found it at Trestles, the breaks off a beach that seemed like wilderness despite the fact it was on the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base.

“It’s like a magical place for me,” said Hetzel, a retired photographer who, at 65, still surfs Trestles weekly. “There are a million stories from that place. People who grew up in the ‘60s here in Southern California know those stories, even if they’re not a surfer.”

The story of Trestles and its role in the popularization of Southern California surf culture includes surfing gurus and gun-toting Marines, a nuclear power plant and protests against encroaching development. Even the Beach Boys and Richard Nixon have roles.

And now, so does a planned toll road.

The proposed extension of Orange County’s Foothill tollway has generated debate within California because it would slice through San Onofre State Beach. Opponents say it would threaten wildlife habitat and the San Mateo Creek watershed.

But the six-lane roadway has garnered widespread attention outside California over concern that it could damage Trestles -- spoiling views, polluting the water and altering the hydraulics of the tapered waves that peel off its cobblestone reef.

Trestles doesn’t produce the world’s biggest waves, but their shape and consistency are considered among the best. It’s the only mainland U.S. stop on the Assn. of Surfing Professionals’ World Championship Tour, which ends today at Lower Trestles.

Trestles’ fiercest protectors have dubbed it the “Yosemite of Surfing,” a broad crescent of white sand backed by an estuary and bluffs where the waves roll in like lines of whipped cream. Even toll road proponents, who vigorously deny the highway would change Trestles, acknowledge they’re dealing with a Southern California icon.

“It’s like saying you want to do something to harm Plymouth Rock,” said Meg Waters, a public relations consultant who worked several years on the project for the Irvine-based Transportation Corridor Agencies. “When you say, ‘It’s going to wreck Trestles,’ you’re going to get everybody who’s ever heard something about surfing.... Trestles is in a Beach Boys song, for God’s sakes!”

If everybody had an ocean across the U.S.A.

Then everybody be surfin’ like Californ-i-a...

You’ll catch ‘em surfin’ at Del Mar, Ventura County line.

Santa Cruz and Trestle ...

When “Surfin’ U.S.A.” hit the charts in 1963, surfing was enjoying a surge in popularity that would eventually transform it from the passionate pursuit of a few hundred self-styled rebels into a mainstream, heavily commercialized sport.

Just a few years earlier, Trestles -- named for the train tracks that cross San Mateo Creek there -- was an obscure rumor passed from one longboarder to another. The first time Steve Pezman drove from Long Beach looking for Trestles, he had to hunt.

Pezman was 18 and motivated by two things: The spot was frequented by surfing’s A-list -- guys like Robert August, Dewey Weber, Phil Edwards, Mike Doyle and Miki Dora. And sneaking onto Camp Pendleton provided a patina of danger, which kept the crowds away.

“There were few surfers who were willing to thumb their nose at the law and go in there,” said Pezman, 65, who publishes the Surfer’s Journal from a San Clemente office park a few miles from Trestles. “It was a constant game of one-upmanship with the Marines.... They didn’t know how to cope with us without actually harming us. We were all just kids. Most of the Marines were kids themselves.”

Much of the battle for Trestles was waged in the “jungle,” the tree-and-brush-lined watershed of San Mateo Creek, where surfers reconnoitered the “enemy” and hid their cars -- among them a 1948 Dodge painted in camouflage colors -- before sneaking down to the beach along dirt paths. Pezman and Hetzel were among a small group who had a key to the place after they attached a lock to a farm gate that offered back-door access to the beach.

When a Marine patrol came across a group in the water, they would park and wait for someone (in this era before surfboard leashes) to lose their board. That would set off a “rock dance,” a race through the shoals pitting a man in swim trunks against a uniformed Marine with the prize being 9 feet of balsa wood.

When Marines came across the surfers’ old beaters in the jungle, they would flatten tires and strip out sparkplug wires. Surfers returned the favor by vandalizing unattended jeeps.

A few times, tempers escalated. Hetzel recalled when a Marine shoved a visiting Hawaiian who wouldn’t obey his order to leave. The Hawaiian decked him and, surrounded by a group of surfers, the Marine left.

“We thought, ‘Cool.’ So we went out into the water,” Hetzel said. “Then, suddenly down the beach we saw 20 jeeps coming. They got on megaphones and shouted, ‘You’re all under arrest.’ ... We paddled halfway to San Clemente Pier before they gave up on us.”

In the 1950s and ‘60s, countless surfers were detained and cited for trespassing. Many more had their boards confiscated. Rick Wilson, who today works for the Surfrider Foundation, keeps a faded citation from March 26, 1966, framed on his office wall.

