Naturopathic Doctor in Campo, CA

Trucks, trains, horses and history await visitors at annual event.

CAMPO, California — The history of the East County is awaiting visitors this coming weekend in Campo with four museums are offering free admission all day Saturday and Sunday.

Brian Elmore admits he has a thing for old trucks. which is why he volunteers as president of the Motor Transport Museum in Campo. “This is a step back in time. You come here, you're going to have some real fun,” said Elmore.

“The Motor Transport Museum is in the old feldspar mill. You can't miss it. It's kind of sticks up into the air. It's the highest thing that we got here in Campo, nine stories,” said Elmore. “We have about 300 trucks here. And we have about another 200 miscellaneous items that are connected with the motor transport industry.”

The truck museum is one of four nonprofits that are offering free admission May 4 and 5 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for the annual Campo Days. Country music and dancing area also on tap Saturday night at the Camp Lockett Event & Equestrian Facility (CLEEF).

Trucks, trains, horses and history await visitors at annual event.

“We'll have music live music from 1 to 10. We’ll have the whole shebang,” said Ray Fleury, the CLEEF events coordinator.

CLEEF will be open both days with food and drinks available, and of course, horses.

“This is a free event for the entire family. We'll have a couple of kids bounce houses. We have goat roping and the kids can try to rope something without having a horse. Barrel racing, mutton busting, horse obstacle course, we're celebrating the ranching heritage of the East County along with the history of Buffalo Soldiers that were here in Campo during World War II,” said Fleury.

Larry Johnson is the president of the Mountain Empire Historical Society. “There was up to about 5,000 horses here at one time, and maybe 3,000 men,” said Johnson.

The historical society runs the Gaskill Brothers Stone Museum, the site of a deadly gun battle in 1875 with border bandits.

Down on the train tracks is the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum with free admission and train rides for a nominal fee. Kids of all ages love those old trains.

“I love anything that's old. I just am attracted to it,” said Elmore.

Campo is about an hour drive from downtown San Diego. For more information on Campo Days, go to visitcampo.com.

WATCH: Drone footage of the Motor Transport Museum:

If you’ve ever wanted to buy an entire city in San Diego County, now might be your chance to purchase a small town named Campo.

Campo is technically an unincorporated community in San Diego’s Mountain Empire. It’s about an hour from the city proper, and it could be yours for the price of $6.6 million.

Included in that price tag would be 28 buildings across the small township, including many former Army barracks that have been converted into apartments or homes, as well as several commercial properties.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Campo has technically been on sale since 2019. Back then, the price tag was $5.5 million. Now, a new real estate company called Top Gun CRE has taken over the task of selling nearly the entire town.

As far as other perks, the entire town has an Old West charm that hearkens back to the golden age of frontier towns in California. Because of its location in the Mountain Empire, Campo and surrounding communities is also one of the best places to see snow in San Diego County and is a great starting point for the best hikes in San Diego County.

Additionally, the properties on Campo bring in about $331,521 a year in net income. Since rents have increased, the overall value of the town has too, Top Gun CRE said.

Along with the residential buildings, Campo’s commercial properties also include a few museums, a church, a metal shop, a lumber and ranch supply store, a post office, and a Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter.

If you’d like to check out Campo before buying it, the community holds an annual Campo Days celebration each year with free admission to nearby museums and other festivities.

Media credit: Image courtesy of topguncre.com

Mike Peterson is a writer, editor, and strategist based in San Diego. When he’s not writing and editing the La Jolla news, you can often find him practicing yoga, rock climbing, or exploring the outdoors with his wife and dog.

The small, historic town of Campo in San Diego County, California is officially on the market.

The 16-acre village, which about an hour away from downtown San Diego and the ocean, is available to purchase in its entirety, however a price has not yet been advertised, according to the Los Angeles Times,

"This is a very unique opportunity for an investor to own the downtown portion of a small town," listing agent Conor Brennan told the outlet. "It's a very unique opportunity that doesn't come around often."

John Ray, a Las Vegas investor who owned much of Campo since the early 2000s, decided to sell many of his properties as he is getting older, Brennan added.

According to the outlet, the town would include 28 residences — apartments, single-family homes and seven commercial properties.

Campo still has about 100 people living throughout the properties in town. The outlet reported many of the residents to be employees of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as the town is only about a mile away from the U.S.-Mexican border.

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Brennan shared that he has not yet assigned a price tag to the town as he wants to see what he is offered first. However, when a majority of the town was put on the market in 1994, Campo was selling for $1.75 million — which inflates to more than $3 million today, the Los Angeles Times notes.

The town—which holds a Baptist church, cabinet shop, and a U.S. Post Office—used to be home to the Buffalo Soldiers, the only all African American cavalry unit in the Army.

