Del Mar Triangle

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I hiked the Del Mar triangle starting from Del Mar Heights School, down Crest Canyon Trail to San Dieguito Lagoon following the San Dieguito River to the Pacific Ocean. Once at the beach, I waded bare-foot south to Torrey Pines. I left Torrey Pines proper walking through the Torrey Pines extension back to my car at the Del Mar Heights School. It is one of the most diverse hikes you can do in the area, part coastal chaparral, part estuary, part urban, part public beach and part wild beach.

I have to confess, as I was walking, I realized that summer in San Diego had started without me. I was escorted through Del Mar Fair traffic across Jimmy Durante Boulevard by a traffic cop. People screamed from across the San Dieguito river as the rides bounced them up and down, dropped them, and otherwise propelled them in their harnessed seats about the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Ospreys, martins, snowy egrets, and giant blue herons hunted and crabs scuttled about indifferently in the surging tidal waters.

The beach, from the river mouth south passed Power House to about 15th street, was packed. This might have been the first real beach day of the summer. The throngs of thongs were out in force (yes, I think a collection of thong-clad people must certainly be a throng). Beachwear, for young ladies anyway, continues to shrink. That is an observation and not a complaint.

However clad, beachgoers played traditional games of catch with softballs and footballs and frisbees. Others played some new spike game bouncing a ball into a netted hoop a few inches off the ground. I saw one game of an aerial version of bowling. Sand Castle building seems to have been elevated to an art form. Burying someone in the sand up to their neck in the sand never gets old. I was careful to avoid little kids hurtling sand and sea with their little plastic shovels, I’ve already lost one camera this year.

People walking together took group selfies (an oxymoron?) with their cell phone cameras. People walking alone talked into their cell phones, many with white ear pod ear adornments. Doesn’t anyone just take a walk anymore? I heard lots of foreign accents.  

At high tide, the surfing conditions looked terrible, without a breaker to be had any farther out than about thirty feet from shore. A few paddleboarders and a few swimmers braved the water. I watched one poor kid try to glide along the surface of the water at the shoreline on a thin kite-shaped board. As soon as he jumped on his moving glider, it stopped immediately, propelling him face first into the water and sand at the front of the now stationary board. I’m not an expert, but I don’t think that was a successful run.

The long stretch from Del Mar to Torrey Pines was vacant by comparison except for a few ambitious joggers, the occasional surfer that hikes over the tracks and down the cliff face, and yellow-footed white herons working the surf line fishing for sand crabs. Pelicans dive-bombed for fish in the distance disappearing into the geyser of their splash.

From there, I finished the hike in the chaparral and Torrey Pines and red bluffs of the Torrey Pines Extension following the overgrown Margaret Flemming trail back to the parking lot at the school.

Rattler

The total distance of the hike is six miles but the end result, I think, was that I finally caught up to summer.

More pics at: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RTx7uu6gNRxVQJ3bxXdr6bvH6tSMibfs