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Every once in a while, I am struck by how impermanent things are in California. Usually this happens when I drive on a road I haven't been on in a while, and discover that what was once open hillside is now overgrown with McMansions. Occasionally, it happens the other way around.
I've been involved (as a very small cog in the monitoring wheel) for some years with a local mitigation project, the San Dieguito River Park. The San Dieguito River runs from Volcan mountain to the ocean, ending in a coastal lagoon/wetland area, of the type that has been filled in and built over for most of the last 100 years or more...in other words, something that has become vanishingly rare. However, a whole host of people, in groups with many more initials than I can recall, have devoted the last 40 years or so to reversing this process at San Dieguito They have been working to make a perserve along the entire length of the river, from the mountain to the sea, with trails and things so that people can see it and enjoy it. Today I went to an event marking one step in that - the opening of what is now the Grand Avenue Bridge overlook.
Despite the name, it's not such a grand avenue -- it's down to a couple of disconnected bits of street now. In all the speechifying today, I learned that it once led to a blimp airfield, built during WWII when blimps patrolled the coast for Japanese submarines. One keeps forgetting how much blimps were used, even after the Hindenburg - Mr. Goodyear's airship seems to be pretty much all that remains of that; all those charming blimps lost to the past. After the war, it became a civilian airfield for small planes; this in turn was lost when I5 was planned to run through the middle of it. The airfield was forgetten long before the area came under consideration for a mitigation site, unnoticed by the millions of people rushing by on the freeway - during the restoration work, the crews uncovered a big underground cement tank; no one could even find records of what it was for. And now the airfield is a newly-dredged basin, hosting a population of little fishies, much to the joy of a fair number of birds, but I guess that's the risk you run, being a fish. The bridge now isn't - it stops halfway across the channel, by design, so there is space for the tide to reach the inner basins, and space for people to look out over the wetlands and watch the birds dive for the fish. There are spaces set up for educational information, with old photographs, showing a surprising ferry (who would think it was necessary, on that little river?), and landings for loading same - now they exist only as one more mysterious set of pilings.
The pilings have an odd permanence, amid all the change. About the only structure that still seems to be original is the railroad bridge, with its wooden pilings and cross-beams, apparently still the same one put up perhaps 100 years ago (a rather disconcerting thought when one is under it, in an inflatable raft, while a train speeds by a disturbing distance overhead). There's another set of abandoned pilings now, where the far end of the bridge was. You can still see that road that crossed it, petering off in the wetlands, now already being lost in new growth.
Another thing I learned in the speechifying was that it almost didn't happen. The property passed through the hands of two sets of owners, each of whom planned to turn the area into a shopping mall, complete with hotels and restaurants and much parking. Both plans were stopped by the various people in the groups with all the initials, who then persuaded Southern California Edison to purchase the property for off-site mitigation for the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. SCE has now made a 40-year commitment to monitor and maintain the wetland, so that's one shopping mall vanished into the mist of might-be ephemera.
There were a lot of picture of various ages at the opening, showing what was and the stages of what now is. They show how much, surprisingly, the river has managed to resist change. Despite all the construction that surrounds it - the Del Mar Fairground and Racetrack (Where the Turf Meets the Surf, at Del Mar, per Bing Crosby), the five (four, now) bridges that cross it within about a mile of the coast, and the houses on the surrounding hills, much of the river has kept its original shape. Even the odd little L-shaped tidal creek - when I was planning out the baseline surveys with my boss all those years ago, I though he was dignifying a transient gap in the undergrowth with that name; I can find it in the earliest pictures, and it's still there now. I'm glad it's going to be there for a while yet.
There is still some work to be done on the wetland - returning native plants that were removed during the construction phase, and planting other areas with new seedlings. But the place seems to be off to a good start. The speakers didn't have everyone's full attention, because a group of least terns were diving for fish right behind them, so close to the bridge you didn't need binoculars to seem them; so close I distinguish their eyes, just below their black crowns, with my unassisted ones. A pelican glided past a couple of times, cruising downstream and then back up, so close and huge you could believe it was a dinosaur itself, and not merely a decendent.
I couldn't get a picture of him (slow as he was, it seems I'm still slower) - but here's a few other birds I managed to catch.
Trust me, the splashes are terns:
The red-tiled roofs in the background are the Del Mar Fairground.
This guy is a snowy egret (right? with the black legs and yellow feet);
It may look brown and uninspiring to those of you in greener climes, but it looks awful pretty to us. I'll have to get back in the spring, when the wildflowers come out (I can usually manage to catch them on camera).
