As you drive through the gates into Pinecrest Retreat from Highway 79 — known as the “Firefighter Steven Rucker Memorial Highway” — about three miles south of Julian, you can sense the layers of everyday stress and anxiety starting to peel away.
The entrance sign at Pinecrest Retreat off Highway 79, near Julian, CA. (Photo by Jimmy Camp)
A secret gem tucked in the Cuyamaca Mountains 60 miles northeast of San Diego, Pinecrest Retreat is home to 160 trailer sites, mostly vintage trailer time capsules. These range from complete restorations of trailers produced from the 1940s through the 1970s, to those just beginning the journey back to their former glory days.
Originally developed in 1961 by aircraft manufacturer General Dynamics-Convair as a retreat for its employees, Pinecrest was sold to a series of private owners beginning in 1994, eventually falling into the hands of Kathleen Rosenow and her husband Frank Spevacek in 2005.
Old-school family time
When sitting by the Pinecrest pool on a warm summer day, you don’t see kids staring at phones or watching movies on an iPad. You’ll see them pairing up, congregating and creating games with other kids they’ve never met. At twilight, you’ll hear them rambling through the park together, possibly seeking mischief but hardly ever finding too much beyond the occasional rock throwing or squirrel chasing … as far as their parents know.
You will notice the unique makeup of the site holders at Pinecrest. Frank and Kathleen recall their very first summer: It was Memorial Day weekend, the big summer kickoff. Everyone was at the pool enjoying live music as they do every summer, and Frank got up to the microphone to welcome everyone.
“I looked around and thought, here we have everyone from conservative Christian families to gay and lesbian couples with their children, and everything in between. Everyone just seemed to get along,” he says. “I was looking and thought, how did all these people get here? People from LA, from San Diego, from as far away as Texas, from all walks of life. What is attracting folks to this place?”
Frank and Kathleen’s daughter and son-in-law, Jill and Wilson Riggs, nod their heads in agreement.
“Well, it’s a nice place to just be.”
Some vintage trailer site holders have been here almost since day one when Frank and Kathleen were first starting out at Pinecrest. Ron Guley, from Orange County, has two adjacent sites. On one sits a beautifully restored, 1950s Royal Spartanette — much sought-after by trailer enthusiasts — and a smaller, very rare “canned ham” style camper built by Field & Stream Trailers in El Monte during the 1950s and ’60s.
How did he get into this?
Ron explains: “At the time, my partner and I owned an antique store, and we were traveling around in a rental truck scouring the countryside for antiques. We came across someone who mentioned Julian and said we should check it out. There were a lot of cool antique stores here. We asked what their connection to Julian was, and they said they had a trailer in this vintage trailer park. At the time, we had been talking about maybe finding a cabin in the mountains, and I said, you know, this might be a really cool thing. We then met a guy that had a site here and, at the time, was a producer for Huell Howser’s ‘California’s Gold’ and was really into restoring vintage trailers. He told us that if we were serious about it, he would help us find a trailer, and he did.”
A community rises from ashes
Sitting on a western-style sofa in the vintage-inspired “Paradise Lounge” clubhouse, with groovy vibes of “Austin Powers” in the woods, Frank and Kathleen recall their initial vision when purchasing the property 20 years ago.
“We talked a little bit about how it would be developed,” says Kathleen, “but we didn’t really have a clear vision; we just knew it was a beautiful property and there was a lot of cleanup to do because of the fire.”
The fire they refer to was the 2003 Cedar fire. At the time, the Cedar fire was one of the deadliest, largest and most destructive wildfires in California history: 273,246 acres burned, 2,820 structures destroyed. Fifteen lives were lost, including Firefighter Steven Rucker for whom the nearby highway was named. The fire also burned through nearly half of Pinecrest’s 80 acres of pine, oak, cedar and trailers.
But to understand the story of how Pinecrest came to be what it is today, we have to talk a little more about Frank and Kathleen:
In the late ’70s, Frank was working at the city planning department in Culver City. “One day, I came back to the office after lunch, and standing there at the counter was Kathleen. I thought, wow, she looks interesting, and a woman I worked with looked at me and said ‘You’re going to marry that girl someday.’”
His co-worker’s intuition was correct; Frank and Kathleen were married in 1981.
Frank Spevacek and Kathleen Rosenow founded Pinecrest Retreat, the vintage travel trailer community near Julian, CA. (Photo Courtesy of Pinecrest Retreat)
Frank and Kathleen lived in Santa Ana, and eventually started their own successful consulting business, advising cities and private developers on the redevelopment of older communities and other real-estate transactions. After the Cedar fire in 2003, Frank and Kathleen’s neighbor approached them seeking advice for his parents, who were the current owners of the Pinecrest Retreat.
Frank recalls, “It was a rather serendipitous circumstance. Our neighbor came over and said his parents were burned out in the Cedar fire, and they had their home up on the hill there, and the fire just raged through and burned it to the ground as well as half the property. Well, they were done with it and wanted to move on, so he asked if we would come by and take a look at the property and give them some advice on what they could do or how they might be able to sell it.”
As it turns out, they ended up buying Pinecrest themselves.
“Our overall intent was to nurture the land and its facilities back to good health.”
