Now, it's a fading memory.
The canyon has been all but wiped off the landscape, its steep walls carved into gentle slopes, its depths filled with 35,000 truckloads of dirt as the US government nears completion of an extensive border reinforcement project at the southwestern-most point of the United States.
In 2005, the Bush administration waived state and federal environmental laws to overcome opposition to the massive earth-moving effort, which entails cutting the tops off nearby hills and pushing about 1.7 million cubic yards of dirt into the gulch and neighboring Goat Canyon.
Environmentalists and conservation groups fear that the project, scheduled to be completed in May, will harm the Tijuana River estuary, threaten endangered species, and destroy culturally sensitive American Indian sites. With construction well underway, it's clear that few of the 500 miles of new border fencing projects are transforming the environment as radically as the 3 miles from the Smuggler's Gulch area to the coast.
Once a breach in the coastal hills, the gulch is now more like a dam than a passage.
Anyone attempting to cross confronts a 150-foot-high berm that soon will be topped with stadium lighting, video surveillance cameras, and 15-foot-high fencing.
Fence project transforms Smuggler's Gulch region - The Boston Globe
Hallelujah. . . . could it be that a little common sense was present at some point during the Bush administration?
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