Mt. Palomar: It’s Home to Select Bunch

Chris the Woodcutter isn’t the typical resident of this mountain, but everyone likes to point him out as the kind of character who most feels at home here.

Chris has baby-blue eyes and a soft, clear voice that emanates from the middle of a wild brown beard. His hands are sticky with wood sap. He’s not Paul Bunyan big--maybe only 6 foot 2 and 230 pounds--but he’s strong. Real strong.

He greets old friends with bear hugs, lifting them off the ground. He throws tree stumps into the back of Bertha, his pickup, like so much kindling. With two gigantic swings of an ax, he can split logs too big for most men to even budge.

Sleeps in a Tent

He lives on the southern slope of the mountain. He runs a generator when he needs electricity, and the only running water is from natural springs. He sleeps in a tent that covers a box springs mattress swinging on ropes from a huge live oak tree.

As Chris Marszalek, he used to manage apartments in San Diego. He was a bill collector. He worked as a management trainee for a drug store chain. He went to law school. Then, about 10 years ago, he and a buddy moved into a $50-a-month cabin here, and one day he got a job delivering some wood to an old lady. One thing led to another, and now he’s Chris the Woodcutter.

Clears Away Dead Wood

Local folks and the government hire him to clear dead or infected trees. He’s a one-man lumber company.

This place--all of it--is his home. He can tell you where the birds are nesting, and where the baby foxes are burrowed.

“I dig the wilderness. I know the creatures and the trees. I’m out here every day. I fit here better than I do in the city. I do my wood. I bust my buns and the trees fall.”

He points to a huge log that holds too much potential to be reduced to campfire fuel. “That’s a cigar store Indian. Not yet, but it’s gonna be,” he proclaims. Chris is an artist, too. The trees are his medium.

“I’m into cutting wood. I’m good at it, and there’s a lot of it around.”

Chris the Woodcutter may well be the most dramatic resident of Palomar Mountain, in his life style if not his appearance. But he accurately reflects the kind of spirit that is drawn to the mountain.

As residential communities go, this is not mainstream society.

There are scientists who use Palomar Mountain as a base from which to spy into deep space.

There are introspective yogis who own a small retreat, where they operate the only general store and restaurant (vegetarian, naturally).

There are families dating back generations on the mountain, able to walk through a meadow of waist-high ferns and detect even the most subtle trail.

There are cowboys and shepherds who can take you to the sweetest artesian springs.

There is no noise. There is virtually no smog. There are no gas stations, motels, gift shops or pizza delivery boys. The closest convenience store is 50 minutes away--so it’s not convenient at all.

End of the Line

And there’s no through traffic up here. You don’t come here on your way to somewhere else. This is the destination, and every road up here is a dead end, either at the Palomar Observatory parking lot or the state park campground or the old lodge on Crestline Road.

Three groups of people come up here. There are the tourists, who come up to camp beneath the cedars and oaks or to play in the snow or to visit the observatory. There are the part-time residents, with their weekend cabins and their get-away attitudes. And there are the 400 or so permanent residents who live up here to get away from it all. They’re a private bunch, by and large, and they enjoy a certain camaraderie. They have shown they can survive the snow, the isolation and the tourists, and they have succeeded in preserving the mountain as probably the most pristine parcel of God’s good earth in San Diego County.

Jennifer Willis has lived on the mountain for 17 years, and serves as postmistress--working out of an office no bigger than a walk-in closet, squeezed between the store and the restaurant.

The community is so small (about 150 families) that mail needs little more than a first name to be delivered, she says. “Sometimes mail is addressed only to ‘Grandma on Palomar Mountain,’ but I can still figure out who should get it, based on the return address. It’s that kind of a community,” she said.

This 6,140-foot-high mountain of fractured granite offers the purest spring water in San Diego County; much of it is bottled and sold by major distributors. The night air sparkles with clarity. Palomar’s got firs, cedars, pines and black oaks; it’s got mountain lions and mule deer, eagles and hawks.

One visitor at the turn of the century described what he called “the surprise of Palomar.”

“There it stands, a hanging garden above the arid land. Springs of water burst out of the hillsides. The road runs through forests that a king might covet.”

So why doesn’t the whole world flock up here to set up housekeeping?

