Don’t Look Back! State Parks Forward?
Press is rolling unveiling what might seem like a ‘new’ initiative, obscuring and ‘moving on’ from some really UGLY past issues with California State Parks. But, hey- we all want to move on, keep moving forward…especially those with criminal records or histories of abuse.
Parks Forward: a brief history
The origin of the Parks Forward initiative was a crushing blow in 2012, an event that should make every Californian, especially those dedicated to natural areas access and conservation, doubt whether the California Department of Parks and Recreation can be trusted. Some may recall the closing of many State Parks supposedly due to budget shortfalls, which some of us recognized at the time as being a political ploy to pressure the California legislature into increasing Parks’ budget. Sure enough, ‘fiscal irregularities’ (as stated euphemistically in Parks’ subsequent report) were discovered, but only after the panicky scuttling of thousands of volunteers, non-profit organizations, and private donations to keep parks from closing down. Many nonprofits made good money from this fundraising boon, which also cemented their cache with the public.
The Bigger History
The State Parks corruption boondoggle in 2012 needs to be put into context with a larger history for a wholistic understanding of the situation. Since its inception, State Parks has been the recipient of lands purchased by private organizations. It has been typical that ‘conservation’ organizations use private donor funds to purchase properties while lobbying for public bond initiatives earmarked in such a way that they profit by subsequently selling those properties to the State. This process violates all sorts of legal and moral codes such as illicit 501(c)3 lobbying, private organizations setting State priorities, adding land to an agency already unable to manage the lands it holds, etc. Conservationists recognize that purchasing and ‘setting aside’ land for ‘protection’ is the relatively easy and affordable first step- the real work is sustaining species on those lands in perpetuity. For a while, recognition of these ‘irregularities’ put a halt to adding more land to the State Parks system.
Santa Cruz County Parks History
Much of that ‘bigger’ history is reflected in what has been occurring in Santa Cruz County where a disproportionate percentage of land is owned by State Parks. State Parks General Planning processes were successfully challenged for Castle Rock State Park, Nisene Marks State Park, and the Gray Whale Ranch addition to Wilder Ranch State Park. In each instance, private organizations were instrumental in transferring land to State Parks while State Parks was unable to either plan for or manage those properties in alignment with California law. And yet, each park welcomes visitors, pouring funding into private businesses at the expense of biodiversity protection and visitor experience. Henry Cowell State Park and the State Park beaches at Cotoni Coast Dairies were opened and remain highly used without any planning, whatsoever. The General Plan for Wilder Ranch State Park, a mecca for mountain bikers, does not allow mountain biking and private recreational businesses openly operate mountain biking concessions. Yet, Parks rangers have been ordered not to enforce prohibitions against either mountain bikers or their unpermitted concessions.
The ‘New’ Parks Forward Initiative
Surrounding Earth Day 2026, there has been much press about the Parks Forward initiative. One might even think it was ‘new.’ More new parks were added to the network of State Parks and some parcels were added to expand certain existing State Parks. In some cases, the press releases note property was ‘donated’ and in other cases, the situation is far opaquer. Nowhere in the press releases is there any mention of species conservation- it is all coached in ‘more access.’ Both access and conservation are expensive to do correctly, are not being done correctly in any State Park currently, and are conflicting uses with vast tradeoffs that go unanalyzed by Parks’ mandated General Plans and concomitant ‘carrying capacity analysis.’
Symptoms Make Sense
This new roll out of “Parks Forward” is quite predictable given public amnesia, popular myths, and the level of oversight from the Parks Forward Commission. Apparently, the public has forgotten about the origins of the Parks Forward initiative: if citizens remembered, there would be some acknowledgement in the many press releases. Overriding the grave concerns of the past is a fervor for more public access to natural areas. The myth, echoed by everyone touching this new version of the Parks Forward initiative, is that ‘more people accessing more natural areas is good for conservation.’ This balderdash flies in the face of science and common sense. The logical conclusion of this thinking is that if every human accessed every last piece of nature then every species would be conserved…the opposite is true. But, conservation organizations want to make money from donors and State politicians want to look successful, so enter the echo chamber of the deeply mistaken myth, which is doing permanent damage to the potential for wildlife conservation in California.
