3 San Diego Hikes to Try When You’re Feeling Down

They say “nature is the best medicine,” and luckily, that’s more than just an old adage. Studies have shown that spending time outdoors has tons of benefits, including mental health and physical advantages. s a San Diego resident, we’ve been blessed with plenty of opportunities to get the sun on our face nearly any time of year. For me, whenever things are not going very well, one of my best ways to cope is get outside—whether it’s a walk, run, hitting the beach, or just feeling the grass under my toes. AIf you’ve been feeling down lately, these are a few of my favorite hikes to improve your mood when you need a little pick-me-up.Pyles Peak – 6 MilesThe trail from Cowles Mountain to Pyles Peak is one of my all time favorites in San Diego. Yes, you have to first navigate 1.5 miles of the very busy path to climb Cowles Mountain. But once you do, and step onto the second trail from Cowles’ summit to Pyles, it’s like you’ve instantly transported to a peaceful and solitary trail with very few hikers on it. The views are absolutely beautiful all along the way, with sweeping scenes of the ocean on a clear day. Plus the additional challenge is enough to make you feel taxed and accomplished, which can really help when things feel bad. Start at the Cowles Mountain trailhead on Golfcrest Drive and then follow the signs for Pyles Peak once you’ve reached the summit.Distance: 6 miles out and backDifficulty: ChallengingDogs: AllowedDetails: Parking is free, and if the spots are taken in the parking lot you can park along the road. Just be sure to cramp your wheels!January 9, 20244 Ways to Work Toward Emotional Healing Via HikingRELATED ARTICLECourtesy of Friends of Coast Walk TrailLa Jolla Beach Trail – 2.3 MilesThere is something therapeutic about walking right next to the ocean. The smells of salty sea air, the sounds of waves—they literally bottle this stuff and use it in spas—so getting a dose of the real thing has to be beneficial. And navigating the winding paths along La Jolla Cove is a perfect way to take it all in. Plus, there are the ever-entertaining sea lions and seals to watch if you need additional distraction. Start near the Museum of Contemporary Art La Jolla and follow the cliffside path to La Jolla Shores. There are a few different winding paths to follow, so you can make your out and back different.Distance: 2.3 miles out and backDifficulty: EasyDogs: AllowedCourtesy of Outdoor ProjectAnza-Borrego Desert State Park – 3.25 MilesThis desert park is a longer drive than the other suggestions, but it’s not too far—about an hour and a half one way. And the chance to roam in an open desert, or explore the slot canyons and abandoned mines of this state park make it well worth the trip. The desert landscape is devastatingly beautiful, and can give you that open mind feeling you need when things are tough. Even better when wildflowers are in bloom, but any time in the fall or winter and great for a visit. Start at the Borrego Palm Canyon Trailhead just past the campground and try the Borrego Palm Canyon Trail, which takes you past a neat palm oasis and waterfalls. Distance: 3.25 miles for the loopDifficulty: ModerateDogs: Not allowedDetails: A state parks parking pass is required.The post 3 San Diego Hikes to Try When You’re Feeling Down appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

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How Wildcoast Keeps Our Marine Protected Areas Teeming With Life

Determined not to flip the kayak, I paddle hard, straight into the swell, following my guide Lillie Mulligan’s lead. The offshore wind drives a brisk fog atop the San Diego-Scripps Coastal State Marine Conservation Area, challenging our forward momentum. “Paddle harder,” Mulligan yells as our kayak ascends a wave.I pray we don’t topple over onto a stingray, thinking maybe kayaking isn’t the best tactic to get acquainted with our coast. Though I’ve lived in San Diego for four years, I have an embarrassingly flimsy relationship with the sea. In summer, I occasionally paddle board the bay, boogie board Moonlight Beach, toss tennis balls for my dog in OB, or amble along Sunset Cliffs. But after reading that La Jolla Cove boasts the densest variety of animal life at any US beach—even those in Hawaii or Alaska—I couldn’t help becoming curious about our front yard, a destination that over 4 million people visit annually.Photo Credit: Sam CampbellOlive ridley sea turtles shuffle ashore at Morro Ayuta Sea Turtle Sanctuary in Oaxaca for an arribada—a mass synchronized nesting.Which is how I found myself here, battling the surf with Mulligan, an ocean conservation coordinator for local nonprofit Wildcoast, an environmental organization co-founded by whale scholar Serge Dedina and turtle conservationist Wallace J. Nichols 25 years ago. Today, Dedina still helms Wildcoast, but he’s