My friends wanted to bag the Jacumba benchmark. So we started early in the morning, driving towards the Mortero Palms trailhead. The dirt road towards Dos Cabezas isn't great, but passable. The rail crossing at Dos Cabezas (where the water tank is) is passable only to high clearance vehicles: the full height of the rail needs to be cleared, so some sort of truck would work, but something like a crossover would not. At Dos Cabezas another dirt road runs along the rails to the left. The next crossing isn't very far, and it has a dirt ramp, so less capable vehicles can cross here. Following THAT dirt road you get to some sort of sign, and a road split. Both sides lead to the "main" road; the left fork bypasses a challenging area, so we ended up doing that. We showed up early, and arrived first at the trailhead.
I was much more interested in seeing the Goat Canyon Trestle than bagging a peak, so here we split. The route to the trestle travels West (in Mortero Canyon, or not) to gain the ridge. Then it picks out the head of Goat Canyon, and descends it NW to the trestle. Note that the trailhead is just upstream of a canyon fork, and the canyon at the trailhead is NOT Mortero Canyon. It's the next one to the climber's right. There's no maintained, official trail to the trestle, but enough people come out to see it, so there're several very good use trails. Several because there are multiple usable lines, especially on the ascent. This is clearly a destination, and many visitors aren't comfortable with this terrain, so there're trail ducks everywhere.
Anyway. The trailhead is at ~2050ft. I climbed up on a good trail on the right wall of Mortero Canyon. It's easy terrain to traverse, and the trail is good. View back down above the first section:
The top is at ~3300ft. Goat Canyon starts out tame, but eventually becomes narrow, steep and full of dry-falls. All of them have easy and very-well-documented bypasses. And there're cool plants
The canyon isn't straight, so you don't see the trestle for a while. First look at ~2650ft.
Wow! You can see the trestle itself AND in behind it, more of the railbed further down Carrizo Gorge. You can descend all the way to the structure, which I did. At the bottom, at railbed level is an old road cut that runs into the canyon on one side (i.e. it bypasses the trestle), and on the other side is an old, long-ago-collapsed tunnel entrance.
I looked up the history. Apparently the railroad, as constructed originally, traversed this tunnel and the bypass. Years later, the tunnel collapsed, and the trestle was built to bypass the tunnel. Once I was done here, I walked down to the trestle. Wow! It's mostly still intact. Some of the concrete footings aren't doing so well. And the service ladder that runs to the top broke about 2/3 of the way down, but this thing is amazing! No idea how much retrofitting it would need to run trains on it again, but it LOOKS mostly good.
Eventually I needed to head back
I took a number of different lines on the descent, resulting in much more interesting climbing. And I found cool rocks with holes in them, and little caves
On the descent I was thinking how there aren't actually any palms in "Mortero Palms". I was now in Mortero Canyon itself, and I saw a palm! I took a photo
So now I had evidence of the palm in Mortero Canyon. But then I walked around the corner, and saw this:
There's a FOREST of them here. The ground is slippery because it's completely covered in palm fronds.
I saw nobody on the ascent, but met 4 groups of hikers on the return. This place is hip. My friends came down off the peak, and we drove North a bit to Indian Canyon, to hike another peak. It was getting late, and the dirt road wasn't that great, so we decided to leave this for another day. I made camp, and went to bed.
The rear half of a bighorn sheep is visible on the ridge. Trust me! The ride back was uneventful. The Laguna mountains have lots of snow. Julian has lots of snow too, and also lots of humans. The area between Poway and Solana Beach is an endless suburb, with lots of neighborhoods sitting behind gated fortifications. And at one point Paseo Del Norte inexplicably becomes Paseo del Sur. That's how they do it in San Diego.