There simply aren’t many jobs up here, and commuting to work off the mountain can be grueling. The two-lane road isn’t particularly narrow, but it’s awfully winding and the grade is steep. It takes its toll on automobiles. Indeed, in the early days, the first motorists to Palomar Mountain would tie trees to the back bumpers of their cars for the trip back home to help keep their speed down.

Place to Hide Out

And in the mid-1800s, the mountain’s residents included cattle and horse rustlers in hiding. They figured no one would find them here, or even look.

The mountain generally is attractive as a full-time residence only to those who are retired or who can find work up here, and who don’t mind living miles from theaters, restaurants, supermarkets and gas stations.

“That road down the mountain is a killer to the average person,” said Cliff Ellerby, who has lived on Palomar full-time for seven years. “During the first year we lived up here, I’d drive down every day to work in San Diego. That was an hour-and-a-half drive. I’d stop in Escondido for breakfast to break it up.”

The lack of local jobs and the long drive up and down the mountain are not the only factors in keeping down the population. With the exception of the small community of Crestline, which was subdivided about 50 years ago into a couple dozen city-size lots, lot sizes generally are at least eight acres. So Palomar will never get crowded with residents.

Plenty of Tourists

The place, however, does get jammed with tourists come the snow season.

“We’re not crazy about the snow bunnies. They run rampant over your property and have no regard for property rights,” Ellerby said. “When they drive up here, they see a sign that reads, ‘Entering the Cleveland National Forest.’ So they figure the whole mountain is theirs.”

Said Dutch Bergman, whose family is the largest private property owner on the mountain, with about 4,000 acres: “People who are normal down below go all to hell and have absolutely no conscience when they come up here for the snow. They think this is one giant Disneyland. If there are fences, they break ‘em down. They park in your driveway and play in your front yard.”

In fact, while state and national parkland makes up about half the 36-square-mile mountaintop, most of the property along the main roads is privately owned.

If you want to meet the old-timers, all you have to do is hang around The Store in the late afternoon. It’s happy hour, and the fellas and their ladies will buy six-packs of beer, walk out onto the front porch, stow their beer in a big ice box, plunk down on a firewood storage box and tell tales for an hour or two.

“If you can afford a six-pack of Coors, you can make friends real easy on Palomar,” one of them says.

It’s not a time for serious talk. What’s the hardest thing about living up here? The answer comes quickly: “When it gets icy, we’ve got bad problems. The Coors truck can’t get up here.”

Sitting outside The Store isn’t the only social event. There’s the Bailey’s barn dances, the Fourth of July barbecues, the Volunteer Fire Department’s fund-raisers, the Woodchoppers’ Ball and the community potlucks at the Palomar Observatory recreation room.

There’s no hurry up here, either. “We don’t wear watches,” Bergman said. “We don’t always know what day of the week it is, but we usually know what half of the month it is. What we don’t get done today can wait until tomorrow.”

Among the mountain residents are 13 families who live in cottages owned by Caltech on the 2,000-acre Palomar Observatory grounds. These are men and women who are employed full-time at the observatory to help maintain the five telescopes for visiting astronomers, and to operate the souvenir stand for the tourists.

The observatory, with its 200-inch telescope--second-largest in the world--is not open to tourists during its night operations.

“It costs us $40,000 a year to be open to the public, in wages and supplies like floor wax and toilet paper,” said Bob Thicksten, observatory superintendent.

“But we have no way of reimbursing ourselves, since one of the establishing endowments for the observatory stipulated that we allow the public to visit it at no charge. So we have no way of recouping the cost of being open. Some people don’t understand why we can’t give them guided tours. They don’t understand the strain it places on us to let them in at all.”

“There’s a sense of respect for those who live up here,” says Bob Russell, a local construction worker who plays classical music on his violin and country-Western music on his fiddle.

“People say, ‘Ah, to live on the mountain.’ But it’s not that easy. You can turn into a vegetable up here if you don’t find something to keep you busy, because the mountain won’t keep you busy.

“Some people will move up here, and after a year or two, move back off. They can’t handle the snow or the isolation. It sounds good until they try it.”

Sharon Bergman lived in San Diego as a youngster and attended sixth-grade school camp in the Palomar Mountain State Park. She liked the place. In 1971 she found a cheap cabin and moved there. She got a job at The Store and met Dutch Bergman, a fifth-generation Palomar resident. They got married in 1979, and their 3-month-old son, Wesley Garrett, is now a sixth-generation mountain resident.