Battle of Ramona Can Save Only a Few Oaks

These California oaks have been there since before the American Revolution, surviving storm and wind and fire. But now they are yielding to a stronger force: progress.

A state Department of Transportation project, which began a week ago and will end sometime in December, will widen a half-mile stretch of California 67 south of Ramona with 10-foot-wide paved shoulders. It will also destroy more than 100 of the live oaks along its path, many of them 300 or more years old. The oaks stand south of the town’s well-known swath of eucalyptus trees that line the entrance to Ramona--and that are scheduled for razing later in the project.

“It’s crazy,” grumbled C. Russell (Bud) Henzie, a retired San Diego Unified School District teacher and administrator. “These trees have been here longer than we’ve been the United States, and they rip them out without any thought to what they are doing, what they are destroying.”

When a vernal pool, probably man-made, was endangered in a meadow nearby, Henzie recalled, environmentalists required that another area be acquired and protected as mitigation. But he asks how can you mitigate the destruction of an oak that has taken hundreds of years to mature?

Henzie and his wife have lived on their acreage along California 67 since 1975, raising Arabian horses for a while as a retirement avocation. But, even before that, Caltrans had acquired a wide easement along the highway for eventual widening.

“The guy who owned this ranch before me was a turkey farmer, and he wouldn’t give an inch. He stood out there with a shotgun,” Henzie said. “I was so distressed about the oaks and concerned that there was no evaluation, tree by tree, of the impact. If there actually was an environmental agency that reviewed this (road-widening) project, how could they be so glib about giving away these old, old oaks?”

Caltrans spokesman Jim Larsen answered that by explaining that the narrow stretch of highway between Archie Moore Road and Air Mail Lane is high on Caltrans’ list for safety improvements because of its accident incidence.

The mild-mannered educator Henzie rose to the occasion when, without warning, Caltrans bulldozers and earthmoving equipment appeared along the road and began cutting a swath through the oaks a week ago.

“I managed to save a big oak, a lovely tree over 300 years old,” Henzie said. The live oak, which he estimates had a trunk 3 feet in diameter, lost a large limb to the widening but survived after Henzie came to its defense.

Henzie credits “a young woman, one of the Caltrans crew, who came along when I was out there.” She listened to Henzie’s complaint and said, “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. The tree, and several other older oaks, were given a reprieve after the bulldozers and earthmovers veered around them.

“We don’t get any pleasure out of cutting down trees that old,” Larsen said of the Caltrans project. “But it is a necessary safety project.”

Actually, Larsen said, 22 oaks, two cypress and two eucalyptus trees have been removed. Twenty-four other oaks--”smaller ones which lent themselves to being moved,” have been transplanted out of traffic’s way and will be treated to an irrigation system to keep them healthy, Larsen said.

Larsen said that the two-lane highway will not become a four-lane road after the project is completed, but will have 10-foot-wide paved shoulders on each side through the winding stretch.

Next will come safety improvements where California 67 and Mussey Grade Road join--another bad spot for traffic accidents--and eventually the widening will progress all the way through Ramona to Magnolia Avenue on the northeast.

That means the towering rows of eucalyptus trees that shade the California 67 entry into Ramona from the south will become victims of progress, Larsen said. But, when it comes to people versus trees, people eventually win out.

“We sat down with the Ramona (community) planning group a couple of years ago and reached an agreement that if they wanted the town to grow, if they wanted shopping centers and more development, the eucs would have to go,” Larsen said.

The picture postcard entry into Ramona with its symmetrical rows of graceful eucalyptus guarding the highway already has become gap-toothed where developers have removed trees to gain safe entry and egress from their parking lots.

“They are replacing the trees they remove by a ratio of 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 and eventually there will be another row of trees, but far enough back not to cause a safety hazard,” Larsen said.

In addition, the narrow two-lane California 67 will become a five-lane (four traffic lanes and a turning lane) highway, with paved shoulders.

Henzie is less concerned by the loss of the eucalyptus, because they are fast-growing trees that will, within a few decades, stand tall and majestic again. But the California oaks, which managed to survive for centuries, will probably never make a comeback.