Sleepy Alpine Braces for Rude Awakening : Smog Creeps In, Warning Town of Expected Growth

There isn’t much in Alpine that makes you think of the Alps. There are no craggy, snow-covered peaks, no ski runs, no pine forests, no high-country meadows. If there are people who wear lederhosen, they don’t wear them around town.

What you find instead are sun-drenched hills that abound with small ranches and thick stands of chaparral. On an average of 37 days a year, you also find smog at what the federal government considers “unhealthful” levels; Alpine has the bad fortune to be at an elevation and location where smog from the greater San Diego area tends to collect.

Despite occasional smog, though, Alpine’s atmosphere as a community is pure laid-back and country--surprising in a place only 35 minutes by freeway from sprawling San Diego.

There isn’t a stoplight in town, and street lights are as scarce as new-wave haircuts. Residents often ride horses down the town’s main streets without drawing stares.

It’s the kind of community in which the owner of a lumber yard repainted his store and it was mentioned in the local paper, the Alpine Sun.

As housing projects and shopping centers spread across the distant North County in recent years, Alpine went practically unchanged. But now development is coming--and fast--to this former stage stop 30 miles east of San Diego.

One shopping center has been built, another is under construction and developers hope to build two more. Luxury custom homes are rising in an enclave called Rancho Palo Verde, two miles east of the town center, and plans for a tract of 239 homes on 260 acres a few miles to the west have been approved.

In addition, a 333-unit mobile home park is planned just north of Interstate 8 at Tavern Road. The park has already been annexed to the Alpine Sanitation District, and many locals predict that it is only a matter of time before final construction plans for it are approved, too.

Town residents are divided on the issue of growth. Some welcome it, others abhor it. Still others see it as inevitable but want to control it somehow. As bulldozers roar and hammers ring on new structures all over town, the people of Alpine debate whether growth will eventually overwhelm their community’s rural character or whether, in fact, it already has.

Beatrice and Clayburn la Force moved to Alpine from San Diego in 1945.

“We’ve raised our children and our grandchildren out here,” said Beatrice la Force, “so when people say they’ve lived here six years or something, we call them newcomers.”

The La Forces’ Sky Mesa Ranch consists of 150 acres on a hilltop with a panoramic view. Their house--a virtual museum of Western paraphernalia--is constructed of railroad ties and local rocks, and decorated with antique branding irons, saddles and Indian artifacts. Horse-drawn wagons and buggies from another era stand in a nearby field.

Now retired, Clayburn la Force formerly appraised property and worked for a company that made loans to farmers. Meanwhile, his wife dabbled in writing. In 1963, she began writing a history of the town, and when she finished “Alpine--History of a Mountain Settlement” in 1971, she published it herself at a cost of several thousand dollars.

“I did it for Alpine,” she said.

According to Beatrice la Force, the town began to take shape in the 1860s as a way station on the road that linked San Diego with Julian and Warner Springs. Stagecoaches and cattle drovers made up most of the traffic, but within a few years wagons bearing gold ore from the mines near Julian were common, too.

In those days, Alpine was known as Viejas (the name came from nearby Viejas Mountain). “It was just a stage stop where drivers could get water and supplies. There was a big barn where they could change horses if they wanted to,” the author noted. “It was an isolated spot.”

New residents trickled into the area, most of them to homestead small ranches. But Alpine took a new direction when a wealthy businessman, Benjamin Arnold, arrived in 1888. Arnold, an ivory importer from Deep River, Conn., came to town hoping that the climate would cure his asthma. His lungs benefited greatly from that move, and so did the town of Alpine. Over the next decade, he built a house, a hotel, a one-room schoolhouse and a town hall to supplement the community’s store and post office.

During those busy years, the town also acquired its name. The story goes that an elderly resident was taken with the way the sunlight and shadows played across the peaks in the area. It reminded her of her childhood in Switzerland’s Alps, she said, and the other residents agreed that the name “Alpine” somehow suited the place. It certainly didn’t discourage the growing number of people who, like Arnold, came to town for asthma and other health problems; from 1890 to 1940, Alpine flourished as a small health resort.

When the La Forces arrived in Alpine in 1945, the town still had fewer than 400 residents.

“We used to cook over the fire,” she said. “There was only one church, and everyone went to it on Christmas to see the Christmas pageant--even the Catholics.”

Between 1950 and 1970, the town grew by only 1,000 people. But after eight-lane Interstate 8 was completed in the late 1970s, growth accelerated, and within a few years Alpine had its first shopping center, Alpine Creek. Currently the Alpine Unified School District has 5,225 registered voters, and the Chamber of Commerce estimates the town’s total population to be several thousand more than that.

From their hilltop redoubt, the La Forces have watched as change has overtaken Alpine, and they have mixed feelings about it. “A lot of big homes have been built” since the freeway was completed, Beatrice la Force said, and with them has come a new kind of resident.

“They’re the kind who buy a new automobile twice a year,” Clayburn la Force said with a chuckle.

