By Tommy Hough with Karina Ornelas and Megan Flaherty

With Friday, May 15, marking Endangered Species Day, this week the San Diego Audubon Society is highlighting endangered birds in San Diego County that benefit from the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the resulting protection of habitat. In a number of cases, these endangered birds have seen their numbers rebound and species saved as a result of the ESA, which has regrettably seen a number of enforcement rollbacks over the last three years.

​The Bell's Vireo is a songbird found throughout North America, but its Southern California subspecies, known as the Least Bell's Vireo (Vireo bellii pusillus), was listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1986 due to an ongoing loss of habitat in the region, primarily due to development of riparian habitats in canyons and coastal areas.

Least Bell's Vireo are small birds with short, rounded wings and straight, short bills, with a faint ring around their eyes. Their feathers are mostly gray with paler shades of gray running to white along their bellies. Adult species spend their day in small trees and dense shrubs along rivers and streams, relying on a diet of insects and spiders. Beginning in April, female Least Bell's Vireo lay four eggs up to four times per year, with young birds leaving their nest some 10 to 12 days after hatching.

Unfortunately, Least Bell's Vireo nests are typically found within two feet of the ground, which makes unhatched eggs and chicks particularly vulnerable to predation from cats, raccoons, rats, and coyotes, all of which are found near housing and business developments. Scrub jays, hawks, and snakes are also common natural predators.

Although they've been spotted as far north as Santa Clara County, the extraordinarily biodiverse set of habitats and open space in San Diego County remains home to the greatest number of Least Bell’s Vireo. A substantial number of the county’s population lives in the drainages of Camp Pendleton that make up the Santa Margarita River watershed, and the Otay Valley Regional Park offers some of the best, most accessible visibility opportunities. San Diego Audubon is working with the rangers here to improve habitat to benefit riparian species, as well as local pollinators.

Help This Bird: Since its classification as endangered in 1986, the Least Bell's Vireo population has increased from 291 pairs statewide, to 2,968 pairs in Southern California. But the Least Bell's Vireo needs the verdant riparian habitat of canyons and stream beds in coastal areas to survive. The ESA is capable of stopping or requiring modification of proposed developments in order to preserve habitat for this species, which is essential as their population is still so low that they are not safe from extinction.

Please contact your federal elected official and ask them to support conservation policy in Congress to incentivize coastal wetland protection and restoration for carbon storage in order to help the Least Bell's Vireo.

Fun Fact: As songbirds, the Least Bell's Vireo are known to be chatty and melodic, with male birds often signing up to 15 different varieties of song.

Least Bell's Vireo photo by Andy Reago and Chrissy McClarren, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

By Tommy Hough

When I was running for San Diego City Council in 2018, I knocked on thousands of doors in District 6.

One afternoon, when I was canvassing in Mira Mesa, I stopped by a house on Gold Coast Drive. When I asked the homeowner if there was anything going on in the neighborhood he was concerned about, he led me by the arm from his front door to his front yard, where we were promptly hit by flying gravel as a car drove by at less than 25 miles per hour. "This is my problem," he told me. He wasn't the first.

If you've driven on Gold Coast east of Camino Ruiz over the last dozen years, this anecdote probably doesn't surprise you. ​I first drove along Gold Coast some 17 years ago, shortly after I'd arrived in San Diego as part of the inaugural air staff at FM 94/9. Even then I remember remarking on how atrocious the road was – not just with potholes, but with cracks, gaps, bumps, asphalt patches upon patches, and intersections devolving into gravel pits.

I realize it's difficult to find a smooth drive in San Diego. Every neighborhood has their problem streets, but Gold Coast remains a potholed minefield where motorists are forced to drive like a slow-motion skier on a slalom run to avoid the worst parts, especially around the intersections at Westonhill and San Ramon. While not an unusually long stretch of road, it's a heavily-traveled arterial vital to our community and the commuters who drive to and from work in our city's economic engine every day. Gold Coast needs to be rebuilt now, in conjunction with the rebuild of Parkdale Ave. outlined in the city's Community Improvement Program (CIP) number B17188 (you can find other CIPs in District 6 here).

