The historic Southern Pacific Railroad depot in Bakersfield

Never fails! When I’m out and about doing one thing, trains seem to crop up here and there.

When I was in Bakersfield on February 11 speaking to the Bakersfield Cactus & Succulent Society, I had to go downtown and check out the historic Southern Pacific depot.

Looks like this:

When construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad line had reached the southern San Joaquin Valley in 1874, Bakersfield was the preferred stop. However, a land dispute between Bakersfield and Southern Pacific resulted in Southern Pacific building its tracks two miles east of the Bakersfield, in Sumner, a town laid out by the railroad, as many towns were back in those days. A small depot also was built.

When the Bakersfield depot opened on June 27, 1889, it was located in Sumner, California. Sometime between 1888 and 1892, Sumner incorporated under the name Kern City. In 1910, Kern City voted to become part of Bakersfield.

The depot originally was built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, comprising both a train station and a hotel. One of the station’s most defining features was the long arcade stretching along the north side and connecting the station and the hotel.

In the late 1930s, Southern Pacific wanted to demolish the depot and build a completely new one. Instead, the depot was remodeled, providing a more streamlined appearance by removing many of the ornamental Romanesque features and transforming the depot into a Spanish Colonial Revival style. The steep roofs, part of the original style, were kept. Additional expansions included a section in the Moderne style.

The depot served Southern Pacific passenger trains that ran on the San Joaquin Valley Route: San Joaquin Daylight, Sacramento Daylight, Owl, and West Coast.

Eventually the hotel closed and was converted to office space; I could not find the date of its closing. Closing the hotel also resulted in half of the portico (on the hotel side) being enclosed.

It currently is used as an office building and crew change center by Union Pacific, and on very rare occasions (about once every ten years), it serves as a stop for Amtrak’s Coast Starlight when Union Pacific’s Coast Line is closed. When that happens, the Coast Starlight goes through the Tehachapi Loop. Getting a video of Amtrak on the Tehachapi Loop is #1 on my Bucket List. Here’s a video of a long BNSF freight on the Tehachapi Loop in February 2017 showing the front of the train passing under the rear of the train:

BNSF freight on the Tehachapi Loop

The depot itself closed in 1971 with the founding of Amtrak and the termination of individual railroad passenger trains, thus ending Southern Pacific passenger trains through the station. The office portion would continue to be used by Southern Pacific, and later by Union Pacific.

There is a nice Amtrak station not too far away, and there are plans for two new rail systems, both having a stop in East Bakersfield near the historic Southern Pacific depot. Kern County also has been toying with the idea of a regional commuter rail system which would use existing Union Pacific tracks. Not to be left out, Bakersfield also has been mulling a future light rail system. Both systems are not on the drawing board before 2025.

Halls of History — The Cardiff Mystery House

When I was in Wrightwood Village a week ago, I immediately noticed that there was not a single brick or stucco home. All were wood. That’s because Wrightwood is built directly on top of the San Andreas Fault. As has been regularly seen in earthquakes throughout the world, brick and stucco homes don’t do so well in earthquakes.

Consequently, building codes in California have changed significantly since the Loma Prieta (World Series) earthquake of 1989 and the Northridge earthquake of 1994. Thus, whenever I see a brick building in my part of the world, I’m pretty sure it was built before 1989.

Recently I found a two-story brick building in Cardiff near the Cardiff Elementary School.

There was only one window in the place, although it looks like there were many more that were “boarded up” with brick.

Google Maps shows it as a gray rectangle in a public park.

It took a lot of research to find out about this house, known locally as the Cardiff Mystery House.

I did find lots of interesting guesses:

1. A haunted house to keep the kids close to the school during recess.
2. The original Cardiff schoolhouse.
3. The old Cardiff jailhouse.
4. The Cardiff power station from the 1970s.
5. A secret lookout or radar facility to guard against a West Coast attack by the Japanese in World War II. Note that many spotter bunkers were established along the California coast after Pearl Harbor but they all are camouflaged bunkers rather than being 2-story structures.

None of those appear to be correct, but #1 and #5 are fun to imagine.

