Hike #37 Crest Canyon & Torrey Pines State Reserve Extension

52 Hike Challenge 2016 Adventure Series

7.25 miles | +750'

Crest Canyon Open Space Park Preserve is a wonderland of steep, orange sandstone cliffs and slopes dense with fragrant coastal sage scrub and southern maritime chaparral.

Lying between Del Mar and Del Mar Hills, Crest Canyon is carpeted with California buckwheat, bush sunflower, lemonadeberry, prickly-pear cactus, the bayonet-like yucca, and toyon, also known as California holly, the tree for which Hollywood was named.

The plant community includes two endangered species. The magnificent Torrey pine grows only on our North Coast and on Santa Rosa Island off Ventura. The tiny, delicate succulent, Dudleya brevifolia, produces star-like, cream-colored blossoms with bright yellow-green centers touched with red, like flecks of blood.

At orange dawn and dusk, the canyon is alive with birds and rabbits. The canyon provides a home for the threatened California gnatcatcher and for the California quail and the California towhee. The canyon is a stopover on the Pacific Flyway for migrating birds from faraway places.

Crest Canyon originally was included in the plan for Torrey Pines State Reserve but was omitted because of concerns about cost. The canyon was badly eroded by increased runoff from the development of the Del Mar Hills neighborhood in the late 1960s. Crest Canyon was saved from development in the 1970s by local activists who persuaded Del Mar and San Diego to buy and restore the land for public use.

Most San Diego residents can probably tell you where to find the rare Torrey Pine, whether or not they realize the tree’s uniqueness. That’s because the well-known Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve between La Jolla and Del Mar offers beautiful ocean vistas, secluded hiking, and, of course, plenty of opportunities to see Torrey pine trees in their natural habitat. Slightly less famous, but equally worthwhile, is the Torrey Pines State Reserve Extension, located just across Los Peñasquitos Lagoon from the main reserve. These less-traveled extension trails offer spectacular pine specimens as well as a rich collection of other coastal sage scrub and chaparral plant life.

While a stroll through either the main reserve or the extension may convince you that the magnificent Torrey pine is relatively abundant, it grows nowhere else in the world except a thin strip of coastline south of Del Mar and a tiny fragment on Santa Rosa Island of the Channel Islands. With only a few thousand individuals in the wild, the Torrey pine is considered rare, threatened, and endangered by the California Native Plant Society. It is a perfect example of why San Diego is globally known as a “biodiversity hotspot,” a region with very high numbers of plant and animal species, particularly endemics, or species that occur nowhere else.

The dry, sandy soils favored by the Torrey pine are also preferred by a variety of other San Diego natives. This coastal sage scrub habitat is rich with wildflowers, various shrubs, and, as the name suggests, sage. Both white and black sage can be found here, as well as the unrelated (except in smell) California or coastal sagebrush. California poppy and sunflower bloom here in late winter/early spring, with many additional wildflowers blooming in the spring months.