Rangers beef up enforcement at Box Canyon swimming hole

LA COSTA — Rangers have begun daily enforcement of the “no trespassing” area around La Costa’s Box Canyon, a stretch of San Marcos Creek that has drawn daredevil swimmers and cliff jumpers for generations.

The canyon area north of Piragua and Cadencia streets near the border of Carlsbad and San Marcos has been fenced off, with warning signs posted, for more than 20 years — yet it still draws young people willing to break the rules.

A few people have been killed jumping from the cliffs into the creek’s largest pool, and an unknown number have been injured. The most recent death was a man swimming alone in the winter of 2006.

Enforcement is usually stepped up during the summer because school is out and the creek’s two year-round freshwater pools attract teenagers looking for a place to hang out and cool off.

But this year the foot traffic picked up early because the winter was unusually warm, said Markus Spiegelberg of the Center for Natural Lands Management, which owns the land and employs the rangers who patrol it.

“Record temperatures out of season made a big difference,” Spiegelberg said. “We weren’t prepared for that.

“In the winter, we’re just on call,” he said. “Now all of a sudden we have 80-degree weather for two or three weeks in a row in February, that’s why there were neighbors up in arms.”

Most of those neighbors live in the Sea Point Tennis Club condominiums, a 337-unit development at the top of the cliffs overlooking the creek and Box Canyon.

“I have a bird’s eye view of it,” said Tere Wilson, a Piragua Street resident who has lived in the Sea Point condos on and off for 30 years.

“Just yesterday four teenage boys came up,” Wilson said Thursday. They were parked on the street near her house, she said, and one boy stood outside the car to change from his wet swim trunks into some dry shorts.

“I told him that is not appropriate,” she said. She also emphasized how dangerous it is to climb down the cliffs, and that he could be fined for trespassing.

From her back deck she often hears people shouting in the canyon, and sometimes she can see them jump from the top of the cliff.

“It’s a huge problem,” Wilson said. If someone gets badly injured, she said, helicopters can’t fly down to the pools to get them because the canyon is so narrow and steep.

Also, there’s the potential for a wildfire that could sweep up the slope to the homes.

“Fire is a huge concern,” she said. “It’s a tinderbox down there. They go down there and smoke dope or smoke cigarettes, and I’m sure they are careless because they are kids.”

Wilson said she and her neighbors sometimes call the authorities when they see people go into the canyon, but there are many access points, so it’s easy to enter unseen.

Also, she said, some residents are reluctant to confront people or report them because they fear retaliation.

Wilson said she went to a Carlsbad City Council meeting in April to ask for increased enforcement at the request of her fellow Sea Point HOA board members.

Spiegelberg said part of the difficulty with enforcement is that his rangers can order people to leave, but they can’t cite anyone for trespassing. The rangers must call Carlsbad police to issue citations.

Carlsbad police Lt. Mickey Williams said the department sent officers on dirt bikes to patrol the La Costa and Calavera preserves on a trial basis in April and May.

But the only offenses the officers encountered were minor things such as people with dogs off leashes, Williams said, so the off-road patrols were discontinued.

Box Canyon has attracted trespassers for a long time.

A story published in the Los Angeles Times in 1989, and still available on the Times’ website, said that at the time the canyon had been a teen hangout for 25 years.

It described ledges on the side of the cliff that provided jumping platforms from 20 feet to the highest at 85 feet. The story quoted a number of young jumpers, and included a story told by former Carlsbad Councilwoman Ann Kulchin about how she had scolded her daughter for making the leap hand-in-hand with her football team quarterback boyfriend.

“She said she’d never do it again,” Kulchin told the times, “Not because of what her mother said, because she was terrified.”

Two years later the Times reported in another story that a chain-link fence was being erected for the first time to keep people out of the canyon.

Spiegelberg said incidents of trespassing in Box Canyon were back down this week because temperatures were cool and skies were overcast, but that his rangers were ready for the summer rush.

“We’re on it,” Spiegelberg said. “We (through the police department) gave out 15 citations in May.”

The fine for trespassing is $250 for the first offense, he said.

“We’re busting our butts,” he said. “I’m confident we’re going to have a great summer.”