O Neill Park

The soldier who lost his firearm while marching in this hilly region with Capt. Gaspar de Portola's 1769 expedition would no doubt be astonished at the number of Orange County place names inspired by his mistake. Trabuco, which is the Spanish word for blunderbuss, now is the name of a canyon, a creek, a plain, a trail, a road and even a ranger district of the Cleveland National Forest; at one time it was also the name of a rancho.

Sheriff's deputies on Tuesday said they confiscated about 3,500 mature marijuana plants worth roughly $2.5 million from a well-irrigated plot in O'Neill Regional Park. The plants were spotted from a sheriff's helicopter on patrol about 3 p.m. near Sunrise street in Mission Viejo, said Lt. Hans Strand of the Orange County Sheriff's Department. He said authorities did not know whether the find was related to the 3,800 unattended marijuana plants found this month in Silverado Canyon.

Plans still have not been worked out for reopening O'Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon, closed since Dec. 26 after numerous mountain lion tracks were found in sections heavily used by visitors and one animal was seen by a woman camper, park officials said Tuesday.

Until the young woman from Massachusetts was brutally assaulted, this had been her most recent home: 3,300 acres of oak and pine trees, mule deer and rattlesnakes, minutes from suburban Rancho Santa Margarita in south Orange County, where the average house is worth $600,000. O'Neill Regional Park's 86 camping spaces provide a temporary home for drifters and vacationers -- people from a few miles away or the other side of the continent.

Following the second sighting of a mountain lion in less than a week, O'Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon was closed indefinitely. "We have not formulated any plans as yet, so we can't say when the park might be reopened," said Harold J. Krizan, county director of parks and recreation. "We certainly hope it will be soon, although fresh tracks were found there again this morning," he said Wednesday. The park was first shut down Dec. 26, after the first lion tracks were spotted.

After being closed 11 weeks because of concerns about mountain lions, O'Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon will reopen Friday with a ban on overnight stays by children and with large areas designated as off-limits to the public, it was announced Monday. Richard Dyer, supervising ranger at the park, said adults will be required to obtain free permits before entering. The permits contain a warning of "inherent dangers" such as mountain lions, poison oak, rattlesnakes and rough terrain.

O'Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon opened in 1948 as a remote retreat from the booming cities to the south and west. Suburbia has finally found O'Neill, but the magnificent oaks and views of the Santa Ana Mountains have continued to make it worth visiting. Now there are 1,000 new reasons to come. Very quietly--not surprising, given the county's financial state--the park doubled in size in June with the public opening of the 1,000-acre Arroyo Trabuco.

When county parks chief Tim Miller was a ranger at O'Neill Regional Park nearly 20 years ago, he could hike to the top of a lush, tree-lined mesa, look over the park, and the only living creatures in sight would be cattle grazing off in the distance. But as the newly renovated park fully reopens Friday after a yearlong hiatus, the same vista now takes in rows of new, expensive homes and construction equipment toiling nearby.

Workers halted construction of a bike trail through O'Neill Regional Park on Wednesday morning after discovering five military bombs, one containing an ounce of explosives. By noon, the Orange County Sheriff's Department's bomb squad had detonated the live bomb and taken the other four away. The incident was another reminder that the park had been part of the former Trabuco Bombing Range, where Navy pilots practiced dropping ordnance from 1944 to 1956.

For 44 years, people have trampled on it, camped on it, made cooking fires on it. Homeless people have lived in it. Tens of thousands have made use of O'Neill Regional Park. But the traffic of four decades has badly marred the county's second-oldest park. "It's possible to love a place to death," supervising park ranger Mark Carlson said, picking at the decaying bark of one of O'Neill's felled oak trees.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has finished removing old artillery rounds from a section of O'Neill Regional Park in southern Orange County, and within two months will decide when to begin clearing the rest of the park. During a two-week project that ended last week, technicians found 12 ordnance-related items along a 22-foot-wide corridor being planned as a bike path. None of the munitions discovered in the search area of 1 2/3 acres was live.

Three teenage boys who left Irvine's Northwood High campus during school hours Monday suffered major injuries when their car missed a curve and plowed into a tree on Live Oak Canyon Road, the edge of O'Neill Regional Park, authorities said. "We don't know where they were headed," Officer Katrina Lundgren, a spokeswoman for the California Highway Patrol, said of the 10:30 a.m. accident near Rancho Santa Margarita.

The Army Corps of Engineers said it will begin its search in March for old military explosives along a proposed bike path in Rancho Santa Margarita's O'Neill Regional Park. The sweep for unexploded ordnance at the former bombing range had been scheduled for 2023 but was quickly advanced with the discovery two months ago of 11 small bombs under about a foot of soil by workers preparing to lay asphalt for a bike path in the park.

Hikers and mountain bikers entering O'Neill Regional Park in Rancho Santa Margarita are warned of potential encounters with mountain lions, rattlesnakes and Africanized bees. But those dangers may pale next to the presence of small, unexploded, half-century-old Navy bombs. Over a 28-hour period beginning Wednesday morning, workers building an asphalt bike path through the park discovered 11 military bombs while grading about a foot deep near a path used by mountain bikers.

Authorities are investigating the cause of a brush fire that destroyed about an acre Monday near O'Neill Regional Park in an unincorporated area of the county. "We had witnesses who saw children fleeing the area" about the time of the fire, said Capt. Stephen J. Miller, a spokesman for the Orange County Fire Authority. "It's the first day of spring break."

A brush fire briefly threatened homes in Trabuco Canyon late Monday but was quickly contained by more than 100 firefighters aided by water-dumping helicopters. By late evening, Orange County fire authorities declared that the blaze, which was reported at 3:41 p.m., was fully contained and no longer a danger to a dozen homes skirting O'Neill Regional Park northeast of Mission Viejo. As relieved homeowners looked on, fire crews continued to douse hot spots in the 38 acres charred by the flames.

Until the young woman from Massachusetts was brutally assaulted, this had been her most recent home: 3,300 acres of oak and pine trees, mule deer and rattlesnakes, minutes from suburban Rancho Santa Margarita in south Orange County, where the average house is worth $600,000. O'Neill Regional Park's 86 camping spaces provide a temporary home for drifters and vacationers -- people from a few miles away or the other side of the continent.

I am disappointed in the Nov. 7 article, "Saving Land to Pave Land," which I think unfairly overlooked the important contributions being made by the O'Neill family and Rancho Mission Viejo Land Conservancy. The O'Neill family has managed, through the years, to retain and protect a large portion of the original Rancho Mission Viejo. This has been a difficult task. Even agricultural and open land is taxed. Maintaining large areas of open space is expensive. Inheritance tax on vast tracts of land can be high enough to force their sale.