The Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve opens up to visitors several times a year. Visitors are invited to hike down to the river and meet some of the personnel. See http://fs.sdsu.edu/kf/reserves/smer/
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It's an 800 foot drop from the HQ to the river on a steep dirt road.
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Witch's hair, a parasite.
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Flowers grow in cracks in the decomposed granite rocks.
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View down the hill of the river and gorge. We live just over the hills you see.
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The Santa Margarita river runs 5.1 miles thorugh the 4500 acre research center property.
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The surrounding hills are steep and mostly untouched.
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The engineer from Fallbrook Public Utility District joined us and taked about the water aspects of the property.
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Without his comments, we would never have known that a 84 inch water pipe carrying water from the Sierras ran right under here. See the data sensors up the hill?
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The river is pristine.
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A train ran through here once - you can see the railbed on the far bank.
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Two creeks in Temecula join to create the Santa Margarita river.
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Lots of sand washes in from the desert.
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Beautiful river water.
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Plenty of visitors showed up.
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The straight line along the far river bank is the old roadbed for a railroad that ran through here in the late 1800s. It was flooded out many times before it was rerouted.
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More weather instruments on the ridge with webcams. During the October 2007 wildfires, we used their cameras to see where the fire was.
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Here you can see the station for the water pipeline that crosses the river and the abandoned railroad bed.
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View down to the river. During the rainy season it can be more than 7 feet higher.
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Views of mountains around the river.
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Core samples from a research project.
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Looking down to the river.
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Here are more of the weather instruments. I believe they said there were more than a dozen stations.
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The entire 4500 acre, 5 mile long property has wireless internet , WiFi at 50 Mb/s connected to the HQ building here.
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More antennas for the WiFi.
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The weather station just outside the HQ.
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Cameras and line-of-sight wireless antennas.
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Another camera and weather station. They are actively monitoring for fires.
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The trail over the hill is just left of Red Mt. which is next to our place. You might be able to see the antennas on Red Mt.
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Dr. Matt Rahm, Director (in white shirt) talks to visitors about the work being done here.
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A photographer from the Fallbrook Paper took photos.
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