Area Holds Allure for People From All Walks

If everyone has his own notion of what the San Dieguito River Valley Regional Park might mean to him, Richard Carrico has his, too: a landscaped history book.

Carrico, a professor of American Indian history at San Diego State University, said the river drainage basin, from the foothills of Julian to its mouth at Del Mar, was home to San Diego County’s earliest settlers.

“Virtually all the Indian cultures that exist in San Diego County that we know about archeologically are within this drainage,” he said. “You can literally walk back through time by walking that valley.”

Indian Cultures Evident

The upper reaches of the park touch on two existing Indian reservations, representing the Santa Ysabel and Mesa Grande bands of the contemporary Mission Indians that first settled in the region about 500 years ago.

There is also evidence of the Luiseno Indians, who migrated to the San Dieguito River Valley about 1,000 years ago from Nevada and Utah.

The Luisenos became neighbors to the Ipai Indians, whose presence in the valley can be dated back about 2,000 years, Carrico notes.

And ultimately, the Indian lineage can be dated back to the San Dieguito People, whose cultural presence goes back about 10,000 years--before that of even the famed La Jolla Man--based on archeological finds below the Lake Hodges Dam, Carrico said.

Others, less historically inclined than Carrico, might treasure the park for other reasons.

Steve Sorensen is a backpacker who may well be the only man in recent time who has walked the entire stretch of the proposed park. The experience, he said, opened his eyes.

Only by walking it on foot, he said, did he come to appreciate the continuity of the loosely defined valley. On maps it is a hodgepodge of man-made political jurisdictions. Through the jumble weaves a thin blue line of a creek-turned-river, connecting a small spring north of Julian to the Pacific Ocean--a distance measured by Sorensen as three days on the trail.

“Now I have a sense for it as one big watershed that has maintained some kind of integrity despite what is happening around it with growth,” said Sorensen.

Variety of Desires

Others might appreciate the park for reasons not necessarily shared by Carrico or Sorensen. Those who treasure country life might particularly enjoy the two-lane highways that crisscross the dairy farms and cattle ranges.

Some might gawk at the blueblood ambiance of the river’s lower reaches, with its thoroughbred horse ranches, polo fields and golf courses.

Picnickers, bird watchers and fishermen might figure on settling in alongside the lagoon at Del Mar or the banks of Lake Hodges or the Sutherland Reservoir.

Day hikers, young Scouts and schoolchildren on nature field trips might explore short walks from existing parks--Felicita County Park and Kit Carson Regional Park in Escondido, the Rancho Bernardo Community Park and San Diego city’s Black Mountain Open Space park.

Horsemen could rest beneath the shade of centuries-old oak trees at one end of the valley, ride past Golden Eagle nesting grounds and hooches used by migrant farm workers, and complete their journey by sloshing through salt marsh grasses at the valley’s western end.

Environmentalists say the valley needs to be protected as a habitat for entire species of animals and plants.

Opponents to growth say the park will cut, at least symbolically if not in substance, a greenbelt buffer protecting North County from the reaches of metropolitan San Diego.

And so it goes. Indeed, the San Dieguito River Valley Regional Park would cut a public swath across San Diego County like none other and offer a potpourri of experiences, or symbolic meanings, to those who visit it or are comforted by its presence.

The county is not without other outdoor opportunities. Hikers and others can experience the remote outdoors by traveling along the Santa Margarita River in the extreme northern reaches of San Diego County, but much of it travels through Camp Pendleton, and is off-limits to the public.

To the south there is the sprawling Mission Trails Regional Park west of Santee, but it does not offer an ocean-to-foothills link.

More serious hikers can trek from Julian to the San Diego River through a network of paths that crisscross the Cuyamacas, but that outing can be too severe for the less rugged.

For that reason, the San Dieguito River Valley--actually, a sort of three-level terrace from the Pacific to the foothills between the Sutherland Reservoir and Julian--is being heralded with great expectations.

The upstream terminus would be at Ironside Spring, nestled in a splash of ferns in the Volcan Mountains north of Julian.