Apparently the “house” was built in the 1940s by Bell Telephone as a telephone relay station to connect services throughout Southern California. It held large, low-voltage batteries that amplified every phone’s handset and powered the phone’s ring.

Bell designed it as house structure to avoid a possible air attack by the Japanese, which would have knocked out communications.

In the 1990s, Bob Sinclair, the founder and owner of Pannikin Coffee and Tea, bought the Cardiff Bell Telephone house, intending to repurpose it for his growing coffee shop chain, something he was good at doing. In fact, he bought the old Encinitas railroad depot, moved it to Leucadia, renovated it, and turned it into a coffee house, shown below.

I found the Encinitas railroad depot a couple of years ago and did a blog post about it, which you can find here.

The Cardiff Mystery House was deemed non-earthquake proof, thus requiring massive retrofits to make it suitable for a a coffee house, not to mention that it probably would not have the requisite number of parking spaces.

The school district bought the property from Sinclair in 2001 and now uses it to store the school’s equipment and carnival supplies. Surrounding the building is a student garden.

There are at least two more surviving Bell Telephone houses, identical to the Cardiff house both in size and architecture. I actually have seen both of them but didn’t have time to stop and explore them. One is in the San Onofre State Beach campground, visible when driving southbound I-5, just west of the California Highway Patrol weigh station. The other is at the west end of Ortega Highway 74, in San Juan Capistrano.

I guess you know that I’m going to have to go by those two and take pictures, yes?

I’m worried about his followers

Yesterday I went to Salvation Mountain.

This was my sixth or seventh trip to Salvation Mountain since 1993, but I was always alone, so I never exited the car and walked around.

I did not feel safe.

Yesterday I was with a group of seventeen photographers…. There’s power in numbers.

I felt safe.

Not completely safe.

But safe enough to get out of my car and take pictures.

Is it odd that I don’t feel safe in the midst of Bible Thumpers, especially those spouting “God Is Love?” On the surface, yes, I think it is odd. The underlying reality, I believe—

—and as my wise old grandmother told me,
“You can’t argue with someone’s beliefs
because their beliefs are not always based in reality.”—

—is that these people will do just about anything to protect their beliefs, and they often are not sane, sober, or interested in other beliefs, not to mention opinions, facts, science, truth….

Salvation Mountain is a “hillside visionary environment” created by Leonard Knight (1931–2014) in the California Desert area of Imperial County. Knight started it in 1984 when he was 53. Although there are many Bible verses painted on Salvation Mountain, its main philosophy is the Sinner’s Prayer. Knight’s version of the Sinner’s Prayer seemed to be the following because it was everywhere!

Jesus, I’m a sinner.
Please come upon my body
and into my heart.

What little research I could tolerate doing this morning on the Sinner’s Prayer indicates that it’s just another of those beliefs. In this case, even the Bible does not contain any reference to the Sinner’s Prayer. It’s all made up gobbledygook even beyond the fairy tales in the Bible.

Salvation Mountain is the “showpiece” of Slab City. Other parts of Slab City include the “neighborhoods” of East Jesus and West Satan. I’m pretty sure I would  be living in West Satan.

We didn’t make it to West Satan yesterday. Seems the West Satan folks and the East Jesus folks weren’t getting along…. Where’s God’s love?

All residents of Slab City are “squatters” and seem to be paranoid about government, technology, and science. However, if you want to donate to their paranoia, they have an email address and they do take PayPal. They also have a Facebook page. Am I the only one who sees the irony here?

I do find it interesting that for a “city” propounding God’s love, there was a lot of non-love exhibited throughout Salvation Mountain, Slab City, and East Jesus.

More irony (my belief)

In 2000, The Folk Art Society of America declared Salvation Mountain

a folk art site worthy of preservation and protection.

In an address to the United States Congress on May 15, 2002, California Senator Barbara Boxer described Salvation Mountain

as a unique and visionary sculpture… a national treasure… profoundly strange and beautifully accessible, and worthy of the international acclaim it receives.