When I attended an informational meeting at the Mira Mesa Senior Center in the summer of 2018 to learn more about the proposal to rebuild Gold Coast Dr. and Parkdale Ave., the city's chief engineer noted with some amazement how bad Gold Coast had become, going so far as to mention his surprise that it hadn't already been rebuilt.

Again, no surprise on our end. Longtime Mira Mesa residents know the roadbed of Gold Coast Dr. and others were built quickly and on the cheap in the early 1970s, and failed long ago from a clear intrusion of water, bad drainage, and loose soils. All of these factors, plus the fact that much of Mira Mesa was rapidly, and unecologically, built upon naturally occurring vernal pools at the time of rapid construction beginning in 1970, have conspired to make Mira Mesa roads notoriously bad. But Gold Coast, one of the most heavily-used arterials in the community, has become the poster child for civic neglect. I made my case on this point in a Times of San Diego piece in February 2019.

I realize the city is looking at a very lean period over the upcoming months, maybe even years, due to the loss of tourism, TOT taxes, and convention revenue from the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertainty over Proposition B, but it's critical the Capital Improvement Program B-17188 to rebuild Gold Coast Drive from Thanksgiving Lane to Camino Ruiz, and Parkdale Ave. from Mira Mesa Blvd. to Northrup Drive, be funded and moved forward as a priority in the 2021 budget. The decaying streets affect my neighbors' property values, even beyond the flying gravel, and puts extraordinary wear and tear on my neighbors' cars that can cost thousands of dollars a year to stay ahead of.

​And it isn't just the residents. MTS buses use the otherwise narrow strip of Gold Coast throughout the day, and in normal times under non-pandemic conditions heavy San Diego Unified school buses deliver students to Salk Elementary School on Parkdale, and Wangenheim Middle School via Gold Coast throughout the school year. 

To my earlier point, located as we are between the I-15 and I-805 freeways, our neighborhood streets and arterials like Mira Mesa Blvd., Capricorn, Flanders, Bootes, and Gold Coast bear the brunt of the daily nine-to-five commuter traffic as workers head to and from tech centers like Sorrento Valley and western Mira Mesa. I would ask Mayor Faulconer and San Diego City Council, in this 11th hour ahead of the unveiling of the new fiscal year 2021 budget, that the proposal to rebuild Gold Coast Dr. and Parkdale Ave. be funded and enacted upon, according to the plan for Capital Improvement Program B-17188.

Again, I realize we're in the crosshairs of an impending and likely long-term budget crisis, but hopefully we can address more streets in Mira Mesa and District 6 that need to rebuilt from the ground-up, not slathered over with another layer of asphalt that doesn't fix the underlying problem, like Calle Dario, Jade Coast, Pegasus, Port Royale, Perseus, and others. I'm sure you know of some that could use more than a hug and some TLC. If you agree, do me a favor and please let me know.

By Tommy Hough

I have a layperson interest in seismology, and if I was capable of competently executing math and logarithm formulas, I'm pretty sure I would've been a scientist, perhaps even a geologist or seismologist. But the reality is, as much as I find science fascinating, math has never come easy to me beyond basic arithmetic. I blew the lid off the SATs with my English scores, but my math scores were lurking somewhere near the basement, and I never received much academic encouragement to more fully pursue earth science studies.

Nevertheless, a friend recently asked about a story in the Los Angeles Times detailing how the Garlock Fault in Southern California is experiencing, according to the headline, "unprecedented" movement as the result of the magnitude 6.4 and 7.1 earthquakes near Ridgecrest over the July 4th holiday. My friend also asked whether the Garlock Fault is capable of producing a magnitude 8.0 earthquake, as the newspaper headline indicates. It is, and the L.A. Times story is in fact based on a new study released by Caltech scientists last week.

The Garlock Fault runs east-west across Southern California, essentially from Death Valley National Park at its east end to the Grapevine along I-5 at its west end. The Garlock is unusual because it's an east-west trending fault, and most faults in California tend to run northwest to southeast along larger fault systems like the San Andreas and San Jacinto. Most earthquake faults in San Diego County also follow this alignment.

