# The Forgotten Dirt Strip of Murrieta ### The True Story of Thompson Field, Bear Creek Airport L86 Long before Murrieta became a landscape of subdivisions, golf courses, shopping centers, and crowded freeways, there was a little dirt runway sitting among the wheat fields. It was called **Thompson Field**, although pilots also knew it as **Bear Creek Airport** and, for a time, the **Thompson Transportation Center**. Its FAA identifier was **L86**. There was no polished terminal. No control tower. No restaurant overlooking the runway. There wasn't even pavement. Just a **2,700-foot dirt strip running roughly northwest to southeast, designated Runway 15/33**, surrounded by open countryside on the western edge of Murrieta. Historical airport research indicates the field appeared sometime between **1967 and 1978**. It isn't shown on a 1966 San Diego sectional chart or a 1967 aerial photograph, but by 1978 it appeared in the *Pilot's Guide to California Airports* under the wonderfully simple category of **"Unattended Airports."** And unattended was probably the perfect description. Thompson Field belonged to **Curt Thompson, a local farmer**, and the airport apparently functioned almost as much like a gathering place as an aviation facility. The runway cut through land where Thompson grew wild wheat, which he harvested and baled for livestock feed. Small airplanes would come and go from the dirt strip, while the surrounding property remained unmistakably agricultural. Former pilot Bob Butt remembered learning to fly there in a **Taylorcraft and a Cessna 140**. There was no fuel service at Thompson Field, so when the airplanes needed gas, they flew over to Temecula Airport. But Butt remembered something else about the place. In the evenings, local farmers would gather beneath the oak trees beside the airfield. Old couches had been dragged outside, and the men would sit there drinking beer while airplanes occasionally came and went.