In December 2011, the 80-year-old Knight, suffering from dementia,
was placed in a long-term care facility in El Cajon, California (where I live!).
He died there February 10, 2014.

In 2012, a public charity, Salvation Mountain, Inc., was established to support and maintain Salvation Mountain.

I found the question mark in this little section of Salvation Mountain to be quite interesting:

I’m not worried about whether or not Bible Jesus loves me. I’m worried about the followers of Bible Jesus….

And there you have it

This beautiful Gingko biloba and its sidekick bench caught my eye a few weeks ago in San Diego’s historic Presidio City Park:

After taking the picture, I went over to the bench. Here’s what I found:

Since I always have been a fan of history, a memorial created in 1935 really piqued my interest.

I found a newspaper clipping from The Press Democrat of Santa Rosa, California, published on Wednesday, October 30, 1935.

I also found this from the book, San Diego in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to America’s Finest City:

I’m quite familiar with the Estudillo House since I did a blog post on it back on February 13, 2015: San Diego Historical Landmarks—#14: Casa de Estudillo.

And there you have it.

Out & About—Maybe I can buy a wheel spoke instead of a brick

When I arrived in San Diego in April 1993, I passed a huge military installation, the Naval Training Center (NTC), on my way to the beaches each day. The NTC was founded in 1923 and eventually grew from an initial 200 acres to 550 acres. The 1993 Base Realignment and Closure Commission put NTC on the to-be-closed list, and that is exactly what happened, although it took until 1997 to get everyone out of there.

NTC now is the site of Liberty Station, a very cool mixed-use community—homes, businesses, a high school, many arts organizations, restaurants, a 9-hole golf course, grocery stores, parks, the historic North Chapel….

Many of the old buildings have been retrofitted for earthquakes and re-purposed. When I was visiting a couple of the waterfront parks a few days ago, I discovered Building 191, perhaps the only building that still exists but which has not been re-purposed yet. Looks like this:

Building 191, measuring 20’x80′, was built in 1942 as a maintenance building according to some sources or as a recreation building according to other sources. I’m going to go with a recreation building; it just seems way too big to be a maintenance building.

The area where Building 191 sits was planned to be a 46-acre park. However, the flight path for San Diego International Airport is directly over Building 191, so the Runway Protection Zone use and restrictions prevent it from being converted to any use which would result in large numbers of people using it. Thus the City of San Diego was going to use it for storage and not as a building that would have public access; so maybe it was a maintenance building after all………

Building 191 also was found to have asbestos-containing materials (ACM) and lead-based paint present. Before transferring Building 191 to the City, the Navy abated the building so that it did not contain friable, accessible, or damaged ACM. Those of us in real estate with ACM experience know that “abatement” could have several meanings other than removal, usually encapsulation. Encapsulation could include painting; it would be quite ironic if the Navy’s abatement included encapsulation painting with lead-based paint even though there currently are no requirements for the
abatement of lead-based paint. In any event, any rehabilitation to Building 191 would have to have an asbestos survey completed to determine locations and condition of any remaining ACM.

In researching Building 191, I found a document March 1, 2017, about the San Diego County Bike Coalition (SDCBC) desiring to acquire Building 191 and creating a new bicycling center for Liberty Station. SDCBC, a non-profit, is interested in the building because it straddles a major spur on the San Diego bike path system and could connect Harbor Drive with the Bayshore Parkway, providing a save means for cyclists to get to downtown and points farther south.

According to an SDCBC spokesperson, Building 191 is an old maintenance shed that the City wants to demolish because it doesn’t have the funds to do all that is required to re-purpose it. SDCBC’s vision includes adding porticos and decks around the outside to help make the building usable without moving interior hallways. Building 191 could be a meeting place for the Challenged Athletes Foundation and other cycling organizations, both for profit and not for profit. Even a cycling museum about the history of cycling is in the vision.

Well, when they start fundraising, I think I’ll contribute. Most fundraising enterprises in which I have participated allowed me to buy a brick. Maybe I can buy a wheel spoke instead of a brick this time….