The East County Lumber and Ranch Supply shop, which is one of the most lively businesses in the town, is also included in the sale. However, Brennan added that investors may get rid of these properties or renovate them as they may only be interested in acquiring the land.

“Send me a photo of the bottom of your shoes,” Agent Theron Francisco of the San Diego Border Patrol says. I am planning to hike a route border-crossers take from Mexico through the wilderness outside Campo, California. Francisco wants a record of my footprints. That way, if agents get on my tail, he can call them off.

I have backpacked in this area before, along the famed Pacific Crest Trail, and wondered how the border-crossers hiking alongside me—hidden in the brush—were faring. This time, I will move north from the border fence as they do, hiking cross-country, from waypoint to waypoint—first to an electrical tower, just north of the border, then to a hilltop farther west. I will outfit myself as they do, in jeans and knockoff Keds. I will carry a gallon of water in one hand, and a backpack with candy, sodas, a trash bag, a bathmat, and shoelaces.

I intend to see how far into the United States I can travel in 24 hours. To understand the route, I’ve consulted Francisco and my friend José Hernandez, of Salinas, California, who says he crossed the border illegally near here in 1990.*

Francisco sends me off on a morning in May. “If you get into trouble, call 911,” he says.

I jump onto the dirt road from a two-foot-tall embankment at the base of the border fence. Patrol trucks have dragged tires along the road to smooth out the dirt, and my feet leave deep, dusty prints in the unblemished surface. With a branch of a native plant called chamise, I “brush out,” as the Border Patrol calls a crosser’s practice of erasing her footprints so agents can’t find her track. To the Border Patrol officers who will soon creep along here in trucks at five miles an hour, scanning for the tiniest disturbances in the dirt, it will look like a kid has scribbled out footprints with a stick. I walk and brush, again and again.

A barbed wire fence lies along the northern edge of the road. I step up on the middle wire, hang on to a fence post, and swing my other leg over. Now I am straddling the fence, swaying north and south. I tip too far north and stumble off in a spot worn bare by prior landings. My palm is grooved with blood and rust.

I duck into the protective cover of tall brush. I walk through chamise, yucca, barrel cactus. And invisible cactus. I feel the stings. More and more needles—too thin to grasp between fingernails—embed themselves in my skin as I hike. I will never see the cactus responsible.

I cross a second dirt road. This time, I try camouflaging my footprints by tying a bathmat to my feet with shoelaces.

Now the brush is waist-high. Standing upright, I can see two Border Patrol trucks parked at high points along the fence to the southeast and southwest. From the road to Campo, to the north, I see a third truck approaching the fence. In the northwest, dust clouds billow from vehicles I can’t see.

I drop, trying to hide. My jug hits the ground and cracks. The sand sucks down my water, but I have a back-up. I start crawling.

This is breaking trail face-first. A twig carves a track onto my closed eyelid. My gouged palm fills with the shards of pebbles. I move onto my knuckles and develop a strange, novel injury, part abrasion, part burn. Hot grit collects in the spaces between my knuckles and turns the skin purple and raw as I approach the first waypoint.

Crossers rest on high points so they can see agents approaching from afar. A hill of brush and boulders, perhaps 300 feet tall, is my second waypoint, where I will wait out the day’s hottest hours. Discards litter the route: water bottles, energy gels, sun-bleached backpacks.

This is rattlesnake habitat. “I’m surprised we don’t see more bites, given the amount of snake track we see,” Francisco told me at our briefing near the border fence. The best way to get bitten is to put your hand on a rock without looking. The brush makes it impossible to see. I start plunking my water jug ahead of me, offering snakes a decoy. On one plunk, the cap skitters away. Now I’m sloshing water out with every move.

Below the topmost boulder, which is graffitied with a skull, I can’t get purchase. I inspect my shoe: Ribbons of sole hang from it. I pull myself up using chamise, and branch after branch rips off as I climb. I stare back at the decimated plant.

Broken plants betray crossers. “We look for this,” Francisco had said back at the fence, snapping a twig and pointing to the fresh, green break. Hidden sensors blanket this brush. In the places where crossers trip them, agents go looking for green breaks.

I’m nauseated and need to stop. “If you stop, you get left behind,” Hernandez had said. I lean against a boulder. Crossers rest their warm bodies against warm rocks, Francisco had said, hoping to hide from infrared scopes that work by detecting temperature differentials.

I take a drink. My mouth fills with chamise needles that have collected in the uncapped jug. It’s too thick to swallow.