‘Trailer people’
New to Pinecrest this past year, Suzie and Richard DeGuilio of Alhambra had some friends who were site-holders. They informed them of a 1969 Silver Streak Sabre that was for sale, and if they purchased the trailer they could probably take over the site from the current owners.
Silver Streak trailers were produced in small numbers in El Monte, and you’ll never want to confuse one with the similar-looking Airstream trailers, as Silver Streak owners tend to look down on the more mass-produced, industry giant Airstream.
Standing in front of their new-yet-old Silver Streak, Suzie recalls, “We drove up to see it with our son, and they had multiple people looking at it, but they liked us the best, so we got picked!” She laughs.
Richard chimes in, “That was our first time visiting Julian and Pinecrest. And honestly, when we were driving up from LA, I was a little skeptical, thinking, OK, are we really trailer people? Like, is this really our thing? As we were driving, I thought, OK, this is pretty and everything, but still not convinced. Then we pulled into downtown Julian, and I was pretty much sold. We drove into Pinecrest and just fell in love; no more convincing needed to be done. We were trailer people.”
“The site is just gorgeous with the live oaks, and it’s very private,” Suzie says. “I grew up camping all over the western states, and to me, it felt very comfortable. As we got older, we realized we didn’t love pitching tents and sleeping on the ground whenever we camped. It’s a lovely way to have a getaway without making a campsite every time. Another thing we love is that our trailer was in original condition, all the appliances and fixtures, nobody took it apart and tried to build something new. You see so many old trailers that look like a new condo with plasma TVs and microwaves. We appreciate the original vintage.”
Richard adds: “It does need a little work; that’s the fun part of owning it. We don’t want to come up here and work the whole time, but it’s cool to work on little projects, and it starts to make it feel like it’s ours.”
All in the family
After they purchased Pinecrest, Frank and Kathleen moved to Julian full time and began the overwhelming task of restoring it. It soon became a family affair.
Frank and Kathleen’s youngest daughter, Jill, chipped in by working at the pool snack shop during her summer break from college.
“After college, I went to work on a farm in Nevada City, kind of testing the waters of what I wanted to do in life because that’s what you do in your early 20s,” Jill says. She later took a job teaching outdoor education in Portola, a small town in Northern California, where she met Wilson Riggs.
If you were to picture in your mind’s eye what a “Sierra Nevada mountain guide” looks like, an image of Wilson Riggs would appear — big, bearded and burly. And if you were to give a name to that imaginary mountain guide, you’d choose a name like “Wilson Riggs.”
Jill and Wilson ended up working together in the mountains in 2010 — Wilson as a mountain guide with Yosemite Mountain Guides, and Jill continuing in outdoor education. They soon fell in love and were later married.
Speaking from the clubhouse, a space Wilson and Jill helped create, he recalls, “Our time working in the mountains kind of left a gap in our winters, so we came down here to Pinecrest and started helping out, and then we’d go back and do our seasonal work during the summers up north.”
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“At that point, we started to really see the potential of Pinecrest and said to my in-laws, ‘You know, we could eventually take this place over.’” In 2013, Jill and Wilson Riggs took over full-time management of the property and are now part owners.
“We’ve just kind of been chugging away at it ever since. There’s not a part of this park we haven’t put our stamp on at this point,” Wilson says. “When we first started, it was kind of creating my mom and dad’s vision and then just us getting comfortable here. Our first big job was numbering all the sites. The previous owner had their own mental numbering system that no one really knew about. We ended up collecting 160 large rocks and hand-painting them with site numbers so we would have some idea of who was where,” Jill adds, laughing.
Waiting to get in
There’s a wait list to become one of the coveted 160 site-holders; people just don’t want to leave. The yearly lease on a Pinecrest site is about what one would expect to pay to store a trailer at a storage facility in Southern California.
Kathy remarks, “The site holders are our business plan. They’re what keep us going.”
When asked why, with such a high demand, they don’t raise the yearly leases, Wilson responds, “This is our life’s work. There’s not a rock here I haven’t stepped on or kicked, and we’re not here to make a killing; we’re here to make a living.”
You’ll often see “Pinecresters” on long walks through the tight, gravel drives that randomly connect all of the sites, a sort of living, natural gallery, marveling at the beauty of their neighbors’ blood, sweat and tears, described by Jill Riggs as “pieces of art.”
The most famous trailer at Pinecrest is probably a fully restored 1957, 27-foot Airfloat Cruiser in anodized gold, purchased by partners Jim Dowle and Spencer Street, from a Hollywood film editor in 2023. You may have seen Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Kurt Russell or Margot Robbie lounging in and around the Airfloat in the 2019 film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
“We loved it straight away,” Jim says with his distinctive British accent as he points out some of the tedious work they’ve done to the trailer. “The connection to the film was quite something. We went up to Ventura to take a look at it, and it was way out of our budget, but we thought budgets were meant to be broken, so we made a deal then and there.”
“We love it here at Pinecrest,” Spencer adds. “We all have a common interest, in the vintage camping and the outdoors. It’s truly where you leave all your troubles behind, isn’t it?”
Firewood is available at Pinecrest Retreat near Julian, CA, and fires are allowed in covered fire rings except during high wind events. (Photo by Jimmy Camp)