Out & About—The San Diego & Arizona Railway

On January 1, 2017, I decided to write a book that combined my love of writing, history, trains, and photography. With a tentative title of “On Time: A Timeline of Railroads in San Diego County,” I’m finding that it keeps me busy and I don’t seem to get bored.

Right now it’s just a lot of reading and research. I started in the San Diego Central Library (left) because I found that they have microfilm of the new San Diego newspapers—Herald, Union, Tribune, Union-Tribune—all the way back to 1851, which was 18 years before the completion of the Union Pacific/Central Pacific transcontinental railroad at Promontory, Utah.

Those 18 years in the San Diego newspapers indicate that San Diego was hoping to be what San Francisco became. It never happened because, basically, no one could agree on a good route through the Santa Rosa Mountains and the Colorado Desert from Yuma AZ to San Diego.

Not that people weren’t trying. Even after the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, people kept trying to build a southern competitor. It looked like it might happen when John D. Spreckels, the owner of the San Diego Union, said that he would build it. And he did. The San Diego & Arizona Railway (SD&A). Also known as “The Impossible Railroad.”

The SD&A’s history is so convoluted (which is why I’m writing this book) that the only thing I can determine for sure at this point is that the SD&A was chartered on December 14, 1906; groundbreaking ceremonies were held on September 7, 1907; and construction was completed on November 15, 1919. Final construction cost was $18 million, three times the original estimate of $6 million.

There are 129 miles. The 11-mile segment through Carrizo Gorge included 17 tunnels stretching 13,385 feet, and 2½ miles of bridges and trestles.

The SD&A was never profitable, mainly because tunnels kept collapsing and trestles were washed away from winter rains. Although there is, to this day, hope for re-opening the line, there are two main problems: First, the cost to repair the damaged tunnels and trestles is estimated at $5.5 million. Second, there are 44 miles of track in Mexico. Yep. Mexico. A hundred years ago there was no border wall and people easily moved back and forth between the two countries.

In today’s world with Twitler as the United States president, I think there is no way anyone anywhere is going to approve a train leaving San Diego, entering Mexico at Tijuana and re-entering the United States at Tecate, 44 miles away. Nope. Ain’t gonna happen. That’s based on my early youth when I was hopping trains between Brigham City and Ogden UT, and Kingsville and Bishop TX.

So, while we’re waiting for Twitler to be impeached, we have to content ourselves with tourist rides on a 5-mile section of the old line courtesy of the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum.

Early in January 2017, I took a driving tour of the SD&A tracks all the way out to Plaster City, a distance of about 90 miles. A month later, a friend who owns a helicopter service took me on a 3-hour flight out to the Santa Rosa Mountains to check out the SD&A railroad from the air. Following are some pictures from both my adventures.

This first picture is near Jacumba Hot Springs and shows the SD&A tracks going under a bridge built in 1932 for old U.S. Highway 80.

The border wall with Mexico is about one hundred feet away, with a maintenance gate:

I walked over to the gate and had about a million Border Patrol and Homeland Security agents descend on me. After talking with me for a few minutes and looking at pictures on my camera, one officer said into his walkie talkie: “Stand down. Local tourist.” Another officer informed me that with a new car with “paper plates” (temporary plates), I’d probably be stopped several times. I was. Six times in 90 miles.

Note that San Diego County already has built its border wall with Mexico, and we had no help from anyone else, not even Mexico. Thus, we’re not going to help other counties build their walls.

This next picture is of a switch engine marked as Carrizo Gorge Railway 1465:

Carrizo Gorge Railway operated the SD&A tracks between Tecate and Plaster City from 1997 to 2012. This locomotive is tied up in court between Carrizo Gorge Railway and the engine’s owners, the East County Dirt Works. It sits at the old depot in downtown Jacumba where a lot of other rolling stock also sits, deteriorating in the hot desert sun.