quick to give credit for the robustness of La Jolla’s marine protected areas (MPAs) to his staff—70 percent of which are women.November 28, 2022Consider the WhaleRELATED ARTICLE“Look at all these people recreating,” Mulligan exclaims, motioning at the clumps of kayakers and paddle boarders mingling outside the caves in the MPA that Wildcoast actively monitors. “They’re here because they know they will see marine animals.”She points out silvery bait fish darting amid kelp forests, along with orange Garibaldi (California’s state fish), leopard sharks, cormorants, and pelicans, all markers of ocean health. “Look for the green sea turtles,” she adds, tying her hair into a knot and peering into the water. “La Jolla has four.”Courtesy of WildcoastWildcoast staff members free an olive ridley sea turtle tangled in a fishing net in Oaxaca, Mexico.Dedina calls the Eastern Pacific green sea turtle one of Wildcoast’s biggest success stories. When he and Nichols were young PhD candidates surfing southern Baja, they only ever saw dead turtles. Over 30,000 were slaughtered annually to serve as a pre-Viagra food that purportedly increased male virility.Wildcoast’s earliest campaign, masterminded by communications and policy director Fay Crevoshay, rallied the pope to speak out in support of protected places for nesting mothers. The team put up signs on beaches, on billboards, and in newspapers; on them, a model posed beside the words “My man doesn’t need turtle eggs, because he knows they don’t make it more powerful” in Spanish. This got locals educating their neighbors about not eating turtles.The latter became a key part of Wildcoast’s approach: Start small by encouraging residents to protect their wildlands. Rather than having some outside wonks policing fragile ecosystems, collaborate with folks on the ground, teaching and inviting them to become invested in safeguarding their backyards from harm. Turns out that working with Mexican communities to protect sea creatures south of the border benefits the overall health and diversity of San Diego’s coastal regions, too.After seeing too many stories of blue whale sightings off San Diego’s coast to ignore, I book a summer whale-watching trip. Eager faces peer into the blue, seeking an Instagrammable moment. As La Jolla’s palaces shimmer atop fragile sandstone cliffs, docents wax poetic about San Diego’s rich waters. It is possible to see whales year-round here: gray, humpback, orca, fin, Bryde’s, blue.“Whales rebounded because we stopped whaling,” says Russell D. Moore, whale-watching boat captain with Xplore Offshore. “Today, our waters are a testament to a well-managed biosystem. Wildcoast has contributed to that.”It’s true. Twenty-five years ago, a coalition of conservationists, including Wildcoast, stopped Mitsubishi from constructing a massive salt mine in San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja, an important gray whale breeding site. Five years later, the team helped to permanently safeguard 450,000 acres there. Today, that space is a marine protected area and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. With their breeding site preserved, the whales are thriving.“More whales mean we have another problem,” Moore says. “San Diego is the Wild West of whale watching—boats are harassing whales by getting too close.”So, in response, Wildcoast’s Ann Wycoff, Annelise Tappe, and Devon Lukasiewicz developed the Protect the Locals campaign to educate whale-watching guides and visitors on the importance of keeping a safe distance, so our beloved whales’ breeding and migration patterns aren’t disrupted by our adoration.Courtesy of WildcoastMPAs offer a safe home for adorable ocean critters like harbor seals.On my whale-watching venture, none grace us with their presence. Surprisingly few visitors appear disappointed. Rather, people seem energized by the salty wind on our faces; the pod of dolphins that swoops in to say hello isn’t a shabby consolation prize, either.Another morning on the water, this time on a speedboat gliding north from Mission Bay. The resident dog, a mutt called Captain, sits next to Joe Cooper, the boat’s true captain, barking whenever she spots a sea lion or dolphin.Despite my kayaking struggles, Mulligan and Cooper invited me on one of their monitoring excursions to educate fishers about marine protected areas. San Diego County boasts 11 MPAs: Tijuana River Mouth (Tijuana Estuary), Cabrillo (off southern Point Loma), Famosa Slough (between Old Town and OB), two in south La Jolla, Matlahuayl (La Jolla Caves), San Diego-Scripps (La Jolla Shores), San Dieguito Lagoon (Del Mar), San Elijo Lagoon (Escondido), Batiquitos Lagoon (Carlsbad), and Swami’s (Encinitas).Courtesy of WildcoastA Wildcoast staff member monitors mangrove health in San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja.In 2012, Wildcoast teamed up with NGOs and government officials