Week 5: Santee to Lakeside

Fashion Valley Station

A face in the clouds

Our day begins quite late in the afternoon.  Daylight savings time has begun and I had a long day previously, judging a science competition and then attending a friend's epic birthday bash.  Its past two when we finally arrive at Fashion Valley Transit Center to catch the trolley east to Santee.  This is likely the last time we will be using the trolley for logistics on our River walk as we expect to be at the end of the transit system by the time we reach lakeside this evening.  I have grown more fond of the bus system and the trolleys on this journey.  Cars are faster, yes, but the trolley and busses are relaxing in their own way and seem to bring us to interesting and beautiful places that we see not while driving.

Santee Town Center: end of the line

We are in a full blown Santa Ana conditions when we arrive in Santee.  Warm, sunny, dry.  In east county you can actually feel the wind blowing and sucking the moisture out of you sometimes.  It rained a week ago, but it would take a discerning eye to notice any change.  Our irrigation systems have buffered the drought cycle somewhat.

looking up river from the Cuyamaca Street Bridge

Crossing the river

Lots of trees

I like the sound of that

A great place for family friendly sports

We make our way up Cuyamaca Blvd over to Town Center Community Park.  Santee has a lovely system of parks and trails along much of its river front and it seems to be improving constantly.  I can see why folks raising a family would be inclined to settle out here.  A lot of what we see feels very new, and I am not sure whether it is actually new or just well maintained / recently improved.  While most Cities have parks the key to Santee is Connected parks.

The river jungle

Athletic fields everywhere

Park comes with a map

Flowers irrigated with reclaimed water

Bridge over the creek

There are many tributaries to the San Diego river.  Generally we have not noted them much because they haven't had a lot of water in them and their confluences have not been particularly noticeable.  The one exception was in Grantville where a bunch of tributaries meet and we ended up walking along one of them for a bit.  Now at Woodglen Vista Creek we are beginning to see the tributaries attract more attention.  As we continue upstream I expect to see more of these.
It s absolutely beastly hot out here.  Although there is a breeze, it's coming from the northeast and actually making things hotter.  We see flowers, but I suspect they are wilting.  Sometimes I wonder how aliens visiting our planet will see these photos and what they will think.  Is the heat evident?  It's hot even along the coast, but you don't feel the wind there.

Looking downstream

And the trail continues

Wildflowers

Young athletes competing

Offshore flow today,  I can actually feel the Santa Ana winds

Finally the sight of water

As we continue along we pass we see all sorts of youth sports types, a BMX kid riding on only his back wheel and some parental types chatting.  The sight of actual water is kind of refreshing despite the blistering heat and glare of the sun (maybe time for a new hat?)  We didn't linger, however.  With our late start there was still a lot river ahead and I was not completely sure of our route.  Further up we encountered my favorite piece of public art of the day: a sun dial, that had adjustments for daylight savings time and the solar analemma.  I was impressed that I could get the time to within about 5 minutes (probably more if I were as skinny as a mannequin or something.

flowering trees

And the trail continues onward

A rather elegant sundial

4 O'Clockish

Just stand on the appropriate part of the year
for improved accuracy.  This is the Analemma correction

Wildflowers, empty fields and riparian woods

And the trail for now

Past the sundial we wandered through an open dusty field into what is presumably a future part of the park.  This is the wild lands for now.  It's interesting the contrast between more developed river park and undeveloped land.  Certainly the path is more clear in the former and there is more implied community there, but I do sometimes like to see what happens when the bulldozers leave and the unconscious patterns of the local society and nature take over.   Where as the fenced parts  of the park harbor dense brush, here it is still savannah like.  Perhaps with more time.

Some kind of river mining materials plant

Every city in the west seems to have a Magnolia Drive (there is even a film of that name).  Santee's Magnolia seems to divide two parts of the city, the west more open and walkable than the east.  We pass the first industrial facility (rock quarry and associated processing equipment) and ford the river over some dirt road then cross back once again.  There are several encampments around here and more trees.  I feel the sense of being more inland now than we were back the other side of Mission Trails.  Drier, hotter, more subject to temperature changes.  The light and vegetation is all of a somewhat different quality.

Fording the river on an improved dirt road

The state of the river

The reeds of the river

A trail of sorts

The rock company that controls a lot of the land around
these parts.

East of Magnolia it's no go along the river.  Sure we may be able to sneak through the gate but theres a bunch of signs somewhat politely requesting we don't.   I can't say we've been 100% good about private property along this journey, but I want to say we are trying most of the time.  Generally we are avoiding trespassing where it's obviously not what we are supposed to do, and availing ourselves to grey areas at other times.  Things are looking up, however, for future river walkers with the future opening of Walker Preserve sometime in the near future.  This will wind along north bank of the river and provide

The river wilds from Magnolia Blvd

The river below

Blue

No Go through here

But hope is on the way

For now we wander through the neighborhood

The Santee towers

Viewed in wide angle 

So avoiding the future walker preserve we continue into the adjacent subdivision.  One of the first sights of Santee from our previous week was a series of giant antennae.  Apparently they are located in this neighborhood and a large chunk of open space is devoted to them and their radio waves.  It was still quite warm through here and it was not clear exactly how we'd get to the other side.  On maps I had seen a trail running along the back side of the school.  This however turned out to be a dead end due to a series of locked gates between the back side of the field and the street.  This neighborhood boasts nice sidewalks and quiet streets, but the school at its center seems to have put security over accessibility.  It seems a shame that kids living behind it can't take the trail to school, but hey that's how it is.  The name "Hill Creek" apparently came about from a school naming contest that took place as the subdivision was being built and so one of the first people who went here got to name it.