Geologists have been aware of the Garlock Fault for decades, in part because they see the trace of the fault and the impact it appears to have had on the landscape over time. But there haven't been earthquakes that can be attributed to the Garlock in about 500 years of recorded history, and that includes about 130 years' worth of modern seismology that indicates the fault has simply not been an active geological factor in recent centuries. While the Garlock may have played a role in a magnitude 5.7 earthquake near the town of Mojave in 1992, about two weeks after the big Landers Earthquake to the south near Joshua Tree, no evidence of surface displacement was ever found.

That changed with the magnitude 6.4 quake on July 4th, and the bigger 7.1 quake on July 5th near Ridgecrest. The July 5th quake was the largest to hit California in 20 years, and large earthquakes like those in the Ridgecrest area often have a corresponding effect on other faults. Sometimes nearby faults "loosen up" and move as a result of a big quake, sometimes nearby faults "freeze" and stay locked as the result of a nearby earthquake. Most of the time, nothing happens.

A good way to think of California fault geology is to imagine the state as a big, broken dinner plate that's assembled back together, piece by piece, with a layer of topsoil on it. Some pieces of the broken plate are big chunks while other pieces are small, but they all move relative to one another even when one little piece of the broken plate moves – even a tiny one.

The Garlock Fault runs about 15 miles to the south of Ridgecrest, cutting across U.S. 395 north of Mojave, and when the quakes happened near Ridgecrest this summer many observers initially thought they were on the Garlock. They weren't. Instead, the Ridgecrest quakes were centered in a seismically active area called the Little Lake Fault Zone on a relatively unknown "strike slip" fault, which is a fault that moves horizontally and parallel to a surface fault trace. There are perhaps hundreds of these unmapped faults around the state, some of which may not be visible from the surface. In contrast, it was an undetected "blind thrust" fault, which is a fault at an angle within the earth's crust below the surface,  that was the cause of the magnitude 6.4 Northridge Earthquake in L.A. in 1994.

While the Garlock Fault has historically been unaffected by nearby quakes with either an increase or decrease in stress, the Garlock is now moving, albeit very slowly, for the first time in centuries as a result of the Ridgecrest quakes. That movement, as detailed by the Los Angeles Times story, is a big deal in the Earth Sciences world. In seismology, this kind of slow, barely-detectable movement is called "fault creep," or "creeping."

In 1952, a large portion of Kern County and the southern San Joaquin Valley northeast of the Grapevine was hammered by one of the state's most violent earthquakes. It was a big jolt, bigger than the biggest Ridgecrest quake, with a magnitude of 7.3. The quake and its aftershocks killed a dozen people, but that big earthquake happened on an otherwise little fault called the White Wolf Fault. The White Wolf had been identified and mapped prior to the 1952 earthquake, but no one was particularly familiar with it. The White Wolf is also an east-west trending fault, running parallel to the Garlock to the north, and it's located near the western end of the Garlock, where the Garlock meets the San Andreas Fault at the Grapevine near Tejon Pass. Despite the violent shaking and proximity of the White Wolf Fault to the Garlock and San Andreas, the 1952 Kern County Earthquake didn't seem to have any affect on either of those nearby faults.

Meanwhile, this summer's Ridgecrest Earthquake Sequence certainly did affect the Garlock. The depth of the respective quakes may have had something to do with it, another part of the reason the reactivation of the Garlock has become such a compelling story. While a bigger quake 65 years ago did nothing to affect the Garlock, the ones this summer near Ridgecrest rattled it loose. Maybe the Ridgecrest quakes were simply closer to a geologic "sweet spot" for the Garlock where it was "hung up" on rock, perhaps for centuries, and unable to move. Perhaps the Ridgecrest sequences avoided a more destructive quake. Perhaps some other geologic event has now been set in motion.

If you're interested in further layperson reading, there's a seismologist named Susan Hough (a very nice person but no relation) who works at the U.S. Geological Survey. She published a book in 2004 called Finding Fault in California: An Earthquake Tourist's Guide, and it's a handy book to have in the car on road trips or even if you're just driving around L.A., as it points out all kinds of interesting seismic features in the state, some of which you can hike or drive right up to and see for yourself.

By Tommy Hough

As Pacific Beach and Clairemont residents know, a new trolley stop and transit center is under construction at the base of Balboa Ave. adjacent to the newly-renovated Morena Blvd. interchange.

The station is expected to go on-line in 2021, and is being completed under the Balboa Avenue Station Area Specific Plan (BASASP). City acronyms aside, the new Balboa Ave. station will be a critical stop along the San Diego Trolley's new Midcoast Corridor extension north to UCSD. If foresight and good civic management are applied, the new stop could also lead to new opportunities for preservation.

As any local commuter worth their salt knows, the area where Balboa Ave. intersects with Mission Bay Dr. and becomes Garnet Ave. is one of the most notorious traffic gridlock sites in the city. Coupled with the traffic ramp to southbound I-5 just west of Santa Fe St. (the road that goes to the Karl Strauss Brewery), and the backup along northbound and southbound Mission Bay Drive, this intersection and all its peculiarities is rush hour misery incarnate.

​In addition, the area around the Balboa Ave. transit station will soon be home to upwards of 4,729 residential units, including multi-family and single-family dwelling units within the residentially-designated areas, with much of the construction earmarked for the area between Mission Bay Dr. and Rose Creek.

This building boom is, in part, a push by the city to build workforce housing along urban transit corridors, with residents ideally utilizing newly-available transit options from the Balboa Ave. station to go to and from jobs Downtown, and to access job centers to the north at UCSD and Sorrento Valley.

But how will these thousands of eager new residents access the Balboa Ave. trolley stop and transit station? According to the city and SANDAG, the solution is an expanded Rose Creek Bikeway, utilizing a rebuilt Santa Fe St. and a new overpass above Balboa Ave. to safely deliver pedestrians and bicyclists to the new transit stop. The fate of Rose Creek itself, unfortunately, has not been taken into account, even though it winds through the affected area.

Much of the planned housing will be built along Rose Creek, which has become blighted along portions of its length, as well as a hotbed for crime. Some of the businesses with property facing the creek have installed barbed wire in order to prevent break-ins. Not exactly a welcoming sight for new residents, or a responsible way to treat a valuable natural resource, even one as maligned as Rose Creek.

Official management for Rose Creek west of I-5 falls to the city's Storm Water Division, and while there's no doubt the agency will effectively fulfill their mission there, they may not necessarily manage the area in the same manner as, say, Parks and Recreation. If the habitually-littered Rose Creek area west of I-5, already under considerable stress from maximum urbanization, were made into a park the city could begin a renewal process to fully clean up trash and litter, restore native plants, and ensure the Rose Creek Bikeway traverses an area for transit and recreation that is not only aesthetically pleasing, but well-lighted and safe. That's a plan worth advocating for.

In addition, the affected portion of Rose Creek drains into northeast Mission Bay, and has been identified as a Multi-Habitat Planning Area (MHPA) that contains critical coastal wetlands, including salt marsh and fresh water riparian habitats. The area is also used as a winter retreat for birds from northern Canada and Alaska, and a number of wading birds make their home in Rose Creek year round.

Despite this, the only active "management" in Rose Creek is done with the help of community volunteers and organizations like Friends of Rose Creek, which regularly collects and disposes of litter. Park designation would go a long way toward ensuring consistent, on-site management for recreation, clean water and environmental needs.

As with the ongoing ReWild Mission Bay proposal to restore native wetland habitat to northeast Mission Bay, the potential also exists to remake and redefine Rose Creek as a city park capable of accommodating new residents who will no doubt be curious about their waterway neighbor, and provide management to ensure resources are protected and litter regularly collected and disposed of.

A revitalized Rose Creek will also become an asset, rather than a detriment, to adjoining businesses. After all, who wouldn't want to do business along protected parkland? An investment in the future of Rose Creek may be just what the city needs to mitigate, in part, for the expected explosion of new residents in a highly-concentrated area.

​Since the building frenzy on the horizon will put even greater environmental pressure on Rose Creek and Mission Bay, let us encourage San Diego City Council to exercise their power at their meeting on Thursday, Aug. 1, to make Rose Creek into a park, and ensure that an additional layer of management and conservation protection for the creek becomes a reality.

