Rainbow, CA

Rainbow is the last community on Interstate 15 before the freeway crosses out of San Diego County, a rural valley that serves as the southern gateway to Temecula in Riverside County. Fallbrook is the neighboring town to the west, and Escondido and the rest of North County are south down the interstate. Spanish speakers knew the valley as Vallecitos, the little valleys, until the late 1880s. That is when it became Rainbow Valley, after James Peebles Marshall Rainbow, a homesteader who bought land there. The census first counted Rainbow as its own place in 1980, and it covers about eleven square miles of hill and canyon. The land is the main event. At roughly a thousand feet, the slopes hold palm tree farms and fenced acreage, and homes are scattered across big parcels instead of grouped into tracts. A wildfire driven by Santa Ana winds burned through the valley in October 2007. South of town, the Fallbrook Land Conservancy keeps Monserate Mountain open to the public on a 340-acre preserve, and its summit path climbs hard from the first step. Across the county line, the Pechanga Resort Casino and the shopping and dining of Temecula sit a short trip up the interstate. Close to home, a small market and a few storefronts sit along Fifth Street just east of the freeway, a strip that grew up on the old Highway 395 route in the years before the interstate existed. Most other errands, from a full grocery run to a dentist, mean heading to Fallbrook or Temecula. Being on the freeway cuts both ways. The interstate puts Temecula and Escondido within easy reach, but nearly everything requires the drive, and the community has no real town center of its own. What it has is open hillside running right up to the county line, with traffic streaming past on the freeway below.