The Trails

The Trails is 34.7 acres on the western hills with 130 addresses on 141 parcels and 1.07 miles of private street, reached from five streets: Brooke Lane, Chantilly Lane, Somerset Lane, Trails Drive and Walker Lane. The city zones 34.56 acres PRD Planned Residential Development and the general plan carries the whole boundary as Greenbelt Concept.

All 34.7 acres fall in the state's Very High fire hazard severity class, with the liquefaction zone across 5.6 acres and the landslide zone touching 0.6. West Coyote Hills Tree Park is at 2349 Parks Road on 10.99 acres, open since 1979, with recreation trails. Sunset Lane Elementary is 0.49 miles out at 700 students, D. Russell Parks Junior High 0.59 miles at 854 and Sunny Hills High 1.1 miles at 2,337.

The Trails sits in west Fullerton against the West Coyote Hills, and those hills are the reason anything here looks the way it does. They were a major oil field from 1890 onward. In the mid 1920s the Fullerton fields in the northern part of town were running 376 wells and pulling an average of 325,000 barrels a month, and the derricks stood on the ridgelines above the orange groves. Most of the West Coyote Hills has since been converted to housing and commercial use, and this neighborhood of 130 homes on thirty five acres is part of that conversion.

What is left of the hills has been argued over for half a century. A 510 acre remnant is still owned by Pacific Coast Homes, the land development arm of Chevron, which has long proposed 760 houses on 179 acres while donating 352 acres to the city as the Robert E. Ward Nature Preserve. Fullerton voters rejected that in 2012 by passing Measure W, the courts and the council spent years arguing about what the measure actually meant, and the state has since bought portions of the eastern hills. The undeveloped ground is coastal sage scrub, buckwheat and prickly pear.