This is an opportunity for San Diego City Council to create a new city park in a park-poor area, and do so at no cost to the city – quite the bargain.

At the upcoming San Diego City Council meeting on Thursday, Aug. 1, we must ask the city to:

1. Dedicate the city-owned parcels of Rose Creek in the Mission Bay Park Improvement Fund zone as a new city park.
   
   
2. Direct city staff to include funding for a Community Facilities District (CFD) in the Infrastructure Financing Study that will come out after approval of the BASASP. The CFD designation will also enable maintenance and operations for a potential park.

And we need you to attend the San Diego City Council meeting on Thursday the 1st to share your thoughts about why you would like to see Rose Creek become city parkland. If you don't want to speak, attend anyway and cede your time to one of our coalition speakers.

We'll meet at Civic Center Plaza outside San Diego City Hall at 202 C St. beginning at 12 noon on Thursday, Aug. 1, to go over talking points and speak with media before heading upstairs for the council meeting. The afternoon council session will get underway at 1 p.m.

Special thanks to Karin Zirk of Friends of Rose Creek for her help with this piece, and thanks to the many organizations supporting Rose Creek park designation, including the Clairemont Town Council, Environmental Center of San Diego, Friends of Rose Canyon, Friends of Rose Creek, Pacific Beach Planning Group, Pacific Beach Town Council, San Diego Audubon Society, San Diego Canyonlands, San Diego Earthworks and the Sierra Club San Diego chapter.

By Tommy Hough

If you've been following the news in the wake of this weekend's one-two punch of magnitude 6.4 and 7.1 earthquakes near Ridgecrest and Searles Valley, you've likely seen Dr. Lucy Jones with her U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) colleagues on television talking about the impact of the two quakes, the vigorous sequence of aftershocks, and what to expect moving forward as Southern California ends its two decade earthquake drought.

I first met Dr. Jones at the inaugural Great California Shakeout press event at the California Institute of Technology in June 2008, and had a chance to speak with her at length in Dec. 2014, when I was recording interviews for a Public News Service story I was doing on Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti's sweeping new retrofit plan for the city.

At the time I was only able to use bite-sized "actualities" as story quotes, and while I had plenty of material to choose from, being something of an earthquake student I remember thinking it was a shame I wasn't able to use more of my conversation with Dr. Jones for the story, or for a more long-form presentation similar to what I'd been doing a few years earlier with my Treehuggers International show.

After I submitted my story I moved on to my next assignment, but after this weekend's quakes I decided to go back and revisit my interview. I found several of the points Dr. Jones mentioned to be entirely relevant today, including concerns over the loss of affordable and workforce housing, being cut off from regional water sources, and the long-term economic impacts for Southern California.

Remarks to administration officials written for the California Wilderness Coalition, which is joining a lawsuit against several of the proposed border wall extensions through San Diego County and our southern border.

By Tommy Hough

Being an outdoors fan, when I first arrived in San Diego in 2002 I set out to explore our region's coastal parklands, foothill open space areas, and the forests, meadows and hidden canyons that make up the "spine" of San Diego County in the local mountains of the Peninsular Ranges. This in addition to the magnificently preserved, carefully managed, and geologically extraordinary Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in the eastern third of the county.

Only later, after living in San Diego for several years, did I become aware of a fascinating slice of wild, rugged desert mountains just east of the San Diego and Imperial county line along the border of the U.S. and Mexico, and managed for protection by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) as the Jacumba Wilderness.

Included as part of the 1994 Desert Protection Act, the Jacumba Wilderness contains mountains that reach heights of 4,500 ft., and appear to be "sprinkled" from top to bottom with colossal, rounded boulders and rocky outcroppings that look nothing like the low-elevation Colorado Desert that expands from it to the north and east. While a separate geologic bloc, the mountains are similar to the northernmost reaches of the Sierra de Juárez range just a few miles to the south across the border with Mexico.

Portions of this geology can be seen up-close along Interstate 8 at Mountain Springs and the In-Ko-Pah Grade, as the freeway descends from the Peninsular Ranges into the Imperial Valley, with the eastbound and westbound lanes each taking individual canyons through the route.