“I had to go down to the provost’s office at Camp Pendleton with my mom to retrieve my board,” said Wilson, who talked his way out of a fine.

Trestles was relative wilderness in the 1950s. That began to change in the ‘60s. The completion of Interstate 5 made Trestles more accessible and opened the door to southern Orange County’s tremendous growth. The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station came next, its looming domes a mere mile away.

San Clemente’s population doubled during the 1960s. But it was one new, part-time resident who had the biggest impact on Trestles. When President Nixon moved into a Spanish-style, bluff-top estate he named the Western White House, the stakes on the beach changed -- at least when Nixon was in town. Trespassers had the Secret Service to contend with, maybe a Coast Guard cutter.

Nixon was aware of the tension between surfers and Marines; an assistant attorney general was a member of the San Onofre Surfing Club, which leased its nearby beach from the Marine Corps. Nixon was made an honorary member of the club.

Surfers weren’t happy when Nixon ordered the Marines to give up land for what would become San Onofre State Beach. Club members lost their private getaway. And making Trestles part of a state park brought crowds and surfing competitions that periodically closed the beach to the public. Officials later pared the number of contests, but regulars still complain.

“As a state park, the Trestles I knew and loved is pretty much gone,” Pezman said.

In the mid-1980s, a proposed marina-hotel project with as many as 3,000 boat slips melted away amid heated protests from local residents. A decade later, though, an attempt to block construction of a gated community on a bluff above Trestles for Marine officers failed.

As the homes went up in 1998, Orange County’s toll road agency began design work on a new route that would cut through the state park. This year, toll road directors approved the project. The state attorney general and environmental groups quickly sued, challenging the agency’s environmental review. With approval still needed by the California Coastal Commission and several federal agencies, the fight is expected to last years.

Opponents say the toll road would be clearly visible from the beach, generate pollution and cause runoff of fine sand and silt that would alter the delicate dynamics of the ocean floor from which Trestles’ perfect waves spring. Proponents argue that the toll road, which would connect with I-5 south of San Clemente, would be no closer than the freeway and detention basins would control contamination and sediment.

“It’s a false scare,” toll agency spokeswoman Lisa Telles said. “It’s not going to change all the memories and history and the ability to surf Trestles.”

Trestles’ fate is just one of several issues opponents have raised, but it has arguably garnered the most visibility. The San Clemente-based Surfrider Foundation’s “Save Trestles” campaign has become a key fundraising tool. The Save Trestles website (www.surfrider.org/savetrestles/ -- established this year, logs more than 8,000 visits a month; a search for the phrase on Google yields more than 12,000 hits.

“It’s really a rallying point.... It’s a commodity,” Surfrider’s Matt McClain said of Trestles. “If we lose this campaign in our own backyard, it doesn’t say a whole hell of a lot about the surf industry and the surfing community around here.”

Getting to Trestles still requires effort. It’s a 20-minute walk from a parking lot adjacent to a burger stand at the south end of San Clemente. The jungle remains, but the walkway is paved and skirts the Marine Corps’ housing and the freeway. The roar of the traffic drowns out whatever birds may be in the trees. There is still abundant wildlife, but along with deer and bobcats, there is also the occasional homeless person. Stickers for surf products are plastered on every fence post. So too are ones imploring “Save Trestles.”

“I’m not sure what the ‘Yosemite of Surfing’ is, what it means,” said John Raab, 47, a San Clemente surfer and frustrated commuter who spent a recent morning at Trestles and believes it and a toll road can coexist. “You’ve got an eight-lane freeway going through.... If this didn’t kill it, what could?”

Other regulars were more skeptical. “I think anytime man messes with nature, he screws it up,” said Andy Fomenko, 41, who has been surfing Trestles since he was a teen and believes that, while changed, it’s still a unique place. “No one wants to take that chance.”

Down on the wide beach, the only sound is the rustle of reeds at the mouth of San Mateo Creek and the breaking of waves. There are no homes or resorts on the bluffs. Save for the distant domes of San Onofre and a peek-a-boo view of the freeway, there’s still a 1950s vibe to the place.

“I don’t use the word ‘pristine.’ It’s not pristine,” McClain said. But he and other surfers argue that Trestles may be the last of its kind -- a relatively untouched slice of Southern California coastline. Like a comfortable, old wetsuit with a few torn seams, it needs to be treated gingerly. “It’s not just a wave at Trestles,” McClain said. “It’s the whole experience.”

mike.anton @latimes.com