There’s a truism that San Diego has more horses per capita than any other county in the US. I don’t know if that’s true today — if it ever was — but certain parts of the county still have a strong equestrian flavor. Bonita and sections of the North County do, and stables also line the southernmost stretch of Hollister Street in Imperial Beach. Not so long ago you could rent horses from any number of the latter. Today, though, only one or two IB operations still offer trail rides to the public. One is Happy Trails.
From the Happy Trails property (at 2012 Sunset Ave.), it’s less than 2 miles to the beach — the only one in all of Southern California that still welcomes horses. Nearby lies the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve, with Border Field State Park just to the south. This should be an idyllic place for a ride: through an undeveloped wetlands to a deserted beach, less than 12 miles (as the crow flies) from downtown San Diego’s concrete corridors. The Happy Trails facility, too, impressed us. Home to a dozen or so equestrian boarders and around 50 trail horses, it seemed a tidy, well-run business where the animals looked healthy and well-cared for.
The standard 
beach ride requires at least 3 hours — a bit more time than my friends and I had when we visited yesterday. So we opted instead for a 90-minute outing through the estuary. Our guide, Tamara, was personable and an expert horse handler, and horseback seemed an excellent way to experience this little-visited patch of the county. Surely it must rank among the strangest places in all of America. In the course of our ride (which actually lasted closer to 2 hours), we saw only one other person — a Hispanic cowboy, in the saddle. But despite the overgrown trails, it hardly felt like a wilderness experience. The hills of Tijuana rise up only a mile or so to the south, and I noted shattered glass, discarded drinking cups, wadded clothing, and other human detritis along the side of the dirt and sand pathways.
None of that would have struck me as too onerous a cost for the pleasure of experiencing the estuary. The Tijuana River bed in Tijuana (and just north of the border) is a dusty wasteland, dry as a bone, and tainted with a reputation for
being not just unsightly but dangerous. But at its mouth the river’s channels looked wide and azure. They cut through low chaparral that held color even at this driest, most enervated time of the year. We watched a snowy egret fishing amidst the foilage. What came close to destroying the experience, alas, was the auditory assault of helicopters taking off and landing at the five pads at Ream Field. The air station directly adjoins the estuary, and it’s the only place on the West Coast where Navy helicopter pilots train. By the time we approached the beach on our horses, the unrelenting clamor reminded me of the evacuation of Saigon, during its fall.
On the Happ
y Trails website (which has coupons and lists bargain riding times) there’s a video featuring a Channel 6 reporter who went on the Happy Trails beach ride. The sight of her galloping through the sand and walking her horse through the surf still makes me want to return some day to try that. Tamara says the only time the helicopters are silent is federal holidays. I’m thinking about Veteran’s Day… or maybe just a good pair of ear plugs.
the Western Hemisphere. The finds span most of the last 7 million years, and they include more than 550 types of plants and animals, ranging from microscopic pollen and water fleas to giant mammoths and ground sloths, ancient camels and jaguars, sabertooth cats, and the largest bird ever to fly over North America. Though the advent of fall and cooler temperatures might make a trip to the desert begin to seem reasonable again, most visitors won’t discern much — if any — of this paleontological wealth. But I’ve discovered a wonderful key to accessing it. 
Evocative in a different way are five full-color paintings of paleolandscapes representing the way parts of the present-day park would have looked at times ranging from 1 to 5 million years ago. The next time I’m in the desert, they’ll help me summon up that lush teeming past.
to Depression, South and his young wife Tanya packed their few possessions into their Model T Ford, drove to the desert east of San Diego, found a mountaintop that appealed to them, and decided to live on it, as simply and naturally as the native Americans who once preceded them. They called the place Ghost Mountain and within five years they’d constructed a compact adobe home that they christened Yaquitepec (after the Yaqui Indians of Sonora, Mexico.)
e plunged into several years of serious sleuthing that culminated in her 2005 book, Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles: An Experiment in Primitive Living.
