Cuyamaca Rancho State Park
| Cuyamaca Rancho State Park | |
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The West Mesa Trail in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park
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| Location | San Diego County, California, United States |
| Nearest city | San Diego, California |
| Coordinates | 32°56′N 116°34′W / 32.933°N 116.567°WCoordinates: 32°56′N 116°34′W / 32.933°N 116.567°W |
| Area | 24,693 acres (99.93 km2) |
| Established | 1933 |
| Governing body | California Department of Parks and Recreation |
Cuyamaca Rancho State Park is a state park in California, United States, located 40 miles (64 km) east of San Diego in the Laguna Mountains of the Peninsular Ranges. The park's 26,000 acres (11,000 ha) feature pine, fir, and oak forests, with meadows and streams that exist due to the relatively high elevation of the area compared to its surroundings. The park includes 6,512-foot (1,985 m) Cuyamaca Peak, the second-highest point in San Diego County.
Park amenities include trails for hiking, horseback riding, and mountain biking, as well as campgrounds for family, group, equestrian, and primitive trail camping; as well as an exhibit at a former gold mine, the Stonewall Mine.
Wildlife in the area includes mountain lions, which have been known to attack humans, and park literature emphasizes avoiding encounters with them. Numerous other species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians are known to reside within the park.
The park was closed for several months due to massive damage incurred in the 2003 Cedar Fire. Although much of the forest was burned, the park has since been reopened and the fire ecology regenerating native plants are re-growing and returning.
Cuyamaca Rancho State Park is located in the Peninsular Range, which extends from the San Jacinto Mountains north of the park, southward to the tip of Baja California. At the western edge of the most seismically active area in North America, the range is a great uplifted plateau, cut off from the Colorado Desert to the east by the Elsinore Fault Zone, where vertical movement over the last two million years has amounted to thousands of feet of tectonic uplift.
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Wikipedia