Mission Trails Regional Park

This guide to Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego opens in 1803, when drought had nearly broken Mission San Diego de Alcala five miles downstream and its Franciscan padres set out to control the river at Mission Gorge. It follows the decade-long construction of the stone dam by Kumeyaay men and women baptized into the mission system, from mortar mixed out of crushed seashells to a hand-cut stone channel carrying water nearly three miles to the mission's fields. The guide dwells on whose names survive in the mission's records and whose do not. Stand at the dam's crest, where the old flume once began, to take in the scale of the work.