“It’s not the Old West any more,” his wife added. “For our Viejas Days parade, we used to get out the wagons and put the kids on horseback and have a barbecue afterwards. Now they get the girls all dressed up in imitation ballroom gowns with sequins.

“But the growth doesn’t bother me particularly. I’ve gotten used to it. It’s a convenience in a way--for a long time we had to go to El Cajon to shop.

“Still, I’d hate to see it spread out and become like Poway. I’d hate to see Alpine’s country flavor ruined.”

According to Beatrice la Force and other residents, many of the newcomers in Alpine are commuters who work in El Cajon or San Diego. With a median age of 36, the town’s population is also relatively old (countywide, the median age is 29), and relatively conservative, even for traditionally conservative San Diego County (52% of Alpine’s registered voters are Republicans and 36% are Democrats, compared with countywide figures of 47% and 40%, respectively).

“The people who come here want horses and want to get their kids away from the city and the drug influence,” said Beatrice la Force. “They come for the space and quiet, and the beautiful sky.

“It isn’t like the North County, where the people have boulevard feet and can’t stay away from the night life. There is no night life in Alpine. Actually, there’s nothing much up here but a lovely climate and scenery.”

Recent years have brought another “newcomer,” however--the smog. Alpine is at an elevation of about 2,000 feet, the same altitude at which a temperature-inversion layer often forms over the greater San Diego area, trapping smog between cool air above and warm air below. The frequent on-shore breezes push the smog eastward, concentrating it in the foothills in and around Alpine.

Many of the town’s residents insist that the smog isn’t as bad as it is often portrayed in San Diego’s media. A few even suggest that the placement of the Air Pollution Control District’s ozone-measuring device on West Victoria Drive results in artificially high readings due to nearby traffic.

But Lynn Eldred, a spokeswoman for the district, pointed out that “ozone is a photochemical pollutant that takes three hours to form.” Nearby traffic wouldn’t affect an ozone-measuring device at all, she said.

“Alpine consistently has the highest readings for ozone in the county,” Eldred added. Preliminary figures for 1986 show that ozone in Alpine exceeded the federal standard for clean air (0.12 parts per million) on 27 days, down from an average of 39 days over the previous five years.

The smog doesn’t seem to have discouraged anyone from moving to Alpine, however.

“We’re looking at an explosive growth situation,” said Bob McCoy, editor and publisher of the Alpine Sun. “In particular, there has been a proliferation of apartment projects in Alpine in the last two years. A lot of people are not happy with that, but there’s a need for it, up to a point.”

McCoy, 50, a former data processing manager for the Arizona Daily Star and Tucson Citizen, bought the Sun five years ago. In addition to pasting up and laying out the paper--a biweekly that has about 1,900 paid subscribers--he also reports on the local sheriff’s substation, the school board and the planning group. His wife, Chris, is the paper’s photographer and feature writer.

McCoy noted that one of Alpine’s new apartment complexes, Creekside Meadows, has benefited the community by providing needed living space for active senior citizens. But with the apartments and new houses have come crowded streets and schools.

There have been other changes, too.

“There used to be a strong sense of community, but that has changed, although not in a major way,” McCoy noted. “What I use for a barometer is community support.”

At a Kiwanis-sponsored “Las Vegas Night” two years ago, the 15 Kiwanis members who manned the gambling tables outnumbered the paying customers, he said. And the Chamber of Commerce’s monthly lunches in the Crow’s Nest room of the Alpine Inn are drawing fewer and fewer people.

“Last year, the lunches were standing-room only--about 40 people,” he said. “If you didn’t get there before noon, you didn’t sit down. Now, if they get 12 people they’re doing well, and they only meet once a month.”

On the other hand, the chamber had no trouble raising money to buy new curtains for the Alpine Elementary School stage, McCoy pointed out. But Alpine has grown into a bedroom community, and “as a town grows, people communicate less--that’s natural,” he said.

“Alpine isn’t really rural, it’s just spread out. Most zoning here is for one acre, but to me, rural means 10- or 15-acre lots with a barn and some animals in addition to a home. It means you don’t have a shopping center nearby. We’re already past that point.”

Greg Pregill, curator of herpetology at the San Diego Natural History Museum, moved to Alpine in 1980 and subsequently bought nine acres in nearby Japatul Valley. The area makes a convenient base for his frequent forays into the hills in search of newts, lizards, snakes and other local reptiles and amphibians.

The chaparral that covers Alpine and much of the rest of eastern San Diego County is “a habitat that is found only in a few other parts of the world--Chile, the Mediterranean, Australia,” Pregill pointed out. “In the summer it looks so harsh and baked, you wonder how anything could survive. Then the first rain in the fall comes,” and the hills turn green “almost immediately.”

Some of the species he collects and studies are found nowhere else in North America, and others have evolved specific adaptations to local plants. The orange-throated whiptail lizard, for instance, “has a fondness for (eating) a particular termite that inhabits a particular kind of chaparral,” said Pregill. As increasing development along the coast has wiped out much of the chaparral, the lizard has become scarce and is now found only in inland foothills like those near Alpine.

