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A vision nearly a decade in the making was realized this week with the opening of Don Horsley County Park at Tunitas Creek Beach, a 58-acre property midway between Half Moon Bay and Pescadero.
After purchasing the land from a private owner in 2017, Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) sold it to San Mateo County in 2020. Originally slated to open in fall 2022, the park’s debut was pushed back due to pandemic-related delays, the CZU Fire in 2020 and two unexpected landslides.
The park’s opening sheds light on the history of the place known to locals as Don’t Eat Me Beach because of past shark sightings and as the former spot of a home previously owned by singer Chris Isaak. (The dilapidated, abandoned building, which had become a habitat for bats, was demolished as part of the $22.8 million project to construct the park.)
The property also demonstrates how climate change is factoring into infrastructure decisions on the San Mateo County coast, as erosion and sea level rise projections played a significant role in the project’s final design.
“The opportunity to build a new beach park from scratch doesn’t come around very often,” said Taylor Jang, senior land manager at Peninsula Open Space Trust. “There’s a lot of work that goes into making these protected spaces accessible and open to the public.”
Tunitas Creek Beach’s Indigenous roots
Tunitas Creek Beach is located on the ancestral land of an Ramaytush Ohlone tribe known as the Cotegen. Indigenous people lived on the Peninsula for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. At Tunitas Creek Beach, they harvested mussels, clams and other shellfish and intentionally burned underbrush to allow native plants to thrive and to provide habitat for game animals.
After Spain claimed California as one of its territories in the 1760s, it granted land to Catholic missionaries to build missions. In 1769, Spain sent a military officer, Gaspar de Portolá, on an expedition to build a fort and Catholic mission at Monterey Bay. The group set out from San Diego, planning to meet a ship to replenish their supplies. But they didn’t recognize Monterey Bay when they reached it, so they continued north and became the first Europeans to see San Francisco Bay.
Unable to find their ship – which, unbeknownst to them, had been lost at sea – the group ran out of food and began to get sick. Eventually, the Portolá expedition encountered a tribe known as the Quiroste roughly 20 miles south of Tunitas Creek Beach. The Quiroste welcomed the Spaniards, fed them and provided guides who led them north on trails. As a result, the Spaniards met the Cotegen tribe at Tunitas Creek Beach along with other Indigenous villages.
As they built missions throughout California, the Spaniards brought in animals that overgrazed much of the plants that native animals had relied on and banned Indigenous people from burning brush to create new grasslands for the animals. The missions also grew non-native crops and replaced many of the native plants Indigenous people had eaten. Eventually, the Spanish colonizers forced the Indigenous people to relocate to the missions and eat non-native foods.
Forced relocation, hard labor and exposure to deadly new diseases devastated the Native American population and culture. After Mexico gained independence from Spain and the Mexican Republic closed the missions in the 1830s and ‘40s, it promised to return some of the land to the Indigenous people. Instead, most of the land was divided into large estates called ranchos and transferred to a handful of upper-class Hispanic families. Two ranchos shared a property line at Tunitas Creek Beach.
Hard labor continued for the Indigenous people at the ranchos. After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, California officially became the 31st state in 1850. The state made it legal to murder Native Americans and kidnap and enslave their children.
A land acknowledgment can be found at an overlook near the parking lots at Tunitas Creek Beach recognizing the Ohlone as the “original stewards of this land.”
“The Ohlone understood the interconnectedness of all things and maintained harmony with nature for millenia,” part of the land acknowledgement reads.
An entrepreneurial history
By the late 1800s, the Coastside had attracted entrepreneurs like Alexander Gordon, who came to California in 1849 looking for gold. Gordon eventually bought 1,000 acres in the area for a farm and dairy business. Seeking an easier way to transport his farm goods, he designed a 350-foot chute down to the sea on cliffs north of Tunitas Creek Beach. Workers would bring goods out of warehouses atop cliffs at the far end of the beach and send them to waiting ships below.
“Gordon’s chute was a really notable landmark in the Prohibition days where quite a bit of smuggling from the top of Tunitas bluffs occurred with a chute running down dozens of feet from the top of the bluff to load ships that were anchored just off the bluffs in the water,” Jang said.
The chute lasted seven years before it was blown away in a storm, but its bolts in the cliff wall and foundation in the reefs are still visible.
Gordon also partnered with a local Frenchman named Eugene Froment to build the Tunitas Creek Turnpike in 1875. After clearing a road from the ridgeline down to the coast, they charged other drivers to use it.
In 1905, another group of entrepreneurs set out to build an 80-mile coastline railroad from San Francisco to Santa Cruz. But when the 1906 earthquake struck, cliffs collapsed along the Devil’s Slide section of the railroad, taking 4,000 feet of track into the ocean along with tools and equipment.