Hill Creek, eerily like Hill Valley
of Back to the Future fame

This trail doesn't go anywhere, but we learned that the hard way

Looking out at the athletic fields

Back to the streets

And we see trees

Where Mast Blvd ends

This is the end

Cuyamaca and El Capitan

Whereas the river goes south of the hill, we find our logistics eased by going north of the hill.  This takes us onto a locally famous section of Mast Blvd that was originally designed to link Santee and Lakeside, but was never completed as it went around the hill.  Traffic instead gets diverted to El Nopal, a residential connector street ~ 1/4 mile north.  Following a series of accidents along El Nopal there were some calls to connect Mast Blvd through the area we are now walking.  It turns out to be very expensive to build a road here.  So instead they are building another park and trail.  There already are several de-facto trails and getting around the fence here wasn't so difficult.  Indeed it seems like a veritable thoroughfare.
Had a long and lovely chat with one of the residents in this area who has worked 20 years in law enforcement.  While I didn't agree with all he had to say it was fascinating to hear where he was coming from and that gave perspective.  We really do need more conversations like this in our world. So much of the zeitgeist presently seems to be people refusing to speak to one another of perceived differences that turn into opposition.  I would have loved to have chatted a lot longer, but it was now past 5 in the afternoon and we still had a long walk ahead of us.  He warned us about rattlesnakes, though we saw none, perhaps they had been scared off.  You do have to watch for rattlesnakes around here.  I know several people who have been bitten and while survival rates are high, it is not an experience to be sought out intentionally.

Anita along the back of the neighborhood

The hill

fields

Passage through no-man's land.

We had two options: continue to the other side of Mast Blvd until we hit a known trail a mile later, or head over to the river.  Since we're doing a river walk we opted for the second.  As luck would have it there was a well worn hole in the fence at the end of the trail and beyond it lay sparkling water.  It seems to be a never ending battle between the fence makers and the fence cutters, and the establishment of right of way and access.  Apparently there used to be sand quarries here and during off hours the dune buggies had their way, until someone broke her back and then they started citing people for trespassing.  Today however it was just sunlight, rocks and water.

The other side of the hill

The fence is apparently not maintained here

The dark side of the hill

A pond in the old quarry

Panorama of the sparkling river

It is a constant battle between the fence makers and the fence cutters

Looking downstream

I loved how Anita looked wandering over the rocks

Passage through high brush

It's getting better

Recent improvements

The river park is improving constantly here.  There is a large cluster of athletic fields and children's sports happening.  There is also another brand new section of river trail.  Like its counterpart in the west it's fence country here, and we can see the fenced off area coming to life and rebounding to the wild it used to be.  it's not just aesthetics, this is important endangered species habitat.  As we've learned there is a lot of wildlife for which the greatest hazard is people constantly stomping around their nesting sites.  You need to keep the humans at bay.  This wildlife is important for keeping all sort of human pests in check.  Like poisonous spiders, mosquitos, snakes, rodents and ragweed.  We learned much of this from the numerous informational displays along the trail.

And very few users today

Rattlesnakes

A lot of fence

Uh oh!

Lots of signage

looking back

Seaweed somebody?

Anybody weigh more than 2 tons?

Love the light shining under the bridge

The colors of the river bottom.

The web of life.

The golden hour.

We were surprised to see the trail continuing under Riverford Road.  It did not however last long we soon found ourselves at a dead end.  I will not say exactly what we did here and was instructed by Anita not to take pictures of her.  Had it not been Sunday evening this would have been a bad idea possibly.  It was Sunday evening however and we really did want to catch that last bus.

Piles of dirt

Our shadows grow long

flowers in the moat

Another lake!

So the trail continued ~ 1/4 mile or so later.  Here it seems like 100's of donors and volunteers have carefully worked on every little piece of it.  This was easily the nicest section of tail today.  We could not linger however as the light was growing low and we had distance to cover.  So with another golf course to our left and the river to our right we continued through the trees watching the light grow low and the sky erupt in colors.

Back on developed trail.

Lots of new improvements here.

The trail winds along another golf course.

The jungle growing dark.

I loved this pond.

The sky at dusk reflected.

another perspective

through the shade of eucalyptus

Anita in the blur of the shaded road

More river park to come soon

Silhouette of the Eucalyptus tree.

More chaparral.

Clouds on fire above El Cajon Mountain.

More art under the bridge

We rejoined the streets at Channel Road, making our way past construction related businesses to downtown Lakeside.  it seemed here that we spent more time waiting for the lights to change and let us cross than we did actually walking.  This was most apparent when we reached Highway 67 at the northern terminus of it's freeway section.  This is the last highway we cross for a long, long while.  Lakeside is a town on the edge.  Although some commuters live further afield, Lakeside most certainly acts as a border between the suburbia and the country and has elements of both.  We'll get to see more of it next week.

Channel road bridge.

El Cajon Mountain amid the glow of early evening

More bright clouds off to the west.

Interesting flag pole base:
a broken bridge support?

More bright clouds.

The quarter moon (right)
and Jupiter (left).

Highway 67

With 20 minutes to spare we got ourselves a California Burrito at Sarai's Taco Shop and replenished some of the calories burned during or hike.  It was a long ride back to the city center from here, but we were satiated and looking forward to the next adventure.

Sarai's Taco Shop in Lakeside,  end of the line and delicious!