to designate and protect important keystone coastal regions, like rocky reefs, kelp forests, and wetlands. Matlahuayl State Marine Reserve, which roughly translates as “land of many caves” in the area’s Indigenous Kumeyaay language, houses pregnant leopard sharks who come to bask in the warm waters, a tactic that shortens their gestation period by two months. Swami’s is the only kelp and eelgrass habitat between La Jolla and Palos Verdes.The health of MPAs depends on compliance of no-take zones—areas where you cannot pull anything from the water, including fish. MPA Watch, San Diego’s citizen science group, monitors on land. Lifeguards and state park officials also supervise from shore. Wildcoast uses boats and radars to ensure no one fishes inside the MPA boundary.For now, Wildcoast’s efforts appear to be mostly working. On a recent holiday weekend, Mulligan explains, they’d encountered a few boats fishing in the MPA, but most folks said they just didn’t know there was a boundary they couldn’t cross.Courtesy of WildcoastA Wildcoast team uproots invasive plants in Carlsbad’s Batiquitos Lagoon.Mulligan often approaches these teachable moments with data, citing a 2022 Decadal Management Review proving that species diversity in MPA intertidal habitats is higher and more stable than outside MPAs and fish are more abundant, are larger, live longer, and produce more offspring. Another study showed MPAs may be more resilient to heatwaves, too. And, because species that become abundant in the MPAs leave the areas’ boundaries and increase populations in the surrounding waters, their success creates a domino effect.Just before we head back into Mission Bay, Captain the dog lifts onto two legs and starts howling. A massive pod of dolphins leaps into our wake. There have to be 50 small cetaceans surrounding us, playing together, finding the dolphin equivalent of joy. Mulligan kicks off her shoes, gleeful. “This never gets old,” Cooper says. His sunkissed face explodes into a grin.Mulligan points at the dolphins vaulting around the boat. “They are why we do this.”Courtesy of WildcoastTrash booms in Tijuana keep garbage from reaching the sea.My tour of San Diego’s MPAs takes me to all but one: the Tijuana River Mouth State Marine Conservation Area. Once a gorgeous southern California wildland with perfect surf, today the area is an environmental travesty plagued by pollution.Despite Wildcoast’s knack for pulling off feats of conservation in unlikely places, even Dedina, former mayor of Imperial Beach, cannot yet do away with the 60 million gallons of raw sewage seeping into the ocean each day. This year, South County waters have been too polluted to enter for more than 1,000 days. The situation is now the longest-lasting environmental disaster in US history. Still, Wildcoast is doing what it can. The nonprofit’s marine debris manager in Tijuana, Rosario Norzagaray, is leading an educational campaign to teach locals not to toss garbage into the river. In addition, in 2021, her Wildcoast team installed a trash boom, a durable structure that catches river debris before it reaches the ocean. To date, they have collected over 250,000 pounds of garbage, repurposing old tires into playgrounds, building materials, and even structural foundations to halt hill erosion. In October, they placed a second boom, with hopes to add more in the coming years.Courtesy of WildcoastAt Los Laureles Park in Tijuana, children play on structures built with tires that otherwise would’ve ended up in the Tijuana Estuary.In addition, Norzagaray and her team have incentivized plastic as currency, adding a financial benefit to encourage residents to fight pollution in their neighborhoods. “Educating locals and installing trash booms doesn’t just empower communities,” Crevoshay says. “We’re stopping trash from floating up to San Diego.”All this traveling through our region with Wildcoast shifted something in me. I’m no kayaker, but I’ve started regularly snorkeling, swimming, and paddle boarding in La Jolla. The ocean is no longer a stranger to me. There’s treasure here; I like to engage with it. And when I do, I often remember something Dedina told me.“We cannot allow the problem to overwhelm the solution,” he said. “You can support efforts to safeguard and steward the place in San Diego that brings you joy, or you can ground yourself in despair. Why not ground yourself in solving the problem?”Editor’s Note: The print version of this article, published November 2024, mistakenly stated that San Diego has six MPAs and misstated the amount of garbage collected by Wildcoast’s trash boom. We have also removed an incorrect quote. The post How Wildcoast Keeps Our Marine Protected Areas Teeming With Life appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

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Unhinged, A Dating Series: Can an Early Bird Date a Night Owl?