My goal on my driving tour was to make it to Plaster City CA, which is nothing but a gypsum plant for USG. However, USG operates that last remaining commercial narrow gauge railroad in the United States. Standard gauge tracks like you see every day are 4’8½” between the rails. Narrow gauge tracks can be anything narrower than that; the USG narrow gauge tracks are a mere 3′, making the rolling stock somewhat small compared to the big boys. As we flew over Plaster City in the helicopter, I got a picture of USG 112, a narrow gauge locomotive:

And the narrow gauge tracks leading from the gypsum quarry to Plaster City in the upper right:

The flight over the Carrizo Gorge where all the tunnels and trestles are was pretty cool. The main sight in Carrizo Gorge is the Goat Canyon Trestle:

At about 180′ high and 630′ long, the Goat Canyon Trestle is the largest wooden trestle in the world. The trestle was built in 1932 when the tunnel, directly in the center behind the trestle, collapsed. At the left is an abandoned hopper car.

It’s pretty neat to see all the trestles from the air, indicating just how desolate and isolated this area is, and how difficult it is to maintain the tracks.

All along the route are abandoned railroad cars. In some cases it’s obvious why they are abandoned:

The Pacific Southwest Railroad Museum in Campo CA uses the old Campo Depot as its headquarters and has a lot of rolling stock that it is restoring. They offer rides on historic trains over about 5 miles of track, although the rains we have had this winter have, again, washed out some tracks, so those train rides are on hold. Here’s Pacific Southwest Railroad Museum from the air:

Map of the San Diego & Arizona Railroad:

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Out & About—Stand down. Local tourist

Early in January I went on an exploratory driving tour of East San Diego County, specifically looking for remnants of old, abandoned sections of Old Highway 80 which was built from the 1910s to the 1960s. During the years after World War II, U.S. Highway 80 from San Diego to Yuma AZ was reported to be the most used transcontinental highway. U.S. 80 was removed from the Californnia highway numbering system in 1964 after Interstate 8 had become the major thoroughfare from San Diego to Yuma. By 1991, U.S. 80 had been removed from the highway numbering in Arizona, New Mexico, and the western part of Texas all the way to Dallas. In 2006, what was left of U.S. Highway 80 in San Diego and Imperial counties was designated by the State of California as Historic U.S. Route 80.

My journey:

In the original highway system a two-digit number ending in a zero meant that the road was a cross-country road. Indeed, U.S. Highway 80 had its western terminus as far west as Point Loma in San Diego and its eastern terminus in Tybee Island, Georgia.

The road for automobiles from San Diego to Yuma, Arizona, was the Old Plank Road built from February to April 1915. There still is a section of the road in existence, near Yuma, and it is my intent to get over there soon to see it. Here’s a picture of it from Wikipedia:

The 1915 road was replaced in 1916 by a more sophisticated prefabricated plank road. It was a struggle to maintain it, though, and by 1926 work was underway to construct a concrete/asphalt roadway. Many sections of the concrete/asphalt roadway still are in existence, some still being driven on and others being quite difficult to find or get to.

If we start west and drive east, the first section we come to was built in 1917. The earliest concrete highway is easy to determine because it has no center divider, which you’ll see in upcoming pictures, and appears to be at most about 1½ lanes wide. Here is a section visible on what is now the Viejas Indian Reservation in Alpine:

There is a cool bridge, the Los Terrinitos Road Bridge, also built in 1917, just a couple of miles from the reservation:

I, being the indomitable Russel Ray, had to park and crawl under the bridge. Under-bridges often are more interesting than over-bridges.

Once you drive over the bridge, you’re on Old Highway 80 built in 1931. You can see the center divider indicating that it’s the widened version constructed beginning in 1926.

This section of Highway 80 now is called Wildwood Glen Lane. The Wildflower Resort was located here on the old highway. The main house from the resort is still used as a residence. The road goes for about a mile and ends at a gated turnaround. However, you can park your car and walk around the gate and explore another three miles or so of the old highway, overgrown with high desert sage and chaparral.

The panorama below is beyond the gate; I had a lot of fun walking a couple of miles before turning around to stay on schedule.

Each section of highway that was completed each day was date-stamped at both ends. I was able to determine that they poured concrete at the rate of about a quarter mile each day.

