Reporting from San Diego — Smuggler's Gulch lived up to its infamous name.
For a century, the narrow canyon leading into California from Mexico provided cover for cattle thieves and opium dealers, bandits and booze runners. More recently, it has hidden thousands of illegal immigrants on their journey north, sealing its place in border lore.
Now, it's a fading memory.
The canyon has been all but wiped off the landscape, its steep walls carved into gentle slopes, its depths filled with 35,000 truckloads of dirt as the federal government nears completion of an extensive border reinforcement project at the southwesternmost point of the United States.
In 2005, the Bush administration waived state and federal environmental laws to overcome stiff opposition to the massive earth-moving effort, which entails cutting the tops off nearby hills and pushing about 1.7 million cubic yards of dirt into the gulch and neighboring Goat Canyon.
Environmentalists and conservation groups fear that the project, scheduled to be completed in May, will harm the Tijuana River estuary, threaten endangered species and destroy culturally sensitive Native American sites. With construction well underway, it's clear that few of the 500 miles of new border fencing projects are transforming the environment as radically as the three miles from the Smuggler's Gulch area to the coast.
Once a breach in the coastal hills, the gulch is now more like a dam than a passage. Anyone attempting to cross confronts a 150-foot-high berm that will soon be topped with stadium lighting, video surveillance cameras and 15-foot-high fencing. Eventually, an all-weather road will run atop the filled-in canyons and smoothed-out hills and mesas all the way to the ocean.
For those who see the canyon border as blight, the gulch is a victim of its notorious past and deserves to be buried forever. "Good riddance," said Donald McDermott, a former U.S. Border Patrol assistant chief who once patrolled the area. "Anything that makes it easier to control the border is a good thing."
The canyon figured in some of California's earliest history. Charles W. Hughes, a local historian, said many of California's earliest settlers came through the pass. "It's very discouraging. We talk about trying to preserve our history . . . and yet they can come in and do this," he said.
