BLM Dispatch #32 - McCain Valley Resource Conservation Area
If you left Downtown San Diego and followed CA-94 east, then swung onto Interstate 8 and let it carry you farther and farther from the coast, seventy miles in all, you’d pass the small outpost of Alpine — where I lived in an RV one summer between college, and where the carne asada burritos are worth a detour — then slip into the Cleveland National Forest, rise over the 4,055’ Laguna Summit, exit at Campo Boulevard, turn right, make a left onto Old Highway 80, and after 1.9 miles spot the faded green sign for McCain Valley Road 2100, where you’ll make a left and follow it 2.3 miles until the potholed pavement gives way to potholed gravel.
That’s where you cross into a strange mosaic of jurisdiction and purpose — BLM land sliding into Wilderness, Native reservations stitched along the margins, Anza-Borrego State Park looming to the east, and one lonely 619-acre square of California school lands holding its ground in the middle.
Welcome to the McCain Valley Resource Conservation Area…
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