North Inland rural flavor

Valley Center elegy, Fallbrook’s airplanes, drilling and foreign plants on Mt. Palomar, end of Pauma Valley dairies

Author

By Various Authors

Publish Date

Oct. 9, 2016

Mendenhall Valley, Palomar Mountain
Left to right, top to bottom: David Huntley, Joe Morford, Ray Carpenter, Dave Mendenhall. “If the lowlanders of Escondido take our water to sprinkle their lawns, it’s not just our wells that will suffer."

Drilling in on a Little Piece of Oregon

“See those gouges, where the ponds are?” He points to what look like two giant tank-tracks through the middle of the valley. “Those are what happened here the first time man interfered. In 1917, Teamsters cut the trees out of the valley to grow pasture to feed their cattle. That winter, storms came and gouged out those two ditches. Thirty feet deep and 70 feet wide. The valley has never fully recovered.

By Bill Manson, Oct. 6, 1994 | Read full article

I suspect that the residents of this new neighborhood would soon encourage the demise of these ranches, just as the residents of Valley Parkway Mobile Homes made life difficult for the Songer Ranch in Escondido.

Country living, past tense

I used to ride my horse at night to the top of one of the hills above Valley Center. When the weather was clear I could see the lights on the valley floor. Tonight from the same view I see my house as a light in the twinkling grid. As the drive to Escondido grows shorter and shorter each year. I’m shopping at the new stores by Lyle Songer’s ranch out on East Valley Parkway.

Farm in the valley

I had spent only a day with the Verbooms, yet I came to respect and admire, even envy, them. What I had come here for was not the farm, I realized. I had no overwhelming nostalgia for my own past. I was looking for a family. but for one that embodied an ideal, an ideal that has a lot to do with fairness, and hard, honest work, and independence, and generosity, and integrity.

By Tom Lux, July 25, 1996 | Read full article

Greg Rubin: "There should be monkey flower, coffee berry, sage, and wild roses growing in under those oaks."

Going native

“That should be oak woodland over there. Instead that area has been used for grazing and the grass has taken over. You can see over to the right, in that rocky area which is too steep for the animals to walk in, the native foliage is still hanging on. That's what it should all be like. The Native Americans tell stories about being able to walk barefoot for hundreds of miles on the dirt between the bushes”

By Ernie Grimm, Apr 27, 2000 | Read full article

"Caltrans has an easement right through our milking barns." (Joe Klein)

San Diego is no place for cows

"You should see the casino [the Pala Band] are building up there," Verboom says. "It's the Taj Mahal. They're going to employ something like 1200 people. And they plan to open it in March. Then you've got three more coming: one in Rincon, one in Pauma Valley, and another one on the La Jolla Reservation. All that traffic has to come right up this road, and Caltrans has an easement right through our milking barns."

By Ernie Grimm, Dec. 7, 2000 | Read full article

A plane over Fallbrook Community Airpark. That’s airpark, not airport. (Robert Burroughs)

Flaps Down to Fallbrook

Flying over North County, in the vicinity of Fallbrook Airpark, you can spot about 30 private and personal airstrips. One every few miles or so. Most are no more than a bulldozer’s wake of cleared brush with a huge X scored at either end. the owner’s message of “Closed” or “Keep Out.” Others are smooth and inviting. Of flawless blacktop, they serve the country clubs and the spiderlike hilltop homes of the gentry.

By Joe Applegate, May 24, 1990 | Read full article