Bob Eckert

Beach in North County

San Diego's North County beaches, though not the most accessible, are certainly the most stupendous. The crowds especially the affluent of La Jolla Shores, the nudists of Blacks, and the surfers of Cardiff and Encinitas bear out the wildest descriptions of any easterner about Southern California. And the seashore scenery the deep turquoise of the water, the massiveness of some of the cliffs draws San Diegans of all kinds, even from the other beach communities.

La Jolla's Windansea has got to be San Diego's most jingoist beach. “Those are the kind of surfers with nails sticking out of the front of their boards," according to a surfing regular at another beach. Even the City of San Diego's effort to construct restrooms at Windansea has met with a stiff “Ban the Can" campaign, one argument of which is that it would encourage “tourists" from La Mesa and El Cajon to come out and spend the day. In spite of the general unfriendliness and cliqueishness of Windansea locals, it is a nice beach to visit both because of the good waves even the waves are crowded here, though the jade color of the water, and the interesting formations the small cliffs make with the beach.

The Cove is probably the most visited of La Jolla beaches: the proximity to plush Prospect Street and the Caves as well as the potential for snorkeling off the rocks must account for this. On any weekend, however, there's barely enough room to set a towel down in the sand, so it might be best to save this beach for a week-day.

Of all La Jolla beaches, La Jolla Shores seems the most Mediterranean. As one stands in the public beach, looking south to the striped cabanas and uniformly colored umbrellas, it brings the beach scene in Death in Venice to mind. Here, as well as at other North County beaches, you can find the UCSD grad student studying his covalent bonds, infinite number sets, or his favorite logical positivist. Here you meet two young women, their copy of Anais Nin lying half-buried under a towel, with their eyebrows furrowed over some burdensome political question. And here you can see the young Anglo-Saxon second-generation La Jollan’s, home from Groton or Brown's Academy, wholesomely playing volleyball.

As one travels north, the beach is left by the rising shore, so that one has to climb down the stairs to reach the beach in front of Scripps Institute. The beach is narrower than the Shores about 50 feet only but this allows enough room for a few biologists to toss the frisbee around or a secretary or two to spend their lunchbreak sitting in the sun. Because the parking is restricted to Scripps employees and students on weekdays and opened to the public on the weekends, the crowd varies from a young, mostly noontime crowd Monday through Friday to groups of families on Saturday and Sunday.

At low tide you can walk along the sand in front of the cliffs up to Black's Beach, but a more common route is to turn from La Jolla Shores Road to La Jolla Farms Road. If there's parking available nearby, one can sneak down one of the two paved UCSD roads near the La Jolla Farms Rd. turn off. But the route the local residents encourage everyone to take is about a mile and a half beyond the turn-off. The hike down this dirt road/path makes you feel like you've just started on the John Muir Trail: down some steep, eroded paths, a rock climber's slide down a knotted rope, a muddy canyon covered with manzanita and sage. Two young guys from North Park wearing jeans jackets and holding motorcycle helmets walk boldly behind a family with two children. “I used to have a lot of hang-ups. The first time I came here I didn't take my clothes off, but then I realized it was just a hang-up."

“Yeah... Everyone knows about Black's, you know. My mom. I told her I was going to the beach in La Jolla. She said. “Oh, Black's Beach, huh?"

You come out of the canyon all at once and directly in front of you is the sign dividing the “clothes optional" beach from the “clothes required" beach. To the right are hundreds of people (even on a weekday) carrying surfboards toward the water, throwing football. eating picnic food all butt naked. The excitement wears off in a minute and you feel like you're just in a high school or college gym shower room. Except that most people are so completely tan that t h e y look like Gauguin's Polynesians. If you're a first-time visitor, you stare a bit, get more stares in return (especially if you're not at least down to a swimsuit), and turn self-consciously toward the other side of the sign.

The cliffs at Black's seem to be at least 150 to 200 feet high and the drama of the drop is breath-taking. One should get a look both from below and from above. Above, from the perch next to the Salk Institute, near Glider Point, you may have to stand next to the Black's voyeurs with their binoculars and their telephoto lenses, but the view is worth it. (There is no way down to the beach from this point, however.)

Just north of Torrey Pines State Park, where you can also get the feeling of being in the mountains and enjoy the view of the ocean below, there is parking for Torrey Pines State Beach. It's a narrow strip of beach that runs along Highway 101. from the Park to the Del Mar city limits. Parking is $1 per car, however.

Del Mar comes closest of all San Diego cities to similarity to San Francisco's Marin County. It gave McGovern his largest percentage of all cities in the county, it boasts a large, moneyed, young, educated class of people that elected the county's youngest mayor (a UCSD student), it is populated with lots of natural wood exterior houses, and it wages fierce battles against North County developers. In spite of the apparent liberalism, however, there is not a lot of easy access to Del Mar beaches. Some of the beach is monopolized by developments like Del Mar Woods, and part of it is limited by the lack of parking space and the obstacles of a few berms and railroad tracks to jump over. There is a small parking lot at the end of 15th Street and there are some paved streets running right up to the sand north of 15th. Though there are no public sidewalks along the beach like Coronado's or Mission Beach's there is a dog run near 2Nth Street, and in general, the sand is very clean and uncrowded.

Much of Solana Beach is high cliff rather than beach. And if there is one place in the county devoted to the natural wood con dominium townhouse development, this is it. In the middle of Solana Beach's commercial district, however, one may turn off to the Solana Beach Park, a nice, small cove with lifeguards, fire rings, and restrooms.

(Ed.—neither time nor space allows for comprehensive coverage of the beaches north of Solana Beach at this time. Promises have been made by a local attorney-surfer, however, to write about San Diego County's northernmost beaches, including San Onofre.)