Friday, January 22, 2016

Around the Coachella Valley and an excursion of southern California's Riverside, San Diego, and Orange Counties




Friday, January 15, 2016
Over the last few days, we visited Thousand Palms Oasis, Sunnylands, and Rancho Mirage. We have had clear, sunny days with cool nights.

Thousand Palms Oasis is an ancient watering site situated on the San Andreas fault. Watered by a large spring, this is the largest grove of California Fan Palms in the state of California. Waking through the dense stand of palms id like walking through a cave. A fascinating place with a lot of human history associated with it.

Sunnylands is the winter home of the Annenberg family. The estate and gardens are periodically open to the public and present beautiful landscapes, gardens, and art. We’re glad we went!

Rancho Mirage is an attractive and accommodating, upscale shopping and residential area, in the Coachella Valley. Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert adjoin and have streets named after Presidents and other celebrities, who own properties here, in the gated communities. The shops are high-end with nice dining opportunities interspersed. You can get a $5 hamburger for $20. It was fun observing how the “rich folks live”!

Friday, January 22, 2016
Driving a route without any plans or schedule is an exhilarating and exciting scheme to observ what surprises and discoveries are in store. Having made a three-day circuitous route from the Coachella Valley to the coast, we were presented with numerous pleasant surprises. Leaving La Quinta, we drove down Coachella Valley, past the Salton Sea and then over the Vallecito Mountains to San Diego, continuing along the coast highway to Orange County, finally returning via CA 74, the Ortega Highway.

There’s no mistaking Salton Sea because you can smell it before you see it. Below sea level, it has no outlet and the salt content has grown to several times the salinity of the ocean. It’s a beautiful place and the wintering waters for lots of sea birds, however the resulting chemical and elemental contents give it a “rotten egg” smell.

Ocotillo Wells is a stop on CA 78, just east of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, (California’s largest State Park)with very little to see except old buildings. One notable claim to fame is the Iron Door Bar, which Clint Eastwood promoted on a movie. It does however, become very busy, thanks to thousands of acres of off-road riding. We stopped for a cool refreshment but the store was closed.

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is 600,000 acres of spectacular terrain with exceptional flora, fauna, and geography. It’s a destination, so we had to settle for a ride through and an overview, as CA 78 passes through the park. The area was previously covered by the Gulf of California, leaving loads of fossils and lots of Indian artifacts along the ancient shoreline. It’s a fine park that deserves a longer stay.

Just west of Anza-Borrego we stopped at Julian, an 1850 placer gold claim (the year of California’s statehood), worked by Bill “Cockney” Williams of England. Old Bill was panning gold from the creek sands, when A. E. (Fred) Coleman, a former Missouri slave, and experienced hard-rock miner, staked a claim and traced the gold to its source, founding the Coleman “hard rock” mining district. Fred and his wife also built and ran the Julian Hotel for the remainder of their lives, producing the best accommodations and cooking to be found. We walked around the old town and enjoyed reading the stories and experiencing the feel of the historic site.
While the miners were trying to wrestle the gold from deep within the earth, James Madison brought a wagon load of young apple trees up into the mountains. The fruit trees flourished in the clear, fresh air. Apples are still a big product in Julian, many of which are used for making the world-famous Julian apple pies. The gold is long gone but the Julian Pie Company produces an outstanding and delicious apple pie. We had it hot with vanilla ice cream on top. “It’s American as Apple Pie”!

The 1818 Santa Ysabel Asistencia is located here, a Spanish mission asistencia (sub-mission) of Mission San Diego de Alcalá. Spain established the missions in order to lay claim to Alta California but the missions had no legal descriptions or boundaries, so they were doomed for lack of legality.
This area is a good example of the dissolution of the old Spanish Missions, after Mexico’s 1821 Independence from Spain. The new (Mexican) California governors divided the huge old missions into 2.2 square-league, land-grants (Ranchos), and deeded them to friends and associates. Oddly, the rancho, land-grants had no recorded legal descriptions, so they too were doomed to fail. When the Americans began to arrive in California, they took advantage of the situation and got control of the majority of the rancho land-grant acreage.
The Santa Ysabel town site is within the former Rancho Santa Ysabel, an 1844 Mexican land grant to José Joaquín Ortega and Eduardo Stokes. In 1878, the town of Santa Ysabel began with a rancho store owned by C. R. Wellington, and grew to include a hotel and a blacksmith. We love these old towns and the stories they have to tell!

