Hunt Club I

Hunt Club I covers 157.48 acres, the fourth largest of the fifty communities on the city's homeowner association register, and 137 addresses sit on it across seven named streets whose names all run to the same theme: Ascot Lane, Fox Run Lane, Golden Ridge Lane, Hunt Club Drive, Rolling Wood Lane, Steeplechase Drive and Suffolk Lane. All 2.12 miles of street inside the boundary are on the city's Private Roads layer. The whole boundary is Very Low Density on the General Plan, and the zoning layer carries 147.1 acres as Single-Family-40,000 with 10.2 acres in the Residential and Agricultural District, so the minimum lot is close to an acre and horses are a permitted use on part of it.

The boundary takes in 2.62 miles of city trail, the second most of the fifty communities on the register, and eight trailheads sit inside it, among them the heads of the East Hunt Club, West Hunt Club and Hunt Club Ridge trails and the terminus of the Peacock Trail. The city's 200 foot ridgeline buffer crosses 22.13 acres and the Lower Hunt Club Reservoir sits inside the boundary on city record. Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned Harold Ambuehl Elementary for TK through fifth grade, Marco Forster Middle, which enrolls 930, and San Juan Hills High School, which enrolls 2,641 and graduated 96.2 percent of its class. The fire layer places 118.8 acres in the High class and 38.7 acres in Very High.

The Hunt Club is a private neighborhood of custom houses on lots of an acre and more, on former ranch land at the mouth of the eastern canyons, and the street names come out of the hunt: Steeplechase Drive, Ascot Lane, Fox Run Lane, Suffolk Lane and Hunt Club Drive. The city adopted it as Specific Plan 77-01, Tract 6305, with 20 foot and 7 to 10 foot equestrian easements and a designated ridgeline drawn into the plan. The first homes were finished in 1980 and the median home dates to 1985.

Horses are not decoration here. The town has been horse country since the mission was founded in 1776 and the valley filled with vaqueros, cattle ranches and open grazing land, and it has kept equestrian zoning, public riding trails and open space long after most of Orange County let them go. A local author, Donna Friess, gave the subject a whole book, Capistrano Trails: Ride for the Brand, an oral history of the town's riding life. The Rancho Mission Viejo Riding Park is about a mile east, and 2.6 miles of riding trail run through the neighborhood itself into the hills.