To surfers the world over, the word "Trestles" carries a hefty amount of history and significance. Surfers have been riding waves along this 2-plus mile stretch of San Onofre State Park from Cottons Point to Oldmans for generations. The excellent surf found along this stretch is caused by millions of years of sedimentary outflow of the San Mateo and Christianitos Creeks. San Mateo Creek gathers water from hundreds of square miles of gorgeous, undeveloped backcountry behind San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano and Mission Viejo. Christianitos Creek gets most of its water from the gorgeous, undeveloped backcountry along the Camp Pendleton Marine base.

The cobblestone rocks carried downstream from these creeks have been deposited well offshore to create a vast reef system that sucks in and magnifies swells from the south in the summer and the west swells that make it past Catalina in the winter. The setup creates some of the best, most consistently rideable surf on the California coast. Since these creeks are also generally free of pollution from development like lawn and golf course pesticide runoff, motor oil, brake lining dust, antifreeze and other toxins found at the outflow of essentially every other creek or river in southern California, the waters around Trestles stay relatively clean, even when it rains.

But Trestles, and indeed the entire backcountry of Orange County that supports its creeks are seriously threatened by two monstrous projects. The first is a plan by the Rancho Mission Viejo company to build 14,000 homes and more commercial space than a large shopping mall in the areas that directly flow into both San Mateo Creeks and San Juan Creek at Doheny Beach. The other is a toll road freeway that would connect Riverside and Rancho Santa Margarita to Trestles. The tollroad would run right along the San Mateo creek for much of its distance -- opening the backcountry to vast areas of sprawl and development, and emptying the refuse of tens of thousands of cars into the waterways as toxic runoff. Don't believe this scenario? Then use the toxicity levels at Aliso Creek as an example. Aliso carries the runoff from tens of thousands of homes in Aliso Viejo and hundreds of thousands of autos on the 73 toll road to its mouth at Laguna Beach.

Trestles is an escape valve of inestimable monetary and cultural value for tens of thousands of Californians and its backcountry serves as absolutely critical habitat for millions of animals. Much has happened to affect the future of Trestles and indeed that of south Orange County over the last decade. In the interest of informing and alarming those of you who hold the place as a shrine in the midst of urbania, we did an interview with Brittany Murphy who is the director of the Friends of the Foothills organization. FOF is charged with defending Orange County's backcountry and Trestles from the fate that has befallen so much of Southern California. If you want to know more, read on. If you don't want to know, read on anyway because you need to know and you need to care.

In other words, if Trestles has ever given anything to you, maybe it's time you gave a little bit back to Trestles.

This interview will be presented in two parts.

Brittany McKee: It started as a task force for the Sierra Club and it's grown into this coalition of groups including Surfrider, the Audobon Society, National Resources Defense Council, Trout Unlimited, and a number of church and community groups. There are over 30 groups represented in all along with individuals and local businesses.

McKee: Definitely. Task forces for the Sierra Club are normally run at a sort of group or smaller level. But this is what's called an EPEC site, which means Environmental Public Education Campaign.

The Sierra Club national picks 20 or 30 such sites across the country that they consider to be national priority campaigns. So they fund them at a higher level because they think that the campaign there is significant and represents a bigger issue. In this case, the issue is urban sprawl -- that's the issue we're representing here at a national level.

McKee: Right.

McKee: My office is in San Clemente, actually in the same building with Surfrider at El Camino Real and Del Mar.

McKee: Yeah, it's funny, we actually do an information table on Sundays and we do it directly across the street from the Tollroad office.

McKee: I guess it was about 5 years ago, I wasn't there at the beginning. I've been on for about my 3^rd year now. It was started by Paul Carlton, one of the local San Clemente Sierra Club members who heard of the tollroad proposal and just thought it was a horrible idea. It started with about 10 people meeting in his living room. And its just grown since then.

McKee: Another is in Vegas. They have a lot of serious sprawl issues there. There's another on the Gaviota coast trying to protect the coastline up there from development. There are other ones back east. They do one on CAFOS too -- that's factory farming in the Midwest.

That's kind of the Sierra club way -- take people to a place and show them what's it's like and what's out there so you can get them more involved in helping to try and save it.

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