(The Grand Avenue page links to the rest of the SDRP site, check it out.)
I've been involved (as a very small cog in the monitoring wheel) for some years with a local mitigation project, the San Dieguito River Park. The San Dieguito River runs from Volcan mountain to the ocean, ending in a coastal lagoon/wetland area, of the type that has been filled in and built over for most of the last 100 years or more...in other words, something that has become vanishingly rare. However, a whole host of people, in groups with many more initials than I can recall, have devoted the last 40 years or so to reversing this process at San Dieguito They have been working to make a perserve along the entire length of the river, from the mountain to the sea, with trails and things so that people can see it and enjoy it. Today I went to an event marking one step in that - the opening of what is now the Grand Avenue Bridge overlook.
Despite the name, it's not such a grand avenue -- it's down to a couple of disconnected bits of street now. In all the speechifying today, I learned that it once led to a blimp airfield, built during WWII when blimps patrolled the coast for Japanese submarines. One keeps forgetting how much blimps were used, even after the Hindenburg - Mr. Goodyear's airship seems to be pretty much all that remains of that; all those charming blimps lost to the past. After the war, it became a civilian airfield for small planes; this in turn was lost when I5 was planned to run through the middle of it. The airfield was forgetten long before the area came under consideration for a mitigation site, unnoticed by the millions of people rushing by on the freeway - during the restoration work, the crews uncovered a big underground cement tank; no one could even find records of what it was for. And now the airfield is a newly-dredged basin, hosting a population of little fishies, much to the joy of a fair number of birds, but I guess that's the risk you run, being a fish. The bridge now isn't - it stops halfway across the channel, by design, so there is space for the tide to reach the inner basins, and space for people to look out over the wetlands and watch the birds dive for the fish. There are spaces set up for educational information, with old photographs, showing a surprising ferry (who would think it was necessary, on that little river?), and landings for loading same - now they exist only as one more mysterious set of pilings.
The pilings have an odd permanence, amid all the change. About the only structure that still seems to be original is the railroad bridge, with its wooden pilings and cross-beams, apparently still the same one put up perhaps 100 years ago (a rather disconcerting thought when one is under it, in an inflatable raft, while a train speeds by a disturbing distance overhead). There's another set of abandoned pilings now, where the far end of the bridge was. You can still see that road that crossed it, petering off in the wetlands, now already being lost in new growth.
Another thing I learned in the speechifying was that it almost didn't happen. The property passed through the hands of two sets of owners, each of whom planned to turn the area into a shopping mall, complete with hotels and restaurants and much parking. Both plans were stopped by the various people in the groups with all the initials, who then persuaded Southern California Edison to purchase the property for off-site mitigation for the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. SCE has now made a 40-year commitment to monitor and maintain the wetland, so that's one shopping mall vanished into the mist of might-be ephemera.
There were a lot of picture of various ages at the opening, showing what was and the stages of what now is. They show how much, surprisingly, the river has managed to resist change. Despite all the construction that surrounds it - the Del Mar Fairground and Racetrack (Where the Turf Meets the Surf, at Del Mar, per Bing Crosby), the five (four, now) bridges that cross it within about a mile of the coast, and the houses on the surrounding hills, much of the river has kept its original shape. Even the odd little L-shaped tidal creek - when I was planning out the baseline surveys with my boss all those years ago, I though he was dignifying a transient gap in the undergrowth with that name; I can find it in the earliest pictures, and it's still there now. I'm glad it's going to be there for a while yet.
There is still some work to be done on the wetland - returning native plants that were removed during the construction phase, and planting other areas with new seedlings. But the place seems to be off to a good start. The speakers didn't have everyone's full attention, because a group of least terns were diving for fish right behind them, so close to the bridge you didn't need binoculars to seem them; so close I distinguish their eyes, just below their black crowns, with my unassisted ones. A pelican glided past a couple of times, cruising downstream and then back up, so close and huge you could believe it was a dinosaur itself, and not merely a decendent.
I couldn't get a picture of him (slow as he was, it seems I'm still slower) - but here's a few other birds I managed to catch.
Trust me, the splashes are terns:
The red-tiled roofs in the background are the Del Mar Fairground.
This guy is a snowy egret (right? with the black legs and yellow feet);
It may look brown and uninspiring to those of you in greener climes, but it looks awful pretty to us. I'll have to get back in the spring, when the wildflowers come out (I can usually manage to catch them on camera).
(The Grand Avenue page links to the rest of the SDRP site, check it out.)
