by Carey Goldberg

About the author: Carey Goldberg is a staff writer for the New York Times.

In some canyons [at Otay Mountain in California], it looks as if hundreds of Hansels and Gretels have scattered trails of trash behind them, marking the route from Tijuana.

Halloweenish Landscapes

New paths fork across almost every slope, giving parts of this once-lonely mountain the threadbare look of the more trafficked corners of a city park.

And a 15,000-acre swath of the mountain ridge is stripped and sooty, burned in October 1996 to a Halloweenish landscape of naked black branches and orange dust by a wildfire that the authorities are convinced was sparked by an illegal border-crosser. Who else, they ask, would have been desperate enough to be up on a 4,000-foot peak building a campfire here on a windy...