This cache is located on the former main road from Santa Margarita to Pozo. It traveled past the former Blinn Ranch. The road was surveyed in 1880 and was presumably built shortly thereafter. Along the dirt road on the way to the cache keep an eye out for two culverts built of stone with apparently old mile markers next to them.
The road we now drive out to Pozo was locally known as the “mountain road” – and was barely passable through 1906.
From the parking area, the trail follows the now dilapidated paved road for about a mile. It was last paved sometime prior to May 1941, when this road and the surrounding ranches were purchased from the Blinns and others by the U.S. Government for the Camp San Luis Obispo Dam. The Blinn Ranch house and surrounding property is now under water.
In June 1941, Paul Baumann, C.E., was called in as consultant on the design of the Camp San Luis Obispo Dam (later renamed Salinas Dam). Baumann was credited with introducing the sport of skiing to southern California while he was engineering Lake Arrowhead’s dam during the winter of 1921. The snow there had reached several feet in depth that winter which enabled Baumann, together with another Swiss Engineer, Karl Erni from Lucerne, to spend their spare time snow skiing.
The U.S. Corps of Engineers was to secure the supply of water for Camp San Luis Obispo, for the 40th Division, which had been reactivated in March 1941 from National Guard units in California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.
The building of the dam was a hush-hush job and extremely urgent. The design of the dam, which is of an unusual structural type, in that it was the first arch dam constructed with thrust blocks on both abutments. The plan was to install much larger flood gates at some later date to double the storage capacity of the reservoir (which never happened). The design began in June; the contract was let in September and the job was completed by Christmas – all in 1941. The attack on Pearl Harbor had definitely an accelerating effect. The dam is 165’ high, 600 feet long at the crest and stores 50,000 acre feet of water.