Unforeseen circumstances—the approach of a civilian vehicle, say—can knock crossers off-route. As I head toward my third waypoint, I get nudged off-route when barbed wire I didn’t expect steers me too far west. I’m not up for jumping more barbed wire. At a spot where someone propped up the bottom wire with wood, I slip under and try to regain my route. I pass a rusted swing set and a shooting range. It’s someone’s backyard. Dogs bark. Many citizens of Campo are sympathetic to Border Patrol. They call in suspicious activity and open their backyards to chases. I run.

Getting off my route has cascading effects. I find myself in open grassland by mistake. A Border Patrol jeep drives by. I freeze, in plain sight of the agent.

This is why crossers prefer to move under the cover of darkness. I crawl into a bower of oak to wait for night. I pull my trash bag on for warmth. I need to pee. When you are resting under the orders of your foot guide, “you can’t move,” Hernandez had said. I pee where I sit.

My chest burns from eating candy all day. I’m clammy. Oak leaves are pricking my thighs. Two minutes pass. Waiting for nightfall is maddening.

At dark, I move. No flashlight. The moonlight flattens the landscape. Without depth perception, I can’t tell if I’m stepping down two inches or two feet. I scoot on my butt and take long, demoralized breaks.

The Pacific Crest Trail appears. A sign announces how much ground the trail has covered since its start—next to mine—at the border fence. After close to 24 hours, I have made it exactly one mile into the United States. Crossers might hike as far as PCT Mile 77 before they can be shuttled safely out of the desert.

“Agents in the area did, in fact, come across your sign and brush out and contacted me to verify before they started following you,” Francisco told me afterward. From the time they found my tracks, I might have had five minutes, or maybe a few hours tops, before they found me sweating in the dust.

*José Hernandez is a pseudonym.

This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Schools

Del Campo High School is raising money for the 'Field of Dreams,' a project to create a new athletic stadium facility that will not only serve students, but the community.

Nick Hunte, Neighbor

|Updated Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 1:30 am PT

Del Campo High School officials are hoping to raise $1.2 million to fund its "Field of Dreams" initiative, which will include spruced-up athletic facilities to be shared with feeder schools, youth sports programs and the community at large.

With ambitious goals of creating a state-of-the-art athletic stadium -- to include an all-weather track, turf football and soccer field, more seating, permanent restrooms, an expanded ticket booth, new scoreboard and cougar rock statue -- Athletic Director Gary Summerhays is promoting the initiative in coordination with an executive committee. A Carmichael resident, Summerhays hopes nicer digs boost the San Juan Unified School District's and communities' morale.

“We haven’t been putting on that coat and tie enough whereas other communities like Folsom, Rocklin, all these places have got high-profile facilities, and yet we’re a sleepy little community,” he said. "We don’t want to be that, we want to be upscale and provide for our community a really state-of-the-art facility.

“We’ll have something of value that it’s obviously going to enhance property value.”

Also included in the facility plans is low-level lighting so local residents -- from Fair Oaks and Carmichael -- can better use the track and facilities to walk and job during evening hours. And although there will be security measures in place to protect the facilities, Summerhays said he wants it to be open for public use.

Find out what's happening in Fair Oaks-Carmichaelwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“If we’re actually able to generate the resources and develop a turf field and track, it will be the only accommodation like that in the San Juan Unified School District,” Summerhays said. “It will be a great thing for the local community, they can use the track, come over and they can train, they can walk, the whole community is invited."

With the project expected to be underway by summer 2012 and completed by fall 2012, Summerhays hopes the $1.2 million needed for project comes from private and personal donors, along with support from businesses that could then advertise themselves with ads around the field. He also expressed interest in corporate funding, as the school hopes to partner with a corporate sponsor.

“We’re hoping somewhere along the line to have a corporate sponsor jump in and say they want to help or even much the funds that we raised,” Summerhays said. “We’d like some corporate entity that we can even name the field after, we’ll put their name on the field. Someone wants to step up and contribute a good sum of money and the field can be the AT&T Cougar Canyon for example, it would be a nice thing.”

The idea behind the initiative was spawned around November 2010, by two Del Campo alumni from 1983 -- Jim Nally and Keith Brinknan, who approached Summerhays with the concept for the kids of the community as part of a grassroots effort. Youth sports programs, such as the Junior Cougars, football and soccer clubs, need a field on which to play and would be welcome to use Del Campo's, Summerhays said.

The "Field of Dreams" project -- which was unveiled in concept form earlier this month -- is being driven and overseen by volunteers who sit on the committee, with the message of giving back to the community.

“That’s the spirit of this project, it’s giving back, because Del Campo has given us so much,” Summerhays said.

And with parents looking for communities with facilities for their children to use, he wants them to be able to take advantage of Del Campo's when they are built.

“It’s bigger than just Del Campo, it’s a Carmichael, Fair Oaks area project and we’re hoping to get those communities and for people to step up and help us with this project,” Summerhays said.