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Gulliver
Senior Nomad
Posts: 651
Registered: 11-18-2013
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Went up to look at the Mission Magdalena site today. Your instructions worked fine up until the last bit where they were not applicable as the floods
have taken everything out beyond the blue house.
Indeed, the Mission site is gone. The 'aquaduct' has mostly survived although it is almost all filled in with sand and rocks. The farmers have used
the resulting shelf to string a water line. I didn't go poke about for the pila as I have a very limited desire to walk about in the bushes.
The farmer in the blue house confirmed that the mission remains were carried away in Odile and that the pila is still there though my dreadful Spanish
may have confused me.
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David K
Honored Nomad
Posts: 64739
Registered: 8-30-2002
Location: San Diego County
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Mood: Have Baja Fever
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If you ever go back to see the pila and the few adobe and rock rooms that didn't get swept away by Odile:
Do not go all the way to the blue house, but instead, drive into the arroyo sandbed to the north of the blue house... drive down the arroyo along the
right bank for just 2/10 a mile and see a side gully joining in from the south. PARK! The pila is almost visible just up this side wash, on the right.
No bushwacking.
To find the few remains of the mission visita rooms go about 300 feet east, parallel to the big arroyo. When you come to the auto road and where there
is now a cliff drop-off from the flash flood, look around for the room remains. They are just west of the road along the edge of the new cliff.
I will add a Google Earth map to illustrate...
From the blue house driveway to where you park at the side gully at the pila (you can almost see the pila from the big arroyo up the side wash) is
just over 2/10 a mile. The room ruins where the old road meets the new arroyo cliff is 300 feet east of the pila, at the edge of the arroyo.
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Gulliver
Senior Nomad
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Might be a few weeks until I get out there but this Winter for sure.
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David K
Honored Nomad
Posts: 64739
Registered: 8-30-2002
Location: San Diego County
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Great... soon that pila will also be gone! Photocopy the map I made and tuck in your trail box. Take some time and look for more stuff than I saw.
This was a huge enterprise with a big mystery. We don't know who built this or when. We also don't know why out there in the desert instead of in that
nice oasis valley where San José de Magdalena is...? Building that canal in the side of the mountain then across the desert to the pila was no easy
task, either.
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Gulliver
Senior Nomad
Posts: 651
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Religious crazies and god botherers. Same sort of energy that built the pyramids.
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David K
Honored Nomad
Posts: 64739
Registered: 8-30-2002
Location: San Diego County
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Mood: Have Baja Fever
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Perhaps, yet another explanation was colonialism... California was a wild, desert land with several thousand nomadic Indians on a constant quest for
food. To make the land productive for King and Country, the desert had to be converted to fields for food production and the hunter/ gatherer natives
converted to farmers and ranchers. The three Catholic Orders of missionaries in California were motivated to convert new souls to the faith. They
readily accepted the opportunity to lead the Spanish in establishing a colony in California with Indian neophyte members of the church in advance of
migrating people from the mainland of Mexico.
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