Several investors dropped out of the project, and money ran out before the railroad was finished. The northern section of railroad tracks reached the Tunitas Creek Beach area in 1908, but the southern section was never filled in, ending 26 miles away in Swanton. The Ocean Shore Railroad ran for the next 12 years, but landslides repeatedly forced trains to stop running for months at a time. The railroad shut down in 1920.
Among more recent generations, the beach was known as a popular retreat spot for an artists colony and as the location of a clifftop home formerly owned by singer Chris Isaak. The beach itself has always been public, serving as a destination for fishing and surfing. But it lacked official public access points, leading visitors to use unofficial trails to reach the shore.
Popularized by social media, the beach also became a hot spot for raves and illegal camping that damaged the creek delta and bluffs, as well as large-scale Dungeness crab poaching. After locals brought their concerns to the late San Mateo County Supervisor Don Horsley, POST in 2017 purchased the property at Horsley’s urging for $5 million from a private owner. San Mateo County purchased the land from POST in 2020 using $6 million provided by the state.
Planning for climate change
The opening of Tunitas Creek Beach was delayed by an array of complications. San Mateo County Parks employees were pulled for emergency service work during the pandemic, and the CZU Fire in 2020 also led to delays, Jang said.
POST and the county also had to weigh how to balance public access with protecting sensitive species like the western snowy plover, a threatened shorebird that uses the area for its habitat.
The property is also in an active landslide zone, and two landslides further delayed the park’s opening. Geological instability will remain an ongoing concern, and incorporating sea level rise models into the design process led to the decision to have less development on the beach itself and more on the upper bluff.
“(It was) more of a philosophy of working with nature rather than armoring or hardscaping or trying to engineer our way to something that we know is coming,” Jang said.
Hannah Ormshaw, the assistant director for San Mateo County Parks, said that while many of the park’s amenities are out of sea level rise impact areas, bluff erosion from sea level rise or king tides are still factors. The dramatic sandstone cliffs framing the beach are made of rock that can easily crumble into sand from earthquakes or waves.
“Some early design alternatives looked at a boardwalk or some other features that would be more at the beach level, and those were ultimately omitted from the project because of the potential impacts on the longevity of those features,” she said.
The parks department also wanted to ensure it was meeting priorities for the site that had been identified by the community, including accessibility.
“We wanted to make sure that there was the ability for people with disabilities or accessibility needs to be able to get to the park amenities,” Ormshaw said. “So that big design feature was an accessible pathway to get visitors from the parking lot down to the mid-bluff area so that they would be able to enjoy the picnic sites, enjoy the amphitheater, use the restroom, have access to the ranger station and the interpretive signage.”
All told, getting the project completed was a collaborative effort, with work across multiple agencies and funding from multiple sources.
“None of it could be possible without so many people behind it to bring this to light,” said Emma Gonzalez, San Mateo County Parks interim director. “It requires the work of so many different entities and input and engagement.”
What parkgoers can expect
The park is open daily starting at 8 a.m. and there is no entrance fee. Closing times change seasonally. Blufftop parking is available for up to 80 vehicles, along with a bike rack, a bike repair station and electric vehicle charging. Overlooks at the upper bluff parking lot make it easy to pull off Highway 1 and take in the view.
“The overlooks that are there now and the view you have of this beach are incredible compared to what you were able to see before,” Ormshaw said.
The Mid-Bluff Trail leads from the parking lot to the mid-bluff overlook, which features an amphitheater, benches, picnic tables, a ranger station and restroom. Two trails lead from the upper bluff to the mile-long beach.
No lifeguards are on duty, and dogs are not allowed at the park. The site also doesn’t allow horses, camping, campfires or portable barbecues. As at many beaches, alcohol and smoking are banned. Fishermen must have licenses and abide by fishing regulations.
“We hope that people embrace it,” said San Mateo County Parks superintendent of operations Scott Lombardi. “It’s a beautiful beach. The views some days are just absolutely stunning out there.”
A major natural feature of the park is Tunitas Creek, which connects to the ocean in the winter and forms a lagoon in the summer with a sandbar typically separating it from the ocean, Jang said.
“The creek is definitely a major highlight from the visitor perspective and is something that always draws people when they get down to the beach,” he said.
The property is a habitat for numerous species, from Dungeness crabs and steelhead trout to the threatened red-legged frog and western snowy plover. Great white sharks have also been spotted in the past, leading locals to nickname it Don’t Eat Me Beach. Gray whale sightings are common in the spring and fall. Coastal scrub, Monterey pine trees and wildflowers are among the park’s plant life.
Visitors looking to dive deeper into the park’s history and ecology can listen to a free audio tour available in English and Spanish online or through the TravelStorys app.
“I think they’ve done an amazing job of preserving the history of that area,” Gonzalez said. “Ten years from now, 20 years from now, 100 years from now, this park will still be there and millions of people will have had access to it. That’s amazing and historical on its own.”
Historical information used in this story was provided by the Tunitas Creek Beach TravelStorys audio tour and Peninsula Open Space Trust.
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