We Can't Make More Mountains

I've been busy the last few years. That's why it was so sweet to have the opportunity to take two weeks off over the holidays.

California, with the SF Bay Area and San Diego especially, is geographically positioned in a such a way that folks of even modest income can have a very rich quality of life for the active and adventurous.

We live within a day trip and weekend trip of so many different sorts of places. Here in San Diego, we get to surf in the morning and ski in the afternoon. After a winter storm, we can load up the family after breakfast and head to Julian or Palomar and play in the snow for free (not counting fuel costs) and be back for dinner.

With flat waves and snow in the forecast, my family took advantage of a friend's rental cabin on Palomar Mountain, before the New Year's storm. We felt fortunate to have that resource to enjoy. We felt relaxed, calm, and connected to be out of the urban rush. That was before the storm.

Deep snow on Palomar

We got snow. There was snow up to the bottom of my knees. Snow was down in the valley and thick across Rancho Guejito (think "smart growth"). It was absolutely a wonderful few days on the mountain. We were sorry more of our friends couldn't share the time with us.

View from Palomar looking south across Ranch Guejito and Hell Hole Canyon.

Five years ago, I wrote about how fun it could be to run up to Palomar to play in the snow, as a break from the normal routine. A definite quality of life benefit of living in Leucadia. Even then, we saw that benefit was stretched thin. We were glad we drove up early in the morning, even back then.

Well, what we observed this week was redonkulous. Mountain day trips to the snow are no longer on the list of reasons it is good to live in Encinitas.

After the storm, there was not enough room at the top of Palomar for everyone. There was no sense of getting away from the urban rush for the 10's of thousands that sought to go to the mountains across the county. South Grade Road up Palomar looked like an ant trail of cars (see below). It was stop and go all the way up... to get to a destination where drivers would find difficulty parking and families finding it hard to spread out. CHP ended up closing east and south grade road. Thousands of cars were diverted past Rincon and south toward valley center, as they later shut down parts of the 78. It was nuts and must have been sad for many of the families that made it that far without giving up.

South Grade Road Traffic Jam (Click to Enlarge)

 Traffic backed up for miles on Highway 78

We saw all this as we left the mountain. The cars lined up for miles. People must have crawled for hours just to find out they couldn't drive up to the top where there was still deep snow. Certainly, many probably tried to go to Julian when they were diverted back through valley center. That would have been painful, because there were reports of 4-5 hour travel times to get to Julian from San Diego. This was caused by the shear numbers of people heading out; a function of San Diego's population size. Thousands of people set out to enjoy a nice day in the snow and instead found themselves stuck in their car for a majority of their day. 

We can add many new (and expensive) facilities to our city that are nice to have. We already have(/had) lots of great reasons to enjoy Encinitas and greater San Diego. We must remain thoughtful about the diffuse effects of our planning decisions and how the future's quality of life will be impacted. That's fine if we collectively decide to make those tradeoffs, but we should recognize and articulate what will be lost, as well as what will be gained, when the choices are made. However, I will always regret the erosion of our "close to snow" resource.

I know some folk think we should only discuss positives. Ignoring negatives can result in less positives in the future and reduces the value of communication from those who speak up only on rosy topics.


KMC