It is amazing to me that there is a Parks Forward Commission with smart people allowing such misguided endeavors to continue within State Parks. Perhaps they, too, accept the mythology. The symptoms of their complicity were present many years back when the Commission swallowed the poison of the progress report in year 2 of their formation. That report includes ‘four strategic focus areas’ with no metrics for success and two incredibly tiny ‘natural and cultural pilot efforts underway,’ which likewise have no metrics for conservation success. The apparent acceptability of these puerile efforts to the Commission point to an inability of the Commission to provide substantive oversight and input into the broken State Parks system.
Ask, Please
With the unveiling of new parks and new land ‘protections,’ we must ask: is there any additional funding for long term stewardship for biodiversity conservation, or are these new areas merely to continue the silent death of species to the overwhelmingly poorly managed public access/private inurement money machine?
Has California State Parks apologized to the People for the lies and manipulation it promulgated in 2012? Does that apology include details of what they will do to change this sordid past? Can we identify specific individuals who were responsible for those actions? Is there new management? Or, is this situation much like that exposed by the Epstein situation, where the abusers are still in charge? Abusers – is that too much to say? Well, in this case the victims do not have voices and will never speak out…the wildlife will simply go away while the abusers will vocally claim victory with their empty promises of conservation alongside public recreation and access to natural areas.
A Babyness of Plants
The highlight of the week has been PLANTING. Two Dog Farm has a huge patch of peppers taking root in beautifully prepared beds with drip tape efficiently irrigating the tiny baby seedlings into their new life in the real world: what promise! Molino Creek Farm has a patch of newly planted really, truly dry farmed tomatoes thanks to a close collaboration with the Two Dog Farm’s generous Bartle couple. Judy also had some help planting row upon row of onions this past week. And, those Bartles planted their winter squash seeds, the beginning of the annual unfolding of the Miracle where something appears (prolifically!) where nothing was, without any added water. There’s also Sylvie’s endeavors in some beautiful big patches…dry farmed beans, anyone? What experiments will this expert plant person reveal to us this year?
Hundreds and hundreds of new plants are gracing the fields of our most magnificent farm. Tiny green dots in a sea of freshly tilled rich brown soil. What a sight!
Anti-Apple-Babies
On the other hand, there is the great procession against too many apples. So nice to have many hands’ help snipping or twisting off the too, too many baby apples. We are thinning the fruit. This year, it is time to hone our thinning skill, keeping more fruit on the apple varieties that would otherwise make “Whole Meal Apples” – as with Mutsu or Braeburn. With some apple types, you’d need a cart to carry a fruit to lunch if they were ‘properly thinned,’ and no one would enjoy a ‘lunchbox apple’ without leaving more apples per stem. The ground is getting littered by hundreds of marble-sized apple kids. Up on the stems: one apple per cluster where there used to be 5+. Long each bough: one apple every 4 – 6 inches! Those are our goals: high hopes!
More Cool Weather
This past week has been another ‘the sun sure feels nice’ kind of weather. It has been creeping up to maybe a low 70F hour or two with nights in the low 50s. Foggy mornings, mostly. When the fog clears, the air feels a bit oddly dry. Perhaps the cold soil condenses out what moisture was in the air. “They” say it might get warm this coming weekend.
Baby Trees
Believe it or not, we are still rejuvenating our orchard…through grafting! The 2020 Fire still is echoing- the trees that inferno fried still have promise. Sylvie has taken to grafting desireables onto the few remaining post-fire rootsuckers. Here and there you encounter her artistry- grafting tape at the base of a rapidly sprouting scion. One graft from last year, a persimmon right inside the main gate to the apple orchard, is especially luscious with its bright green, glossy, big leaves. The many, many cherry trees Drake grafted onto rootsprouts from fire kill, in 2021, right after the fire, are getting to look more like adult trees than babies.
Native Grass Seed
Judy, Sylvie, and I harvested a few pounds of native grass seeds recently. Hanks of seed slowly cure and dry in paper grocery bags warmed by midday sun. We have tens of thousands of California bromegrass seeds, the dominant grass on the Farm which has been getting ripe lately. This is restoration material. The farm has already been transformed in many places from thistles and other weeds to native grass swards. We’ll do more of that as we turn brush fields into prairie just by tossing seeds from one place to the next. If there is a prescribed fire this year, this pile o’ seeds will do just fine.
