Tourist First: The Way to Potato Chip Rock

Sunday, May 16, 2021

The Way to Potato Chip Rock

At more than 4,500 square miles, San Diego County is larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. It has more than 3 million residents, most living along its 70 miles of Pacific coast. Its geography is so varied that weather forecasts are divided into four zones: coast, inland, mountain and desert, and high temperatures on any given day can vary 20 or even 30 degrees.

My wife, Jane, and I could feel the difference in temperature on May 14, 2021, when we started at about 400 feet above sea level and trod up Mount Woodson to about 2,600 feet above sea level. It got windier and cooler. We were there to see Potato Chip Rock, a tapering slap of granite that seems to float out of the mountain just below the peak. Mount Woodson is about a 45 minute drive from our home in downtown San Diego.

The three distinct routes to Potato Chip attract about 400,000 visitors a year, many of whom climb out onto it to pose for pictures. There were maybe two dozen people at the rock when we were there. One fellow jumped up and down on it and reported that it vibrated.

We took the "easy" way to the rock, walking almost two miles on a relentlessly uphill (and often very steep) paved road that is closed to traffic. The road allows workers to service a bevy of transmission towers at the top of Mount Woodson. The road took us to the very top, then we went down a dirt path on the other side of the peak to reach the rock. The other two routes are much longer trails that weave up and down and around the giant boulders of Mount Woodson. All three trails exceed 2,000 feet in elevation gain. By the way, given the steepness, walking down wasn't the piece of cake that I had expected. With many rest stops, it took us just over two hours on the way up, then another hour or so to get back down to where we had parked on a state highway.

The paved "trail,' Mount Woodson Road, offers plenty of great views of towns, reservoirs, mountains and rock formations. There was yucca in bloom amid the chaparral, a few short-leafed pine trees and several kinds of wildflowers.

Here are some snapshots from our hike:

The victim of some past fire?

Yucca in bloom.

More yucca spikes.

These are just some of the towers atop
Mount Woodson.

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Argentine Patagonia

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Dominica

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Palm Springs

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