Cold Stream Trail teems with wildlife, history
BY PRISCILLA LISTER
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2009 AT 12:01 A.M.
The Cold Stream Trail in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park has views of meadows and Stonewall Peak. The trail is often an excellent place to spot wildlife. (Priscilla Lister)
COLD STREAM TRAIL
Before you go: The best trail map of Cuyamaca costs $1 and can be purchased at entrances to the Green Valley or Paso Picacho campgrounds, at park headquarters, or at the Visitors Center, open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.
Trail head: From Interstate 8, take state Route 79 exit, heading north toward Descanso. Park at the Visitors Center, now in temporary buildings, just off 79 between Green Valley and Paso Picacho campgrounds. The trail head for Cold Stream Trail is across from the placard for the Dyar House Trailhead parking area. The trail is well-marked.
Length: Three miles one-way. Allow at least two hours for even a partial round-trip walk.
Difficulty: Easy.
Cost: A $10 day-use fee to park in the Visitors Center lot.
For viewing wildlife, Cuyamaca is hard to beat. On its Cold Stream Trail late last month, I saw a bobcat, a troop of wild turkeys, bright-blue scrub jays and flocks of redheaded acorn woodpeckers.
The path leaves from the Dyar House trail head at the Visitors Center of Cuyamaca Rancho State Park. From the parking area, you will notice the stone-walled shell of the once-grand house built by the Ralph Dyar family in 1923. This historic home was once the park’s headquarters and visitors center. It even included a small museum, but it was destroyed during the 2003 Cedar fire, which also charred more than 270,000 acres of the county, including more than 24,000 acres of Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.
Fire crews fought to save historic structures in the park, but the Dyar House, as well as all the historic buildings at Camp Hual-cu-Cuish, were burned. Camp Hual-cu-Cuish, used for years by local Scout troops, was first developed in the 1930s by the California Conservation Corps and “represented some of the best examples of CCC-era park rustic architecture in California State Parks,” according to The Wave, the newsletter of the California State Parks Rangers Association.
The Dyar House was the mountain cabin of wealthy Beverly Hills residents Ralph and Helen Dyar. They had bought 20,000 acres that was Rancho Cuyamaca in 1923, selling it to the state in 1933, when it became Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.
The Cedar fire also devastated flora and fauna. “Ancient stands of stately sugar pines on Middle Peak and Cuyamaca Peaks were reduced to ash,” said The Wave. “These old-growth trees were as large as 6 feet in diameter and perhaps 500 years old. Very few survived the blaze.” Oak trees are far more resilient — 75 percent of them survived.
One was “Grandfather Oak,” a giant tree estimated to be 300 to 600 years old. The oak is just below the Cold Stream Trail, where some large boulders make perfect perches in front of it. It’s a short way past the No. 12 post marker, with views of the meadow and Stonewall Peak behind it.
Part of Cold Stream Trail is also called the Indian Village Trail. Numbered posts along it correspond with a brochure explaining how the Kumeyaay people lived in this area.
The brochures should be available in a box at the beginning of the trail head. Near the posts marked 5, the brochure points out that the Kumeyaay made pots using clay from this stream; 6, that wild lilac sticks were used to kill rabbits; and 7, that willow branches were made into acorn storage baskets.
Several oak trees hosted dozens of black-and-white acorn woodpeckers, their red heads bobbing on the tree trunks when they knocked against the bark.
I saw the jays in this area, too. The wild turkeys were chowing down in a wide-open meadow below Stonewall Peak, one of Cuyamaca’s highest at 5,730 feet.
But the bobcat was the best sighting. This rarely seen creature surprised me, literally, at the parking-lot trail head. It was just a bit larger than a house cat, with pointed ears and white-striped markings. When it saw me, it crouched, watched for a minute, then ran off.
At that trail-head entry, if you go south on Cold Stream Trail, you’ll hit Sweetwater River in about a half-mile at the junction with East Side Trail. The river was too full to cross without taking off my shoes, so I turned around.
Cold Stream Trail continues north for about three miles if you go all the way to its junction at Los Caballos.
Priscilla Lister is a freelance writer from San Diego.
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