In the picture immediately above, the January 21, 1930 date stamp is wrong. Every other date stamp on this section of Highway 80 was 1931, including January 21, 1931, at the other end of this 1930-stamped section. Well, I guess they could have started this section on January 21, 1930, and finally completed it on January 21, 1931, but I’m thinking, uh, no.

In addition to finding beautiful scenery, I also discovered normally dry mountain streams that were running full of water.

In the following picture, you can see Interstate 8 in the upper right. This was about two miles past the gate and where I turned around to go back to my car.

The next section that is visible is the Pine Creek bridge in Pine Valley, built in 1917. It still is in use as a private entrance to some horse stables.

Between Pine Valley and Jacumba Hot Springs are mostly abandoned building ruins. Quite interesting. There are so many abandoned ruins, especially in and around Jacumba Hot Springs, that I will cover them in a future blog post.

Although my tour book, dated 2013, said there were sections of Highway 80 visible or accessible, I was not able to find them in 2017. The next section I found was near Jacumba Hot Springs, a 1931 bridge built on top of a 1916 bridge.

So, do you think I crawled under the bridge? Uh, der. That’s the only way you can see the remnants of the 1916 bridge!

I also found another 1931 bridge near Jacumba Hot Springs. This one went over some abandoned railroad tracks of the San Diego & Arizona Railroad, so I stopped to walk the tracks.

That spot where I stopped to take that picture is about one hundred feet from the border fence with Mexico, which has a maintenance gate in it.

I walked over to the gate in the picture, and that’s when every Border Patrol and Homeland Security agent within 100 miles descended on me like flies on dung. I was sure that I was going to be deported….

After explaining what I was doing, they let me go but warned me that being in a new car with “paper plates,” it was likely that I would be stopped several more times this close to the border. They were right. Six times total during my 101-mile trip. While being warned by one officer, another was talking into his walkie talkie: “Stand down. Local tourist.”

The two pictures immediately above were taken on the side of the road nearest to the border. On the other side, while standing on the bridge, were sections of the 1916 road, shown in the following four pictures and easily discernible because there’s no center divider:

Out at In-Ko-Pah where the Desert View Tower is (see my blog posts here), there are two long sections of Old Highway 80 right next to Interstate 8. The 1916 section, shown below, is abandoned.

To the right in the above picture is the 1932 section which is still in use. It terminates at the Desert View Tower. In the picture below, in the center of the bridge, you can see the date 1932.

Once you leave the Desert View Tower (if you’re that close to it, stop and take a tour), you’ll get on Interstate 8 and head down into the desert where there are long stretches of both 1916 and 1932 sections of Old Highway 80, as well as track and trestles from the abandoned San Diego & Arizona Railroad.

1932 meets 1916. Interstate 8 in upper quarter, especially upper right.

East of Ocotillo is a long stretch of a 1916 section of Highway 80. The 1932 version is at the left, which is what you drive on through here.

Here is a panorama showing the 1916 Highway 80 on the left and the 1932 Highway 80 on the right.

The currently abandoned San Diego & Arizona Railroad tracks are to the left of the 1916 Highway 80. They look like this:

Hope you enjoyed this driving tour of Old Highway 80 in East San Diego County. I’ll have more driving tours like this coming up in future posts. Stay tuned by following or subscribing.

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Out & About—Natural springs in a desert city

Not too far from me—in fact, directly across the street—is Collier Park. It’s a quaint little park with tennis courts, a boarded up unused building, a non-working drinking fountain, some picnic tables, a creek which somehow always has water in it (this is a desert), some very tall very old eucalyptus trees, and some unpaved trails bordered by California pepper trees. Pretty much the only people who use the park are tennis players from the high school not too far away and people playing with their dogs.

Collier Park currently is being renovated. Since renovation often means “historical destruction,” I decided to do a little research and get some pictures just in case what was there would be no more.

Collier Park is named for Colonel David Charles Collier, a distinguished San Diego citizen and early La Mesa developer. Collier is perhaps best known for organizing the Panama-California Exposition at San Diego in 1915. However, he also built a railroad line to Ocean Beach in 1909 which led to a real estate boom at the beach.

