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Making the Grade: NATE’S ROAD HAS STORIES TO TELL

Part I of a series on Nate Harrison and the grade named after him.

By DAVID ROSS

One of the roads up Palomar Mountain has been known for five decades as “The Highway to the Stars.” The road named after Nate Harrison might well be known as “The Highway Back Into Time.”

If you listen, besides the sound of the wind and hawks wheeling effortlessly overhead, you can hear horses straining against their leather harnesses, wooden wagon wheels creaking, and teamsters swearing and cracking the whip over the necks of the sweating beasts.

You may see the ghost of an old white-bearded black man, the first “white man” on the mountain, meeting exhausted horses and men just as the wagons enter the cool shade of the trees after climbing 4000 feet in the broiling sun. He’s driving a wagon loaded with cool water from the first spring discovered on Palomar Mountain. If you try, you can almost taste the dust and the sweet water on your tongue, so cold it makes your teeth hurt.

Nate Harrison Grade once appeared on the maps as “Nigger Nate Grade,” and even as “Nigger Grade.”

It was a cruder, crueler age in many ways, and people thought nothing of calling the freed slave who spent much of his time on what was then known as Smith Mountain, “Nigger Nate.”

By all accounts, that’s what he called himself. The grade named after him was once the only way up the mountain, and it was in continual use by all the residents until east grade was built in the 1940s to transport the 200 inch mirror for the Hale telescope up to Palomar Observatory.

In fact, the Highway to the Stars was built especially for the mirror; the rest of the observatory’s paraphernalia came up on the Harrison Grade, the way settlers had “made the grade” for sixty years or more.

The grade starts in Pauma Valley, just a few hundred yards from the intersection of Cole Grade Road and Hwy 76.

When you are coming down Cole Grade from Valley Center, you can see the Nate Harrison Grade winding its way up the mountain, almost to Boucher Point, the site of the now sleeping CDF watch towner, built on a cliff at 5438 ft.

The grade criss-crosses up the mountain in long switchbacks, that, from a distance, look like hairline fractures tracing the mountain’s face. The grade is about 10% on the average, which means that it’s definitely four-wheel drive territory, unless, like the few residents who use it, you know it well.

Although you can undoubtedly get up to the top of the mountain in less than an hour if you push it, a road trip up Nate Harrison Grade is definitely a trip to be savored.

So if you plan to take the trip, allow at least a couple of hours, which includes time to pull off and look down into the Valley, or, if it’s a clear, Santa Ana driven day, the channel islands off Mexico.

It’s the perfect poor man’s National Geographic expedition, with no discomfort, some adventure, and a lot of beautiful scenery.

Nate Harrison Grade begins with a crippled, lopsided road sign and a road that’s tucked away between two citrus orchards. I was accompanied on my trip by fellow history buffs: Don Seitz, who has driven up Nate Harrison Grade since he was a boy in the 1950s; intrepid Roadrunner photographer Theresa Gallagher and Petie McHenry, author of The History of Valley Center: The Homestead Years, and a trained archaeologist.

We began our trip on a hot August afternoon, although it wouldn’t be long into the trip before we would notice that the temperatures were cooling off as we climbed.

I was riding in Seitz’s 1972 International Scout four-wheel drive, a rough, tough vehicle if ever there was one!

As we drove down into Pauma Valley Seitz recalled that when he was a boy Cole Grade was a dirt road bounded by brush on both sides. It also used to be more winding than it is today, but 25 years ago the County straightened it out in places.

Seitz first discovered the Nate Harrison Grade when he starting riding his motorcycle in 1954. At that time some motorcycle group was putting on races (!) on the grade. They raced for several years until someone (maybe the authorities) put a stop to it and Seitz was never able to actually participate in the races.

Back then the grade was dirt from the beginning and there were no citrus trees on either side of it. The road today is the same width that it was then, only paved. However, it doesn’t stay paved for long.

Almost as soon as the grade passes through the citrus grove it starts to climb. Soon, if you look off behind you you can see Cole Grade stretching back in the distance. Then you come to a yellow sign warning of the snakelike switchbacks to come. At this point Seitz switched into low gear.

We looked behind us, where Petie McHenry and Theresa Gallagher were following us in Petie’s Jeep. Shortly after the sign announced that the road will be windy the paving tapers off, to be replaced by gravel. Straight ahead, looking far too tall to be challenging on this primitive road, is Palomar Mountain.

Palomar is Spanish for dovecote, Seitz told me, and I believe him.

Well into the Twentieth Century it was called Smith Mountain. It was here that we stopped and took our first picture behind us, a panorama of Pauma Valley. Even a few hundred feet off the Valley floor the view is impressive, and it would become more so as we climbed.

This is how Nate Harrison Grade looked back in the days when the only way up was by wagon.