​Similarly, to the south in the northernmost portion of Baja California, the Rumorosa Highway winds along these mountains in a series of dramatic switchbacks. While the views are spectacular, it's difficult, and clearly dangerous, to get out and fully appreciate the area at speed on a steep freeway grade, whether in the heat of summer or during the not-infrequent snowstorms which can blanket the area in winter.

And that's one of the reasons I'm so concerned about the future of the Jacumba Wilderness, especially as new extensions of border wall are to be implemented along the area's international boundary with Mexico.
 
I was recently in Jacumba Hot Springs as a new segment of border wall was being added to the old, Clinton-era Operation Gatekeeper fence, topped with ominous and deadly concertina wire – something no nation should have along a friendly border. I was disturbed to see a stark line of border fence, now over twice as high, extending for approximately two miles to the east, over the western slope of the Jacumbas. This is absolutely not a place where wild processes should be impeded.
 
The border is, and always has been, an invisible line that means nothing to the winds and wildlife that have moved through these rugged, harsh canyons for millennia. Given the frequent furnace-like temperatures, the balance of life is so on edge and fragile in a place like the Jacumbas that even with the inherent protections that come with wilderness management, sealing off either side of the wildlands from each other will not only serve as a death sentence for dozens of species – but will lead to interbreeding and less diversity overall.
 
The Wilderness Act was specifically tailored and intended to avoid this very fate for natural processes and places where "man is only a visitor." Should these border walls go in and replace the fences of barbed wire now there, it will be in defiance of the spirit of the act.

On the Mexico side of the border the same natural processes that we find in the Jacumba Wilderness continue for a dozen miles in each direction – which is partially why the area was so suitable for wilderness designation in the first place.

There are areas of the southern border in Arizona where barriers have been installed that enable wildlife movement but impede, or at least discourage, off-road vehicle and ATV traffic to such an extent that the necessary slowdowns for someone crossing illegally to slalom through the barriers would no doubt catch the attention of Border Patrol. I would recommend these kinds of barriers be utilized in the Jacumba Wilderness instead of sealing off entire ecosystems in a wild area already known for fierce heat and brutally rugged terrain, completely devoid of water, and patently inhospitable to long-term exposure.
 
San Diego County is the most biologically diverse county in the lower 48 states, and it's because of our coastal, foothill, mountain and desert climates. Because of that location, the region is a key spot for birds along the Pacific Flyway, as birds migrate north and south along the western edge of North America.

​The nearby Salton Sea, in particular, has proven to be a popular spot for a wide array of birds, but in a place like the Jacumba Wilderness one can see and hear this wildlife without crowds, without noise – without anything – except the natural processes which brought those birds there. A wall 30 feet, 40 feet, 50 feet high will undo much of the special sanctity of this wild country for birds and humans alike. It will become a cage.
 
One of the best indicators of a healthy, balanced ecosystem is the presence of large, "charismatic" predator species like mountain lions, which is something the Jacumba has, along with more plentiful bobcats, which are seen as seldom as their larger cousins. The giveaways of their presence are the tracks, which are plentiful when one knows what to look for. Building a wall along this boundary will trap animals on one side from the other, further reducing respective gene pools and weakening these critical natural actors. Within a few years, the entire wilderness could look very different with one of the top regional predators unable to have its "trickle down," for lack of a better term, effect on other species in the region.

And then there's the price to humans – and the peace of mind, solace, autonomy, opportunities for meditation and communing with nature that we so desperately need as a society and a people, that will be irreparably harmed as another long-term cost of these ugly walls. And so needless when other options are considered.

My friends and fellow outdoor advocates have our special routes, trails and campsites in these mountains, and we value the time we spend in a place as wild as any in the United States, where we can hike, explore, and marvel at the surprise call of the canyon wren, or the aromas cast aloft on the warm breezes in the afternoon. It is then we can truly reconnect with ourselves, our environment and our planet, and feel we are part of something far greater than our time – which was another consideration written into the wisdom of the 1964 Wilderness Act.

​Please consider some of that wisdom as you make these decisions, which seem to be so appallingly based on short-term political desires, instead of the natural bounty which it is your job to manage, and defend.