The Santa Ysabel area between the springs and Sutherland Reservoir is in various ownerships, including two Indian reservations, the federal Bureau of Land Management, National Forest Service and private parties. The gently rolling hills sprinkled with sage scrub and grasses are utilized primarily for cattle grazing and are the single-largest source of water for the San Dieguito River.

The traveler will move westward--and drop about 1,000 feet over a 5-mile stretch--to the Sutherland Reservoir, tucked behind hills on the northern side of California 78 east of Ramona. The reservoir’s surrounding hills and the entire Pamo Valley are treasured by naturalists for their oak woodlands, riparian habitats and foothill wildlife. The hiker walks along broad valleys and eroded mesas, beneath the steep slopes of the valley’s accompanying ridgeline.

The Santa Ysabel Creek makes a dramatic drop out of the Pamo Valley to a lower terrace--the San Pasqual Valley east of Escondido, which today is a San Diego city agricultural preserve leased to dairymen and farmers and the site of the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

It was in this valley in 1846 that the bloodiest skirmish was fought in California during the Mexican-American War as U. S. troops campaigned--unsuccessfully at this site--to bring California within the nation’s borders. Eighteen Americans were killed and the survivors were saved when scout Kit Carson and two others sneaked off their mountain retreat--Mule Hill--and returned with reinforcements.

Among the valley’s residents is 88-year-old Rebecca Judson, whose grandfather is said to be the second white man to permanently settle in the valley, back in 1875.

“In 1916, when we’d travel to Escondido to school, the sycamores and willows formed a canopy over the road,” Judson reminisced.

Her son, Bud Judson, says he finds it curious that the San Pasqual Valley might be considered part of the San Dieguito River Valley Regional Park. “The San Dieguito River’s got nothing to do with our valley,” he maintains. “It’s a different world.”

Indeed, the San Pasqual Valley ends with Lake Hodges, another city reservoir between Escondido and Rancho Bernardo; below its dam the waterway takes on, for the first time, the name of the San Dieguito River.

It is here, below the dam, that the presence of the San Dieguito People has been most documented by anthropologists and archeologists. Although no skeletal remains of these nomadic people have been discovered, their presence is easily shown through findings of rock paintings, tools and other artifacts around what is now Lake Hodges, said historian Carrico.

“Theirs is the first culture that we’ve been able to document that existed in San Diego County,” Carrico said of the San Dieguito People. The most treasured site of the San Dieguito People, discovered about 1920, is on private property not far from a fruit stand along Del Dios Highway below the Lake Hodges Dam.

The area today is better known as the Santa Fe Valley as it fans out below the steep gorges just beneath the lake’s dam, and it brings the traveler into the third of the valley’s three terraces.

It is within the private landholdings of the Santa Fe Valley and to the west, where the river valley splits Rancho Santa Fe and Fairbanks Ranch, where development pressures are the strongest.

It is this stretch of the river valley, between Rancho Santa Fe and Fairbanks Ranch, where park planners are most concerned about eking out public easement through already developed parcels to develop a sense of parkland and trails.

The valley has a recent history of farming--from beans, tomatoes and strawberries to the Santa Fe Railway’s heralded attempt to grow its own railroad ties by harvesting eucalyptus trees. Man has allotted room for his own pleasures as well, as backpacker Sorensen observed in an article he wrote for the San Diego Reader about the river valley:

“Just down the road, at the Whispering Palms Golf Course, I saw the strangest sight of my three-day journey. At the boundary of the golf course, the river bed simply ends. Where the river once was, there’s now a manicured lawn and quaint little make-believe bridges. What used to be the San Dieguito River has been transformed into a landscape architect’s notion of what a gentrified river should be.”

The river bottom dissolves into a flood plain west of El Camino Real, bordered on both sides by striking bluffs. The river flows beneath Interstate 5 and into the salt marshes alongside the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Park or no, this area has been subjected to extensive study and debate as environmentalists and businessmen balance the value of lagoon habitat over commercial-tourist uses.

Finally, the river empties itself across the beach at Del Mar into the ocean, where today teen-agers rally around bonfires, where, on the same spot thousands of years ago, Indians fished for crabs and lobster.