This past weekend, my relationship with Caleb* passed the six-month mark. We’re growing closer—and, as we do, it’s getting a bit more challenging to share our experiences in this column. Let me explain.I promised myself and readers that I’d be open and honest when it comes to writing about my dating life. Over the past few months, I’ve found it helpful to write out the thoughts and questions I’ve had while getting to know Caleb. At some point, though, there came a shift. I felt a need to protect what we’re building. My last personal post came out in August. Since then, I’ve wrestled with what to share next. Caleb is the kind of person who makes friends wherever he goes. A personable extrovert, he works in an industry that allows him to travel often and befriend people along the way. I’ve met so many new faces through him. His friends read this column, and my crew reads each piece, too—so, you can see where this can start to get tricky. “I’d never ask you to stop writing the column because of me,” Caleb said once. “This is how we met.” He’d also be the first to share how proud he is of this Unhinged community that we’ve built together—you, the readers, and me.That’s all to say that I’m a little nervous this week as I dig into a topic that we’re still working through as a couple. But conversations with friends have proven that today’s topic is one many couples have had to work through (or are currently wrestling with): How important is it for partners to share the same lifestyle and social needs?I love getting into bed at 9 p.m. every night, and while I used to head into the Gaslamp decked out in heels and tiny dresses in my 20s and early 30s, those days are long behind me. I prefer daytime drinks now, and even then, I can only handle a few (hangovers are two-day affairs). A perfect weekend day for me involves sunshine, a workout, tons of great food, and time to socially unwind from the week.Caleb, on the other hand, has been a roadie for touring bands for the last 15 years, working his way up from loading and unloading equipment to directing concert video. You know those massive LED screens that project the concert for the whole arena to see? He’s the one behind the scenes, deciding when each camera’s shots get mixed into the main feed. He’s used to being up late, doesn’t have a standard work schedule, and only gets to see friends when he’s home for a few days at a time. So, he likes to make the most of his time at home in San Diego.Sometimes, that looks like late nights drinking with his friends, watching football indoors all day on Sundays, and keeping a jam-packed schedule of events on the weekends. Neither lifestyle is right or wrong. They’re just different.We had the big conversations early on in our relationship—marriage, kids, religion, whether we both planned to stay in San Diego—and we aligned on most of these things, which is why we chose to keep seeing each other. What I didn’t expect, though, was how often our lifestyles and social needs would come into play in the day-to-day. Maybe that was naïve of me—but it’s never really been an issue in previous relationships. Lately, my social calendar has been packed with birthday parties, trips, weddings, and weekend activities, mostly with his group of friends. It’s been fun and exciting, and his buddies have welcomed me in so kindly and graciously. But introverts need to recharge. My social battery feels more drained than ever, and I wonder how long I can keep going without the downtime I need to regroup each week.Caleb is asking himself similar questions. As an extrovert who loves his circle, can he be with someone who may need to skip out on social events occasionally, or someone who asks to leave parties early when he’s still enjoying his time out?We haven’t figured it out yet. But it’s there, this lingering question. As I sat down to write this week, I asked my colleague and SDM Associate Editor Amelia Rodriguez for her thoughts on the subject.She’s been with her partner for two years. They moved in together about a year ago and are excited to get engaged sometime soon. In the past, Amelia has dated women with very different lifestyles and social needs from her own. She considers herself an extrovert, though she values sleep and taking time to reset, and she isn’t much of a drinker or partier. “I think vastly different social needs were a big part of why several of my previous relationships didn’t work out. I hated feeling cooped up inside with more introverted partners, but when I went in the opposite direction and dated an outgoing bartender, I rarely saw them—they couldn’t do early mornings, I couldn’t do late nights,” she says. “Another more extroverted fling drank… a lot. I couldn’t match her energy, and the fact that her drinking made her forget details of our dates that I remembered left me feeling lonely and sad.”When she first met her now-partner, they didn’t have much in common when it came to shared hobbies or interests. Amelia likes art museums, poetry readings, and ice cream shops. Her lactose-intolerant girlfriend, on the other hand, was into soccer games, breweries, and camping. “But we shared a similar love for being out in the community, and as we introduced one another to our favorite things, it became clear that doing something together was more important than what the thing was (though she still hasn’t managed to get me to camp),” she says. “Some couples I know are really comfortable having fairly separate social lives and different lifestyles, but that wouldn’t work for me, personally. Of course, we spend time apart—alone at home or with our own friends—but the fact that, pretty much every weekend, we’re excited to plan something interesting to do together makes the occasional ‘you go; I’m too tired’ no big deal.”This all makes sense to me, though it does still leave me with questions. For one, a good man is hard to find (at least in my own experience), so I’m worried that I’m overthinking our lifestyle differences. Caleb has so many qualities that I want in a husband. Is it a deal-breaker if his life never slows down? Would I be okay having a big portion of our lives be separate in order to make sure we both feel happy and fulfilled while together?In the next column, I’ll be chatting with others and enlisting the help of relationship coaches, therapists, and experts in dating to find out what they can share about this topic. And I want to hear from readers. Do you and your longtime partner have different social needs? If you’ve dealt with these same questions, drop me an email at [email protected] and let me know how it’s played out in your life.*Caleb is a pseudonym.If you’re new to Unhinged, catch up on all the dating chats you’ve missed here and follow along at @monicles and @sandiegomag on Instagram to know when a new article drops each week.Sign-up now for the Unhinged newsletter launching this month. Get exclusive content, Q&As with Nicolle, and subscriber-only meet-ups![sdm-newsletter-placement]The post Unhinged, A Dating Series: Can an Early Bird Date a Night Owl? appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

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