Ramona California has an interesting history, being an ancient retreat area for Native Americans, traveling between the coast and the inland areas. Lots of Indian artifacts and drawings are found in the area. Ramona town grew up along the stage route between San Diego and the Julian gold fields. In the 1960s boxer Archie Moore established a training camp called "Salt Mine" which trained George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. The Guy Woodward Museum is a commendable collection of historical buildings and objects from Ramona’s historical past. It’s like going back in time and we felt like we saw an example of early California lifestyle.
Poway’s name comes from the Indian name for the valley but didn’t become a city until 1980, however, its history goes back to Native Americans who left Artifacts such as arrow heads, spear points, metates, grinding stones, and pottery found along the bed of Poway Creek, which all indicate an early Native American presence. The hills of the area are covered with huge, house-size, granite boulders that have the appearance of being placed by some giant landscaping deity. Various pictographs adorn many of Poway's boulders, and modern techniques suggest that these paintings date back to the 16th century or earlier.
The Mission at San Diego used the valley for grazing cattle and later the subsequent ranchos continued using Poway as a stock range. American farmers arrived following California’s 1850 Statehood and were fairly prosperous however, the 1954 Colorado Aqueduct and the Poway Municipal Water District bringing irrigation to ten-thousand acres made the valley boom. The soil is well suited to agriculture and with irrigation they grew anything that had a demand. Now, the valley has specialized in citrus and avocados. Poway started an Indian camp, became a cow-town and now an ag center!
Rancho Santa Fe, one of the highest income communities in the US, has very impressive architecture, landscaping, and amenities. It began as a land grant rancho which was later sold to the Santa Fe Railroad (its namesake), for the purpose of planting Blue Gum Eucalyptus for making railroad ties. The project failed, so the railroad then formed the Santa Fe Land Improvement Company to develop a planned community of country estates. Boy, did that work out very well. Nice place!
Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve is the exclusive home to the rarest pine in North America. My indication of the Torrey Pine compares it to the much smaller Pinion Pine, having the open-crown, needle structure, cone, and nut, resembling the Pinion. Actually the Torrey Pine can be tall with a large trunk. It sure has a nice, attractive home along the sand bluffs of north San Diego.
Del Mar, “affluent beach city” just north of San Diego and the Del Mar Thoroughbred racetrack, “where the turf meets the surf”, on the San Diego County Fairground are mainly seasonal venues where we would like to spend more time. This area has attractions, beautiful scenery, sunny days, and loads of allures to explore and enjoy. We checked out the beach but the wind and water were a bit chilly. Just a virtual playground by the ocean!
Driving the CA 101 coast highway to Encinitas, Carlsbad, Oceanside, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Laguna and Newport Beach, gave us some terrific stops, beach walks, and sightseeing.




While visiting the awe-inspiring 1798 Mission San Luis Rey, Brother Chris gave us an interesting history of the 21 missions. Afterwards, we headed back to Carlsbad for a hotel and dinner, a welcome retreat and rest from a terrific day of travels!
Our next day was spent exploring the state beaches, sampling treats, and touring the small beach towns. San Clemente had some damage from recent high surf but the surfers and beach crowd didn’t let a few wash-outs spoil their day. We saw a few very curious examples of full-time beach bums! We finished our day with a flabbergasting visit to the 1776 San Juan Capistrano Mission. With preservation of the artifacts, facilities, and history, the mission is a literal walk-thru-movie of the “life and times” of the mission.


Leaving Newport Beach, we headed down to CA 74, the “pines to palms” highway, for a mountain drive back to Coachella Valley. CA 74 should be nicknamed the “Coast, Pines and Palms Highway”, because it runs from San Juan Capistrano to the Coachella Valley. This route took us up the San Juan River and over the Elsinore Mountains to Lake Elsinore, then up and over the San Jacinto Mountains and Santa Rosa Mountains to Coachella Valley. This steep, narrow road is very scenic and sometimes alarming, with high precipices along the San Juan Canyon, and 180-degree turns around the drainages. Our favorite area was the high valley in the Santa Rosa Mountains, covered by oaks and pines, making a natural, high-mountain park. We saw Acorn Woodpeckers, probably migrated from Shasta County and the Lassen Peak area of northern California. This was a terrific excursion of southern California’s Riverside, San Diego, and Orange counties!  

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