Orange County's forgotten history Wild times on San Juan Creek

Most of us traveling the Ortega Highway these days drive pell-mell just to get across the Santa Ana Mountains and onto the 15 Freeway.  We barely notice the creek or the valleys along the way.  Or the history. 

Not so for Doc Wylde.

Doc Wylde is an impassioned naturalist.  Not the airy-fairy tree-hugging kind, but someone who has hunted and fished and camped nature all his life.  Now 82 and living in San Clemente, he remembers as a child traveling along Highway 74 in his father’s Model A Ford to get to the family cabin 13 miles from Capistrano on the San Juan Creek. 

As a youngster he hoisted trout out of San Juan’s pools by hand, moving them from smaller to larger pools so they would survive the summer dry spell.  He collected wild honey from the hills, being careful to avoid the mountain lions that lived in the clefts of Sitton Peak.  Later, he would give Elynor his Sigma Chi Fraternity pin during a USC pledge party at the cabin (properly chaperoned of course.) 

Some of Doc Wylde’s best memories come from San Juan Creek.

Like how he and his buddies (and their girl friends) used to sneak into the thermal pools along the 74.  The pools were part of the old San Juan Hot Springs Resort, long ago boarded up, but still making a hot water stream along the 74.

Or the time Doc went shooting quail along the 74 with his shotgun.  Not hitting any birds, he volunteered to use his posterior as a test target.  (“I was wearing jeans,” he protests, to avoid being thought too bone-headed.)  Sure enough, the problem was not the gun, and Doc was pulling shotgun pellets out of his bottom for weeks.

An even less pleasant memory of San Juan Creek comes from the war years (WWII).  Doc let friends talk him into breaking into cabins along the creek.  They got in, got out, and Doc became very popular giving the loot away at school.  Then the sheriff arrived at school.  Doc spent two weeks in the Orange County lock-up.  “It sure taught me a lesson,” he says today.  “I never broke the law ever again.”

As well as a naturalist, Doc is a historian.  Not the pipe-smoking, tweed jacket wearing kind, but someone who all his life has photographed, filmed, processed and preserved his own history and that of his family.  He has created an archive of more than 10,000 images and over 50 hours of film and video footage (including rare 8mm color footage of a fishing trip to Mexico using home made scuba equipment).

Doc the Naturalist and Doc the Historian is an Orange County Original.

Doc is also part of a growing number of Orange County seniors who are preserving their life stories with private, personal history documentaries. (The choice these days is much wider than ever before: Personal History Biography: Audio, Video or Written Memoir?.) Doc created his video biography so that future generations would know his story. "I want them to know something about me and our family history. This video biography is something that I can leave them."

It is increasingly common. There is an enormous interest out there among the baby boomers who see that their parents have lived so much history. According to the Association of Personal Historians, an organization representing personal historians and video biographers from across the United States, membership of the Association has climbed to over 600 from less than 50 only a decade ago.

To see an excerpt of Doc Wylde’s Video Biography, including some of that astonishing home-made scuba footage, follow this link: Wylde Ride