With placid coastal lagoons and pine-covered mountains, and everything in between, this region has some of the most diverse and best protected areas in the United States in spite of how much has been paved over for malls and houses.

Well more than 1 million acres of natural lands in San Diego and Riverside counties have enjoyed protection from roads, development, motorized vehicles, mining and logging for years.

And, with President Barack Obama's recent signature on one of the largest wilderness bills ever to pass out of Congress, close to 200,000 acres of Riverside County lands have been added to the total.

"It's sort of a dream come true," said Geoffrey Smith of San Diego, a longtime wilderness advocate, in a telephone interview Thursday. "But the dream continues. There is more work to be done."

Indeed, the recent success of Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Palm Springs, in securing wilderness in Riverside County has inspired Smith and others to push harder for areas to be added in San Diego County.

Smith wants Eagle Peak east of Ramona christened wilderness. The peak is a haven for golden eagles and a rock climber's paradise. And the area is known for its scenic cascades, including Mildred Falls, Cedar Creek Falls and Three Sisters.

Farther to the north, Wendy Sparks of Fallbrook, organizer of the North San Diego Wild Heritage Campaign, said advocates want to expand two of the new wilderness areas east of Temecula so they spill across the county line into San Diego County.

Sparks also is seeking protection for the Santa Margarita River below Temecula and through Fallbrook.

"Wilderness doesn't have county boundaries," she said. "We would like to finish the job."

New destinations

The job started by Bono Mack left behind a larger existing wilderness area near Temecula and three new ones.

Under the new federal law, 2,000 acres were added to the 16,000-acre Agua Tibia Wilderness on the northern slopes of Palomar Mountain, where groves of pine and fir shelter rare spotted owls.

The law also wrapped a new 16,000-acre wilderness area around 5,548-foot-high Beauty Mountain farther east, near the Riverside County town of Aguanga and the San Diego County village of Oak Grove.

It also framed new wilderness areas of 7,000 acres at Cahuilla Mountain north of Anza and of 22,000 acres along the South Fork of the San Jacinto River near Idyllwild.

"It puts these areas on the map and makes them destinations," Smith said.

Sparks is trying to piggyback on the new law.

She said her North San Diego County campaign is aiming to add 7,800 acres to the Agua Tibia wilderness and 14,000 acres to the new Beauty Mountain wilderness within San Diego County.

"They're just absolutely beautiful areas," Sparks said.

Besides targeting land along the county line, the Bono Mack legislation afforded the highest level of protection under federal law for tens of thousands of acres in the mountains and deserts of central Riverside County.

With the additions, Riverside County now has 1.3 million acres of federal wilderness areas and San Diego County has 107,000 acres, according to Ryan Henson, policy director for the California Wilderness Coalition.

The region is blessed with large chunks of state wilderness, too, notably in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. When sprawling Anza-Borrego is added, San Diego County's inventory of wilderness leaps to more than a half million acres.

Both counties have smaller ecological reserves that safeguard wild lands, too.

From the desert to the sea

The area's single largest concentration of wilderness is in Joshua Tree National Park, with nearly 600,000 acres of protected lands. About 500,000 of those acres lie within Riverside County, Henson said.

The park near Palm Springs is known for its flowering namesake plants and otherworldly rock formations.

Like the national park, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park has been a popular destination for a long time. Famous for its colorful spring wildflowers, lush palm oases and agile bighorn sheep, it has 419,000 acres of wilderness in San Diego County and 41,000 acres of wilderness in Riverside County.

The presence of wilderness in the park is largely why San Diego Gas & Electric Co. chose to build a new power line, Sunrise Powerlink, around Anza-Borrego to the south rather than through it. State regulators indicated they would not allow the utility to sacrifice wilderness for wires.

Some say the Anza-Borrego experience underscores the need for more wilderness in places such as the Cleveland National Forest near Lake Elsinore, where there are plans for a power line, reservoir and tunneled highway.

"The threat never goes away until it becomes wilderness," said Dave Voss of Oceanside, wilderness chairman for the San Diego County Sierra Club.

But Voss said he is grateful for the protection already in place for 38,000-acre San Mateo Canyon Wilderness west of Murrieta. It is a place of chaparral-carpeted hills, year-round creeks and seasonal waterfalls.

"That's one of my favorite places to go and not too many people know about it," he said. "When you take people there, they are amazed. There is always one person who says, 'I never knew this was here.' "

Vernal pools and coastal lagoons

A little more well known is the nearby 8,300-acre Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve. While not a wilderness area, the place of oak groves, native bunchgrass prairie and rare vernal pools is managed like one.

"It's sort of like a time machine," said Rob Hicks, a reserve interpreter for Riverside County Park District.

Besides preserving nature, he said, the reserve shelters a pair of 1850s-era adobes that are the oldest standing structures in Riverside County.

In the 1980s, developers proposed to sprinkle 4,000 tract homes among the plateau's oaks, but activists mounted a campaign to halt the development.

Similarly, activists along the North San Diego County coast mounted a campaign four decades ago to halt plans to dredge San Elijo Lagoon and build 10,000 homes on the site, said Andy Mauro, a Buena Vista Audubon Society board member.

As a result, a half-dozen lagoons remain intact -- even though lagoons in Orange and Los Angeles counties long ago disappeared under the bulldozer's blade.

"We're very blessed here in North County because of our lagoon system. It is like a string of pearls," Mauro said. "It's extremely accessible. It's right here. And it offers respite from the daily grind."

Besides being pretty to look at and a pleasant place to walk, the lagoons provide refuge for numerous birds.

San Elijo, on the border of Encinitas and Solana Beach, is the largest of the lagoons. Each of them is protected as an ecological reserve, and together they cover 2,600 acres. Mauro said Buena Vista Lagoon, on the border of Carlsbad and Oceanside, was the first ecological reserve in the state.

Foresight

It was more luck than anything else that prevented the lagoons from suffering the fate of those to the north.

"It was just timing," Mauro said. "It really had to do with the pace of our development here in San Diego County. We lagged a little bit behind Orange County. When people started looking at the lagoons with covetous eyes and started crafting development plans, that was the time when people were waking up to environmentalism."

On the other hand, long before the environmental movement, pioneers had the foresight a century ago to set aside land south of Del Mar that eventually became Torrey Pines State Reserve.

The scenic 2,000-acre state park, with the blue ocean providing a dramatic backdrop for a grove of 5,000 evergreens growing on a bluff, is a refuge for the rarest pine tree in the United States. The remnant of an ancient coastal forest, the long-needled Torrey Pine lives in only two places in the world today -- at the reserve and on Santa Rosa Island off the coast of Santa Barbara.

"It's a funny plant," said Darren Smith, environmental scientist for California state parks. "It is definitely one of those that is threatened in its native habitat. And that is because we are having warmer and drier weather."

Consequently, he said, it is a good thing someone saw the need to protect the rare and elegant tree.

Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 745-6611, Ext. 2623, or ddowney@nctimes.com.