CONFLUENCE - San Juan Creek - Arroyo Trabuco - San Juan Capistrano, CA - River Origins, Destinations and Confluences on Waymarking.com

Taken from Wikipeida, "San Juan Creek, also called the San Juan River, is a 29-mile (47 km) long stream in Orange and Riverside Counties, draining a watershed of 133.9 square miles (347 km2). Its mainstem begins in the southern Santa Ana Mountains in the Cleveland National Forest. It winds west and south through San Juan Canyon, and is joined by Arroyo Trabuco as it passes through San Juan Capistrano. It flows into the Pacific Ocean at Doheny State Beach. San Juan Canyon provides a major part of the route for California State Route 74 (the Ortega Highway).

Before Spanish colonization in the 1770s, the San Juan Creek watershed was inhabited by the Acjachemen or Juañeno Native Americans. The Juañeno were named by Spanish missionaries who built Mission San Juan Capistrano on the banks of a stream they named San Juan Creek. The watershed was used mainly for agriculture and ranching until the 1950s when residential suburban development began on a large scale. Since then, the human population has continued to encroach on floodplains of local streams. Flooding in the 20th and 21st centuries has caused considerable property damage in the San Juan watershed.

The San Juan watershed is home to sixteen major native plant communities and hundreds of animal species. However, the watershed is projected to be 48 percent urbanized by 2050. In addition, urban runoff has changed flow patterns in San Juan Creek and introduced pollutants to the river system. Although the main stem of San Juan Creek does not have any major water diversions or dams, some of its tributaries, including Trabuco and Oso Creeks, have been channelized or otherwise heavily modified by urbanization."

Taken from Wikipedia, "Arroyo Trabuco (known also as Trabuco Creek) is a 22-mile (35 km)-long stream in coastal southern California in the United States. Rising in a rugged canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains of Orange County, the creek flows west and southwest before emptying into San Juan Creek in the city of San Juan Capistrano. Arroyo Trabuco's watershed drains 54 square miles (140 km2) of hilly, semi-arid land and lies mostly in Orange County, with a small portion extending northward into Riverside County. The lower section of the creek flows through three incorporated cities and is moderately polluted by urban and agricultural runoff.

juaneno and Luiseño Native American people lived along the perennial stream in settlements and hunting camps for 8,000 years before the invasion of Spanish colonization. Trabuco is Spanish for a Blunderbuss, a type of shotgun. Local legend attributes a Franciscan missionary friar traveling with the Gaspar de Portolà Expedition in 1769 for the story that a blunderbuss was lost in the upper canyon by the creek, and so the naming of the area. John "Don Juan" Forster received a Mexican land grant in 1846 for the canyon lands and creek and established Rancho Trabuco here.

In its natural state, Arroyo Trabuco supported one of the most significant steelhead trout runs in Orange County, and birds, large mammals, and amphibians still flourish in riparian zones along its undeveloped portions. Trabuco Canyon along upper Arroyo Trabuco, and long, narrow O'Neill Regional Park, formed from the original land grant of Rancho Trabuco in 1982, are popular off-roading, hiking, fishing and camping areas in the watershed."

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