Elfin Forest Folks Fail to Bar ‘Ropes Course’

Despite the objections of area residents, San Diego County supervisors Wednesday granted a one-year permit allowing a so-called “ropes course” motivational program to keep operating in the secluded North County enclave of Elfin Forest.

The board voted 4-0, with Supervisor Susan Golding absent, to allow the Encinitas-based firm Namaste to run the course, which has as its most controversial feature a series of ropes hung from trees, on which participants swing to build their self-esteem and confidence.

At the same time, the program’s director said the company was already searching for a new location and would be gone from Elfin Forest, a small rural community east of Encinitas, before the permit expires a year from now.

In response to the objections of area residents, Carol Washburn, president of Namaste and the program’s director, took pains to clarify what she said were misunderstandings about the nature of the ropes course, which has been operating without a permit for about a year.

“It’s a learning setting,” Washburn said of the program. “It’s not scream therapy. If the neighbors really knew what we were doing, they would feel differently about it.”

According to Terry Henderson, a counselor on leave from Oklahoma State University to help Namaste start its program, the ropes course is used to help businessmen, human development specialists, families and disadvantaged children overcome their fears and develop communication skills.

In addition to ropes strung between the towering eucalyptus trees that give Elfin Forest its character, Namaste’s program includes cables hung from the trees and attached to tires--on which participants swing--and areas where blindfolded students are taught to communicate without speaking.

“The ropes course is not a party, but a classroom,” Henderson said. “It’s not a place for a bunch of rowdy people to have a good time. It is a highly defined group of people with a highly defined purpose.”

But area residents disagreed. They said the program is a noisy nuisance that attracts strangers to their community and poses a hazard to children or others who might pass through the site when it is unattended.

“This is not a school, this is not a university, this is not a nonprofit civic endeavor,” said attorney Thomas W. Bettles, who was hired to represent the residents. “It is a business for profit.”

Kirby Hughes, who has lived for two years on a parcel that borders the ropes course, said he moved to Elfin Forest from a tract home so that he could escape unwanted noise and intrusions.

“Now I can’t open my doors or windows when they’re operating down there because it’s so disturbing,” he said.

Supervisor Paul Eckert, whose district includes Elfin Forest, said the occasional shouts of glee from the program’s participants were probably no worse than the sounds of chain saws and motorcycle engines that normally punctuate the area’s rural solitude.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in Elfin Forest when I haven’t heard a motorcycle somewhere, over some hill,” Eckert said.

Eckert added that it would serve little purpose for the board to deny the permit and then go to court to force Namaste to stop using the site.

“It would take us a year or so to get them out,” he said, noting that the company had agreed to leave by then anyway.

Eckert’s colleagues agreed and granted the permit, while limiting the use of the course to 12 days a month and the number of people allowed on the site at any one time to 33. In addition, all program participants must meet at the company’s Encinitas offices and be taken to the Elfin Forest site in vans.