Final Transformation Progress Report
This report published by the California Department of Parks and Recreation in 2017 was downloaded on April 30, 2026 from https://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/24689/files/DPR’s%20Final%20Transformation%20Progress%20Report.pdf
Natural Resources Management Strategy
The report says “California’s state parks are endowed with globally, nationally and regionally significant natural resources. The Transformation Team’s Natural and Cultural Resources Committee developed a guiding vision for DPR’s natural resources efforts to assist in the long term and sustainable stewardship of these representative and outstanding examples of California’s natural values.
In furtherance of this vision, the department’s natural resources management efforts will be aligned with four strategic focus areas:
- Stewardship at Scale: Play a leadership role in resource protection at landscape and ecosystem levels as a cornerstone landowner and convener of protection, restoration and management actions.
- Resilient and Sustainable Resources: Promote long-term sustainability by building climate change considerations into all that we do to manage our resources over the long term.
- State of the Art Management: Use the latest science-based approaches and best practices to manage our natural and cultural resources consistent with our mandates and mission.
- Innovative Collaborations: Promote new types of collective engagement to foster innovation, create a shared commitment to stewardship, and harness complementary skills, capacities and support.”
Governor Newsom Unveils Bold Vision for Biggest Expansion of State Parks in Decades, Adding Three New State Parks and Thousands of Acres to Existing Parks
This press release was available via this url https://www.parks.ca.gov/NewsRelease/1504 on 4/29/2026.
Parks Forward Commission
This was downloaded from this url: http://parksforward.com/meet-the-commission on April 30, 2026. This is a list of the Parks Forward Commission appointed in 2015 to address grave mishaps by California State Parks- aka ‘fiscal irregularities’ – leading to unnecessary parks closures in 2012.
A New Vision for California State Parks
A report published without including either attribution or date, ostensibly by the Parks Forward Commission (though some citations suggest the group was only officially appointed in 2015) in February 2015. In April 2026, this link worked but I make it available here in case it otherwise disappears.
Upside Down Spring
In our Mediterranean Spring, it is supposed to stop raining and the flowers bloom. This year, it stopped raining, the flowers blossomed and then it started raining again. Purple needlegrass has already bolted and set seed. Sky lupines and poppy are more pod than bloom. It is downright gushy out there: m-u-d spells mud. Spring mud. This late rain makes it very unlikely that wildfire will plague us this year, at least close by. Official reports from the surroundings put us at ‘normal’ rainfall with this past storm. How we got to that is quite a story: rain in November then none for most of December then a bit more into the New Year, then a fairly hot January…a few storms to wet things again through February and then No Rain March (and hot!) and then here comes all this rain in April. Topsy Turvey.
Oranges
We have Washington, Cara-Cara, Robertson, and Lane Late navel oranges as well as one unknown navel type and a tree full of what look like Valencia oranges. We should mention the bitter orange, Seville?, tree that bears quite a few fruit each year. We have enjoyed the fruit from the two 7-year old Cara-Cara so much that we planted six more last year, and we must wait a long while until we get lots of those fruit. Cara-Cara oranges are red from the same compound that makes tomatoes red, Lycopene, so it makes sense that we grow lots of them on this here tomato farm.
It takes a bunch of work to establish citrus trees; they aren’t happy with weed competition, so we have to keep them weeded frequently…like 4 times a year, for their first 3+ years. This is orange season: the fruit has been hanging for a year and is starting to get sweet. The various Mandarin varieties have a lead on them, so we haven’t been wanting for sweet citrus for a bit.
Deer Report
We chatted about The Deer a bit this past week. Mark Jones reports frequently seeing more than 20 deer. By flashlight, the many pairs of glowing deer eyes are a bit surprising. One can glimpse grazing deer whenever one wants. They scamper or saunter about- normally they are quite shy and run, but not always. We should be pleased for the grazing of the plants, which would otherwise be fuel for summer fires, but some people grumble about all the deer: “landscaping” damage is probably the foremost complaint. With all the deer, one would expect some happy mountain lions, but alas the sign of the cougars is rare, still.
Bird News
This past week brought yet more neo-tropical migratory songbirds. A lazuli bunting is high-squeaking right through midday. Black headed grosbeak song is also wonderous. The background noise of bicolor blackbirds, song sparrows, and golden crowned sparrows is ubiquitous. One is occasionally startled by the vast rush of a startled quail covey. Their cousins of the sky, band tailed pigeons, are quite active flapping from walnut tree to walnut tree. Today’s discovery was a female turkey clucking quite loudly for who-knows-what reason. The turkey flock seems to have dwindled to one hen, a young tom, and an older, dominant tom. Just 3 turkeys – maybe the other hens are sitting on nests or perhaps they were eaten…piles of feathers were here and there the last few weeks and a coyote was close by.
