O’Neill Regional Park 1

Posted on May 25, 2003 in Biomes Photos The Orange

Californian springs confuse outsiders. The leaves on the Sycamores turn yellow brown. The buckeyes drop their leaves entirely to prepare for the drought of summer. What New Englanders and Southerners call “Autumn colors” — the scarlets, the ambers, and the yellows — blend with the olive greens and khakis of the chaparral, plus the rainbow hues of wildflowers and the ocean deep evergreen of the live oaks.

O’Neill Park is located only two miles due east of our home if you fly a straight line, three or four if you follow the roads. Live oaks grow over the road and the chaparral clusters right down to the highway’s edge. Except for a country store and a biker bar, there’s no development along this crochety thoroughfare. O’Neill Park itself holds off the rampant faux Mission development of Rancho Santa Magarita on the one side and the fire-bred spread of the chaparral on the other. It lends its sympathies entirely to the chaparral with the exception that the rangers have plotted wide grassy areas as picnic grounds, paved roads in the camping area, built a nature center, and marked clear trails for those who cannot function without named avenues and signposts.

We explored the Upper Arroyo Trabuco Trail last weekend, on the same evening that we investigated another trail at the park. Getting there is only part of the pain: where our guidebook promised a path suitable for bare-legged joggers, we found a barely recognizable eight-inch wide strip through meadows of woodland flower and shrubs including bloodletting cardon thistle and poison oak.

When I wrote up the features of the path for Local Hikes, I included “poison oak hell” as one of the memorable highlights of the place. I didn’t mention the little boys playing in the rocky wash, building checkdams across the street and bombing the hell out of the algae. I think there might have been flies, too, but I was so concerned with keeping to the dirt thread that pretended to be a trail, that I didn’t pay them much heed. The poison oak and the cardon thistle put more fear in me than the low boughs of the oaks which might have clubbed me. If a rattlesnake suddenly put himself before me, I might have saluted him as a friend, so terrible was the infestation of vegetables armed with oils and needle-daggers.

It got so bad that I didn’t finish the walk. I marched out of the woods and continued my passage along the stream. Then I followed a dirt levee back to the Nature Center, photographing wildflowers as I went.

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