World’s Greatest Point Break Continues to Attract Everyone, Making It Slightly Less Great for the People Who Live There
Trestles Is the Best Wave in Southern California and Everyone Knows It, Which Is the Problem
Trestles, the cobblestone point break in San Onofre State Beach that requires a mile-long walk from the parking area, has been named the best wave in California for the thirtieth consecutive year by a poll conducted by a surf publication whose readers all intend to surf there this winter and will be surprised to find the parking lot full at 5:45 AM.
The wave’s quality is not in dispute. Lowers — the main break, facing north — produces long, mechanical rights off a cobblestone bottom that respond to south and northwest swells with a consistency and shape that most Southern California beach break spends its entire existence failing to approximate. Uppers, the adjacent left, works on the same swells from the opposite direction and is considered either better or worse than Lowers depending on which way you turn and the depth of your personal commitment to arguing about this with strangers in a parking lot at dawn.
The Access Question
The mile-long walk from the 1-5 exit was, for several decades, the self-selecting filter that kept Trestles manageable: you had to want it enough to walk. The filter has proven insufficient for a population of forty million Californians with good wetsuits and fitness tracker apps. ‘The walk used to mean something,’ said one local whose sense of ownership of a public beach has not been significantly moderated by thirty years of public beach status. ‘Now everyone does it. I passed an e-scooter on the path last Tuesday. An actual electric scooter. On a dirt path to a surf break. I don’t know what to do with that information.’
The Counter-Argument
Surfing advocates and coastal access lawyers note that the public has a right to access San Onofre State Beach, that the walk is neither unreasonable nor inaccessible, and that the framing of ‘too many people knowing about a public beach’ as a problem worth solving on behalf of regular visitors is a perspective with limited legal and philosophical standing. ‘It’s a public beach,’ said coastal access attorney Rosa Gutierrez. ‘The fact that it has excellent waves does not make it private. The fact that some people have been going there for a long time does not give them priority over people who started going recently. This is the entire concept of public land.’
Information on Trestles and San Onofre at California State Parks. Comedy: NewsThump.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK