|
Spot: Trestles, CA
33°22′53″N, 117°35′17″W
Surprise surprise. Just as Rincon is not in Santa Barbara County, Trestles is not in Orange County. The San Diego County line goes right through Cotton’s Point, so Trestles is the first or last surf spot in San Diego, depending on which way you are headed.
The Elders call this spot “The Trestle” as there is one long, wooden train bridge raising the tracks up above the wetlands of San Mateo Creek. Over the millennia that creek has deposited enough sand and cobblestones to form two points that are oh so popular with surfers from both counties and around the world.
And Kelly Slater. Once a year, he loves it.
Trestles has a long history going back to the 60s, when the whole area was off limits as part of Camp Pendleton and a security perimeter for President Richard Millhouse Nixon. This place back then was sealed off even tighter than Point Mugu or Vandenberg because of the Vietnam War and the presence of a President. There are epic stories of surfers sneaking in, hiding their boards in the wetlands, getting busted and dodging the Marines as they dodged the draft.
Here’s a Trestles joke: Two kids are surfing Cottons when they save this old guy from drowning. Turns out to be President Nixon, who grants them each one Presidential wish. The first kid says, “I want you to open Trestles to surfers.”
The President says he will.
The second kid says, “I want to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.”
Nixon says, “Okay, I have that power, but that is an odd request. You are a young man, why are you concerned about your burial site?”
The kid says: “Because when my dad finds out I saved you from drowning, he’s going to kill me!”
It’s all legal now, but Trestles still demands a bit of effort, as it is a hike of 15 minutes to half an hour from the closest parking, unless Team Mom drops you off.
Upper Trestles is a right point with some lefts that breaks at the mouth of San Mateo Creek. Not as famous as its brother to the south, Uppers is still a great wave that is best in the winter, on west and northwest swells. Where the crowd at Lowers is concentrated in one small area, Uppers has more than one peak, and that spreads things out a little.
Where Uppers is best in winter, only a half mile down the beach Lowers is one of the best summer waves in Southern California. At the end of the, Barbed Wires are peaks between Cottons and Upper Trestles, which is a right point with some lefts, breaking at the mouth of San Mateo Creek.
South of Upper Trestles, Lower Trestles is a classic California cobblestone pointbreak. Lowers has a shorter left made famous by Christian Fletcher and his aerials in the 80s and 90s. The right is longer and one of the best small performance waves in the world. The right is longer than the left, and Lowers gets swell from south to north, so it’s consistent.
The Good
Consistency. Variety. The Fletcher Family! Whatever energy is vibrating in the ocean, something between Cottons and Church will pick it up and give surfers something to ride. Also, the whole Trestles area is still in a natural state, and the walk down there, and the walk along the railway over the wetlands, and the surf and the dolphins and the flying fish and the view up into the Camp Pendleton Nature Preserve and Killing Fields is a much-needed pressure drop from the rattle and hum of Orange County.
As A Local said: “Trestles is not always worth the effort of access and confrontation. In all honesty it’s nothing more than a diorama of what OC used to be or could have been, a realistic simulation of nature and open space without being natural or open. But it's such a wonderful imitation that it soothes the weary OC soul just the same.”
The Bad
The Toll Road. Sucks. This is Orange County at its worst: Greedy, greedy, greedy, building a toll road that will open up all that area behind San Clemente to more development, more suburban housing projects, more suburban proles, more strip malls, more traffic. The Toll Road will turn many thousands of scrub acres into a goldmine, but that Toll Road is going to rejoin the 5 at a big grapevine which will land right in the middle of the Trestles wetlands. It probably won’t effect the surf, but it will effect the vibe. Shame on California, and Schwarzenegger.
Maybe Gerry Lopez should call Arnold and fire some reason arrows at him.
The Strange
Check it out on Google Earth. Whenever this satellite image was taken, the surf was cranking. Looks like winter because there are blown plumes going out to sea: Uppers is good, Lowers is better but Church has perfect a-frame peaks.
Also, trains passing through Trestles sometimes go in “push mode” which means the engine is in the back. That also means you can’t hear the damned things coming when you are grooving along the train tracks, communing with nature. So that thing you can’t hear might be the last thing you never hear. Use your eyes, too.
|
