Olinda Historic Trail

Olinda Historic Trail. . , While the oilfield here remains active, the earlier community is gone. Dwindling oil reserves and technology reduced the number of employees, flood water from these canyons made life hazardous, and suburban development become increasingly attractive., What visitors find today is a new mix of old elements. The history of Olinda is preserved in and around a museum and along the park's trail. Old oil wells with new equipment content pumping. New homes sit atop the streets and homes sites of boomtown Olinda. Both native and introduces plants and animals live along the park's trail, and panoramic vistas offer views of ever-changing Orange County., Olinda and Oil , Oil put Olinda on the map. , In 1897, the Santa Fe Oil Company successfully drilled Olinda Well #1 into these sloping hills. Two years later, the Santa Fe Railroad added an "Olinda" station to their map of destinations., Dozens, then hundreds, and by the 1920's as many as 3,000 workers and their families moved here to drill and operate Olinda's wells. Oilfields and community intermingled, sprawling up these hills and down into canyons and valleys., Today, Olinda Well #1, now over a century old, still pumps just steps from where you are standing. A "horsehead" pump, not a derrick, tops the well, dipping and rising in steady cadence. Of the hundreds of buildings that once comprised Olinda, just a handful survive., The Nature of Olinda , Nature played a significant role in Olinda's history. , The hot dry climate of the Puente-Chino Hills made agriculture, without irrigation, difficult. When it did rain, cloudbursts turned canyons into raging torrents, triggering floods and mudslides., Underground, the twisted, uplifted rocks of the hills, shoved to and fro as earthquakes rumbled along local faults, trapped large pools of oil., After humans discovered oil here, they dotted these hills with derricks and storage tanks and crossed them with roads and pipelines. Periodically oil from new wells blew high into the sky before coating vegetation. New species, brought by humans, competed with native plants and animals.