Mystery of Vanishing Bluffs Stirs Controversy

It’s a 100-year-old mystery that has had two groups at each other’s throats for a decade: the disappearance of the Encinitas bluffs.

One group, the Seacoast Preservation Assn., is composed of property owners along the ocean cliffs. They are literally fighting for their homes and lives in challenging a scientific finding of two Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers and their published works on coastal erosion.

That finding: during the decade of the 1880s, major flooding and erosion pared off as much as 600 feet of bluffs. In 1976, Scripps researcher Gerald Kuhn and the late Francis Shepard, Scripps professor emeritus, first reported that huge erosion event.

The revelation of the Encinitas bluff collapse might have died a natural death of disinterest. But scientific journals have continued to cite it when discussing coastal erosion, and local newspapers have continued to revive the story when lesser storms struck the coast and caused property damage and cliff collapses.

Then, in 1984, Kuhn and Shepard published a prize-winning book, “Sea Cliffs, Beaches, and Coastal Valleys of San Diego County: Some Amazing Histories and Some Horrifying Implications.” The Encinitas bluff collapse of the 1880s was prominently featured.

Bluff-top homeowners were understandably concerned about the Scripps report and were appalled when the Shepard-Kuhn book put their bluff top back in the headlines.

They were living in houses standing a few feet from the edges of the steep bluffs. If 600 or more feet of the bluff had receded in one decade, how could they expect to enjoy the splendid bluff-top views in their golden years?

Ted Wright, a founder of the Seacoast Preservation Assn., recently told of some of the hardships the Scripps survey brought to the Encinitas bluff-edge owners.

“Homer Eaton wanted to do some work on his home, and he couldn’t get any financing even though he is located a good distance--25 feet or so--from the edge. He went to eight banks and couldn’t get financing,” Wright said.

“Tom Wilson sold his house three times and each time it fell out of escrow when someone would say, ‘I wouldn’t buy along those bluffs. They lost 600 to 800 feet once. They aren’t safe.’ ”

So the Seacoast Preservation Assn. marshaled its forces and began its investigation of the alleged bluff collapse of a century ago. They obtained maps of the first Encinitas town plan filed in 1883 by “J.S.Pitcher, Proprietor.” The maps showed streets that would have been located in the ocean if they existed now.

They searched for maps all over the country and obtained later surveys of the Encinitas bluff area which no longer showed Fifth Street and Sixth Street oceanward of the present bluff top.

SPA members also went to the library to research the coastal weather patterns of that early era. They found no major earthquakes had occurred; no violent ocean storms were reported, and, although there were periods of torrential rains and heavy flooding recorded, no coastal bluff collapses were reported.

Although the research proved to be a help to property owners seeking loans and selling their houses because it proved the bluffs had not eroded more than a few inches since the 1880s, it did not solve the mystery of the disappearance of the Encinitas bluffs.

Only recently did the bluff-top residents hit the jackpot when they discovered an 1881 Encinitas cadastral map (of developable land) which showed, to their joy, that two years before Pitcher recorded his plat map of the Encinitas area, there was no 600 or more feet protruding out into the ocean.

“Mr. Pitcher had larceny in his heart,” Wright concluded, summing up the 10-year search for the answer to the disappearing bluffs. “That land never existed.”

In 1888, Wright said, “Mr. Pitcher recanted,” and wrote off the non-existent building lots and city blocks on San Diego County assessor’s maps as: “In ocean, error in survey.”

Confronted recently with what the Seacoast Preservation Assn. believed to be the incontrovertible solution--an unscrupulous land developer--to the mystery of the disappearing bluffs, Scripps researcher Kuhn remained unconvinced. In fact, he was overjoyed at their effort which, he said, “adds some valuable evidence to the matter.”

The 1881 cadastral map which the SPA contended showed a coastline far inland from the 1883 Pitcher plat map was included in the Shepard-Kuhn treatise, Kuhn pointed out, and does not disprove the bluff erosion thesis.

A cadastral map shows only developable land, “only property on top of the bluffs,” Kuhn pointed out. There well could have been 600 feet or more of sloping bluff face and toe extending beyond the bluff top, he said.

That and the other evidence produced by the SPA have only served to convince Kuhn that his theory about the disappearing bluffs is the correct one.

The bluffs were attacked by flooding from the inland along Cottonwood Creek which enters the ocean at what is now Moonlight State Beach. Torrential rains, recorded during most winters of the latter 1880s, saturated the sandstone bluffs and made them easy prey to ocean storm waves, Kuhn contended.

“We did not state that the bluffs disappeared in a few minutes or overnight. But the evidence points to a major bluff erosion along the Encinitas bluffs during the 1880s,” Kuhn said.

Perhaps J.S. Pitcher did have “larceny in his heart” when he platted the sloping bluff faces as if they were an extension of the Encinitas bluff top, the Scripps researcher conceded. “But, no one pays taxes for five years on non-existent land.”

Kuhn said he wishes the Encinitas bluff dwellers well and hopes, as they do, that their ocean aeries sit on stable soil. Nevertheless, he insists, “the historical and meteorological data point to major bluff erosion during the 1880s.”