Julian Will Celebrate Saving of Mountain : Preservation: Effort of town helped prevent development and kept the peak a wilderness.

The Apple Days tourists have left and the snow bunnies are back in the lowlands, so Julian residents now have time for a delayed celebration of the saving of Volcan Mountain.

On Saturday, the Julian Town Hall will be filled with the public and private participants in the battle to keep Volcan Mountain undeveloped. The party, sponsored by the Volcan Mountain Preserve Foundation, climaxes a two-year struggle to keep an Orange County philanthropic trust--First Fruit Inc.--from building 16 estate homes along a ridge on the 40-square-mile mountain northeast of the community.

A grass-roots effort of residents in the mountain community to raise funds to “buy the mountain” was not a monetary success, but it caught the fancy of county Parks and Recreation Department officials and county supervisors. They obtained state park bond money to acquire the 219-acre tract on which development was planned and to designate it as a wilderness preserve.

Among the honorees expected at Julian’s celebration party are supervisors George Bailey and Susan Golding, both active in acquiring the land, and Robert Copper, director of the county Parks and Recreation Department.

Julian residents’ efforts to gain funds to buy the mountain property in order to keep the land pristine included sale of T-shirts bearing the motto: “Volcan Mountain, Not Your Ordinary Mountain,” and posters of the mountain by a local artist. A folk concert and a chamber music concert added to the donations by mountain folk.

But the funds added up to an amount nowhere near the price tag of $575,000 that developers had said they would be willing to take instead of building. Not until county officials stepped in and acquired the land with state bond funds was the deal accomplished.

The Julian celebration did not leave out the erstwhile developers, who ended up getting the price they wanted. Mike Leach of Solana Beach, agent for First Fruit, will be on hand to add a word of congratulations for the small community’s accomplishment. In fact, the former landowner, Peter Ochs, donated a sum for the celebration.

Francis Hemsher, president of the Preserve Foundation, said he will try to extend Julian’s “win-win” experience to the proposed San Dieguito River Valley Regional Open Space Park, planned as a 42-mile-long linear park from the ocean at Del Mar to the slopes of Volcan Mountain near Julian.

Cooperation between park planners and landowners can result in low-cost land for the park, he said. A landowner can donate part of his property to the park and cash in on the increased value of his remaining land because of the views it commands in the adjacent undeveloped parkland.

With ocean views no longer available, Hemsher said, the value of inland park views will increase.

Schoolchildren, who waged a tenacious letter-writing and picture-painting campaign against development on “their” mountain, pitched in to decorate the Town Hall with murals of the mountain.

“They did a wonderful job,” said Susan Vasak, acting director of the Volcan Mountain Preserve Foundation. Most of the Spencer Valley Elementary School students restricted their art to trees, animals and birds on the mountain, she said, “although at least one jet plane snuck in.”

Fare at the party is being donated by Julian eateries and will range from pizza to egg rolls in addition to the mountain community’s more traditional apple pie and apple cider.

About 300 townsfolk and visitors are expected at the celebration, which begins at 10 a.m.

“We just wanted to do something to say ‘thank you’ to all the people who helped save Volcan Mountain,” Vasak said.