Colonel Collier bought East County lands in 1905, which included the natural springs and what is now Collier Park. By 1907 he had established a bottling works on the site. Those bottling works are the Spring House. From everything I can find, apparently the bottling works are still in existence inside the Spring House.

La Mesa Spring House

Spring House ca. 1912

The natural springs made it a seasonal stopping place for the Kumeyaay Indians. By the 1860s, rancher Robert Allison owned most of the southern part of La Mesa, and his family used the springs to water their herds of sheep.

Water still springs forth from the natural springs, which is why there is water in that creek all the time. Here’s the little drainage line that comes out of the Spring House, draining that natural spring water into the little creek:

In 1910, Collier donated a portion of what is now Collier Park for public use, and by 1920 the City was developing the site for use as a municipal park.

Natural spring creek and spring fountain

The red brick structure in the picture above is the Spring Fountain. Originally it was located at the La Mesa Depot of the San Diego & Cuyamaca Eastern Railroad, as seen in this picture from 1912:

Water for the Spring Fountain was pumped from La Mesa Springs about a mile away. The Spring Fountain was in use until the 1960s when it was moved to Collier Park.

Renovation plans indicated that the Spring House was to be destroyed but the citizenry appeared to have rebelled, and those plans of destruction appear to be on hold while the City tries to figure out what to do. I vote for opening it up as a tourist attraction. It wouldn’t be on the scale of Disneyland but I think quite a few people would stop by to see natural springs smack dab in the middle of a thriving city.

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Out & About—I’m thinking heat exhaustion

Yesterday I took a 2½-hour helicopter tour of East San Diego County. My specific purpose was to visit Carrizo Gorge to see this baby:

That’s the Goat Canyon Trestle, built in 1932 by the San Diego & Arizona Railway. It is 630 feet long and 180 feet high, and is the largest wooden railroad trestle in the world. It was built to take the place of a smaller trestle and tunnel that had collapsed in an earthquake. You can see the tunnel entrance just above the center of the Goat Canyon Trestle.

The San Diego & Arizona Railway is known as “The Impossible Railroad” because of the environment through which it was built—rocky mountains, deep canyons, no water, and temperatures regularly reaching 120°F.

Workers lived where they worked, and regularly reported glowing orbs floating around the construction area at night. There also were many reports of Bigfoot-like creatures roaming the Anza-Borrego Desert, eventually becoming known as the Borrego Springs Sandmen.

In 1977, an engineer thought he saw a bright light ahead of his train, meaning that another train was heading towards his train, so he pulled the brake, derailing his train. Of course, there was no other train.

Floating orbs? Sandmen? Trains heading the wrong direction? 120°F? No water? I’m thinking heat exhaustion….

San Diego Historical Landmarks: #17—Lighthouse of 1854

The Lighthouse of 1854, San Diego Historical Landmark #17, also is known as the Cabrillo Lighthouse and is located on the grounds of Cabrillo National Monument.

Just 19 days after California was admitted as the 31st state of the United States, Congress authorized $90,000 to build six lighthouses along the California coast. By the time they got around to building the Cabrillo lighthouse, there was no money left so congress had to authorize another $59,434. Construction began in April 1854, was completed in October 1855, and was lighted for the first time at sunset on November 15, 1855. Officially it was light number 355 in the Twelfth United States Lighthouse District.

The lighthouse was decommissioned on March 23, 1891, being replaced by a new lighthouse at a lower elevation. During its time in use, it was at the highest elevation of any lighthouse in the United States. However, what originally was considered good turned out to be bad, bad, bad. Being at the top of a 400-ft cliff meant that fog and low clouds blocked the light from ships.

The light was re-lit in 1984 for the first time in 93 years for the site’s 130th birthday.

The lighthouse tower normally is closed off to the public. However, there are two days a year when it is open: August 25, which is the National Park Service’s birthday, and November 15, which is the Lighthouse’s birthday. I can highly recommend trekking to the top of the tower; it’s pretty cool.

For the introductory blog post to San Diego’s historical landmarks, click on San Diego’s Historical Landmarks.

For previous posts in the San Diego Historical Landmarks series, go here.

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