17-Sep-2024 -- After a brief vacation in San Diego, I made a short detour (while returning to the San Francisco Bay Area) to revisit this Degree Confluence Point. I had visited this point twice before - in 1999 and 2015 - but wanted to revisit it to get a drone’s-eye view of the point.
While driving along County Line Road in Calimesa, I got discouraged when I saw several “No Trespassing” signs posted on the tidy white fence that abuts the large open space that contains the point. However, at the end of the road - at [34.00539,-117.00927] - I saw a trailhead with signs noting that public access is allowed here. This appears to be the best starting point, but - in my three visits so far - I still have not found the optimal route to reach this Degree Confluence Point because, once again, I ended up doing lots of (apparently unnecessary) climbing and bushwhacking before I finally managed to reach the point, which lies near the bottom of a chaparral-filled ravine.
My previous visit to this point was almost exactly 9 years ago, in September 2015. One surprising difference that I noticed from my previous visit is that the vegetation in the area is much thicker than before. You can see this clearly by comparing my first photo with the equivalent photo from my visit in 2015. It’s not clear why this is the case; perhaps the area has received more rainfall in recent years, or perhaps this is just part of a long recovery from a decades-ago fire in the area? But in any case, the extra vegetation made it noticeably harder for me to reach the point.
Here is a remote-controlled aerial video of this confluence point.