Santa Cruz’s national monument transitions into its post-politics phase
It has been over eight years since former president Barack Obama named the Cotoni-Coast Dairies property, the sprawling coastal landscape just north of Davenport, as a national monument.
Obama’s executive order, signed in the final week of his presidency, mandated federal preservation of, and public access to, the land. Yet, for years, the effort to prepare the property for visitors met friction among an organized group of North Coast residents, for whom a national monument spelled a dramatic rise in tourism traffic to their quiet neck of the woods. Citing environmental concerns, they pushed back against visions to open up the national monument to camping and hunting, as well as proposals for parking lots and access roads. Legal appeals added years to estimated open dates.
All the while, however, a local crew was busy designing and constructing a robust trail network through the property so that, once the monument transitioned out of its politics stage and the public was finally allowed in, hikers and mountain bikers would have a way to experience this gem of a landscape.
That post-politics stage has arrived. In April, the federal Bureau of Land Management will break ground on a parking lot and expects to open the national monument to visitors this summer.
In reporting a pair of articles published Tuesday, I got to explore Cotoni-Coast Dairies in a way the broader public hasn’t, and better understand what goes into creating a trail network from scratch, and the responsibility held by those building trails and determining how generations of visitors will get to experience Santa Cruz County’s own national monument.
“It’s going to be very popular,” Matt De Young told me. He is executive director of the nonprofit Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship, the group responsible for designing, building and maintaining the trails. “We think it rivals Big Sur.”
➤ Read: Hidden no more: Crews push to debut Santa Cruz County’s first national monument trail network this summer
➤ Read: The road not yet opened: On the backbreaking work of trail-building from scratch
The Lookout Santa Cruz app is available now in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Learn more here.
OF NOTE
No warning, no goodbye: ICE quietly deports Santa Cruz resident after 22 years: In what appears to be the first known case of a deportation in Santa Cruz County since Donald Trump returned as president, ICE agents on Jan. 28 intercepted 62-year-old Adolfo Gonzalez of Santa Cruz as he left his front door for work and deported him to Mexico after more than two decades of calling the Central Coast home. Gonzalez told me and my colleague Tania Ortiz that he doesn’t expect to see Santa Cruz again.
A Presidents Day protest against … the president: An estimated 1,000 people showed up outside the Santa Cruz County courthouse on Ocean Street to protest President Donald Trump, his wealthiest-right-hand-man Elon Musk, and the flurry of executive actions that target immigrants, transgender youth and local communities across the country. My colleagues Wallace Baine and Kevin Painchaud have a report on the local version of a protest that took place across the U.S.
POINTS FOR PARTICIPATION
The 351-unit Ocean Street project in Santa Cruz gets its day before the city’s planning commission: Known technically as 908 Ocean Street, the 351-unit mixed-use project proposed across 20 lots in the city’s northeast quadrant will go in front of the Santa Cruz Planning Commission on Thursday at 7 p.m.
ONE GREAT READ
Mike White’s mischievous vision for “The White Lotus,” by Kelefa Sanneh for The New Yorker
Ahead of last week’s Season 3 premiere of the HBO mega-hit “The White Lotus,” New Yorker writer Kelefa Sanneh spent time with the brain behind the show, Mike White. To call White (who happens to be the grandson of former Santa Cruz mayor Carl White – there’s always a Santa Cruz connection) the director, or writer, or creator would be accurate, but I think underplays his influence on the show. In many ways, he is the show, exercising complete creative control, and developing the scripts on his own, without a writing team.
As Sanneh writes, White got his start in television during the late 1990s with “Dawson’s Creek,” where his job in the writing room was to find ways to “prolong the romantic anticipation that sustained the show.”
“But it didn’t last. ‘I quickly couldn’t keep interested,’ [White] said recently. ‘I always, whether intentionally or not, started burning down the house.’ … ‘[“The White Lotus”] is, like, my dream gig, because I can burn down the house at the end of every season and start building again.’”