But Pregill is concerned that the same kind of growth is now overtaking Alpine. “It’s sad and frustrating to see all this mountain habitat plowed under,” he said. “The place has really changed. But fortunately, the Cleveland National Forest encompasses much of Alpine’s perimeter, and that will help prevent complete destruction” of the community’s rural feel and seemingly endless thickets of chaparral.

“Alpine is growing, and growing fast,” agreed Donna Renninger, current president of the Alpine Chamber of Commerce, as she sat in her office recently. It is a measure of the rural character Alpine still has that the president of the chamber is a 34-year-old woman who raises Morgan horses and Sheltie dogs and drives a pickup truck.

Renninger’s office--the only office the Chamber of Commerce has--is a closet-sized wooden building brimming with a single desk and boxes full of color brochures. Across the street is the town hall built by Benjamin Arnold in 1899, which looks incongruous now in downtown Alpine--a double row of shops, gas stations and restaurants strung out for a mile along Alpine Boulevard.

Renninger moved to Alpine 3 1/2 years ago. Now she has two houses here, one near downtown and the other on a 16-acre ranch with horses, dogs, ducks and chickens.

“I had the animals and was looking for a backcountry place,” she said. “Now people are starting to realize that Alpine isn’t that far away from San Diego.

“But I don’t think the town has lost its character. It’s large enough to have what you need to buy and small enough to be sociable. Without exaggerating, I’d say I know 50% of the people who live here.”

Some residents are in favor of growth and others are opposed to it, Renninger said.

“We’re trying to let it grow slowly,” she said. “Our planning group helps control lot-splitting because we don’t want massive growth. And we’re starting a design-review board.”

In unincorporated Alpine, the planning group consists of 15 elected members who make recommendations to the county’s Board of Supervisors on all development plans. The design review board--still under discussion--will consist of five to seven members of the community and will review plans for new buildings in the town’s center to ensure that they comply with guidelines on architecture, landscaping and parking.

The goal is to preserve the town’s character, said County Supervisor George Bailey, who is a strong supporter of the design review process.

“There will be growth in Alpine, but it will be well-planned growth,” Bailey said. “And I think it will set an example for the other communities in the area, particularly the ones along Interstate 8.”

But Mel Crain, a member of the Alpine Community Planning Group who has lived in the town since 1962, describes the design review board as “unwieldy, unworkable and undesirable. Its premise is to create an attractive commercial center--and that itself is growth-inducing. Besides, it will require volunteer (board members) to spend huge amounts of time working with developers.”

Dianne Jacob, Bailey’s executive assistant, insisted that town residents have already shown a willingness to work the long hours necessary to make a design review board effective. As for the issue of growth, Jacob pointed out that Bailey is trying to get his fellow supervisors to back a plan that would prohibit general plan amendments and zoning reclassifications that increase density in the unincorporated areas of the county, unless the changes have the support of a local planning group.

The proposal would “stop any increases in density until we can find some answers to these critical problems,” Jacob said.

“But we don’t have the answers yet. It seems that it often comes down to money: How do you fund more roads, or take care of the sewage? The question is always who should pay.”

To Crain, a professor of political science at San Diego State University, the issue is whether the rural character of his community can be saved. “One of the things visitors who come out here remark about, almost without exception, is how quiet it is,” he said. “People ask me what we grow out here on our 21 acres, and I say, ‘Scenery.’

“But there are dozens and dozens of lights now on hillsides that used to be totally black at night. . . . We’re not opposed to all growth--an individual should be able to come out here and put up a house on a few acres. But we are opposed to becoming another urban area, and we’re especially opposed to big subdivisions. And for believing that, we’re accused of saying that we don’t want to let anyone enjoy the country. Well, you can’t enjoy the country if you move the city out here.”

Crain and other residents are particularly concerned about a 260-acre 239-home tract to be developed in Galloway Valley, on Harbison Canyon Road, by the M.W. Reynolds Co. of El Cajon. The development was endorsed by the Alpine Community Planning Group, but the original developer subsequently sold the project to Reynolds, and some Alpine residents are upset at Reynolds’ plan to build relatively small houses on half-acre lots and designate a large chunk of land in the middle of the project as permanent privately owned open space.

One privately owned area, offered to the town six years ago as “permanent” open space in return for approval of a shopping center, is now an apartment complex.

“I think we’re being led down the Yellow Brick Road again,” Alpine resident Kevin Healy told Mike Reynolds, the company’s owner, at a recent meeting of the Alpine Community Planning Group.

Bailey pointed out that landowners have a right to develop their land, and added: “It will always be the case that some people won’t want something new right next to them, but (pro-growth and slow-growth advocates) in Alpine are talking to each other now, and they never did that before. . . . There will always be change, but Alpine’s general character as an independent semi-rural community will hold its own.”

Crain is not so sure. Projects such as the Galloway Valley subdivision will encourage more commercial development and create more traffic in Alpine, and that, he said, “is going to change us.”