Squirrels
We used to have Western Gray Squirrel, but now we only have ground squirrels. The gray squirrels were before the fire – they supposedly are fond of truffles, so maybe that food source changed. We have a local gray squirrel type without a common name, Sciurus griseus ssp. nigripes, which only occurs along the coast between here and San Luis Obispo. I hope they come back!
The latest on our ground squirrels: have you ever looked carefully at their color patterns? They have the most amazing white eye liner, making their eyes oh-so cute! Their back fur also has cute, cute dots. Their hands are quite agile- today I watched one grab grass stalks so it could get at the seeds, which otherwise were above its head. This squirrel was feasting on ripgut brome seeds, a bad weed with heavy weight seeds that are quite rough to touch – good, brave squirrel with strong seed-eating teeth!
Mechanical Chewing
Speaking of tearing things apart – we are seeing more of Mr. Matthew Todd’s expertise with his brush mastication machine. Huge thistle and French broom patches are being chewed up into tiny pieces as we attempt to reclaim coastal prairie patches collaboratively across property boundaries with our neighbors managing the San Vicente Redwoods property. This will be Part 2 of the recipe to try to get rid of the broom: last Fall was Part 1, then there will be this Fall to hit it again…and the next 2 Falls, too, before we expect to see a reduction in this weed.
A Cotoni Coast Dairies Update
It has been a while since I gave an update on Cotoni Coast Dairies, but I have previously written much about that piece of (unfortunately) federally-owned ‘conservation’ land on Santa Cruz County’s North Coast. In August 2025, BLM staffer Zachary Ormsby had a chance to address the public about the parkland. Here, I present additional perspectives including some more recent developments.
Ch-ch-ch- Changes!
In 2025, as many of us had predicted, the Federal government made yet another of its radical political shifts, affecting the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees Cotoni Coast Dairies. Just before that transition, California’s BLM director changed. Karen Mouritsen, a Trump appointee who had lasted most of the 4 years of the Biden Administration, had been pressing to maximize public access and denying any funding to take care of the land’s pressing invasive species, wildfire, and erosion issues. Then, in 2024, Joseph Stout was appointed head of the California BLM; Joe had previously been deputy director of BLM but mysteriously left for most of Karen Mouritsen’s term. At the start of their term, the Trump Administration fired the national head of BLM and, as of March 1, 2026, has yet to replace them. Nevertheless, the leaderless BLM has turned its already understaffed offices to resource extraction rather than conservation. The staff in our BLM region now spend much of their time advertising, negotiating, and monitoring leases to extract oil. Luckily, the nonprofit conservation organization Trust for Public Land, which signed the land over to BLM, restricted the property deed, prohibiting oil extraction.
Public Access
Public access is a little less extractive to open space than pumping oil out of the ground, and usually less toxic. Visitor use of natural areas has long been recognized as one of the top threats to species, globally. Nevertheless, at Cotoni Coast Dairies, an area set aside primarily for conservation, BLM (in close partnership with mountain biking sports advocates) has begun development of an extensive trail network through globally significant threatened habitats, disrupting and possibly displacing endangered wildlife species. Sole source government contracts paid these mountain bikers hundreds of thousands of dollars to organize volunteers in transforming a little-known virgin wildland into a recreational park. The nine miles of new trails emanate from a 90-car parking lot replete with two restrooms and a few interpretive signs. Despite promises to the contrary, the restrooms are often locked, even when there are lots of visitors filling the parking lot.
The interpretive signs have minimal interpretation of nature but lots of rules. If you don’t speak English, you better have a smart phone (and reception!) if you want to translate the signs, which don’t present even Spanish language translations. One of the rules is to stay on the marked trails, but there are well worn and often-used roads that aren’t labeled for access but frequently used by mountain bikers. The trails are too narrow and the sides too steep to accommodate mountain bikers comfortably passing hikers. During a recent visit, I experienced a mountain biker who was furious about being interrupted from bombing down the trail…there was nowhere to get off the trail– after a wave of explicatives, red faced and loud, the biker stumbled past me, his embarrassed girlfriend trailing. But, pedestrians far outnumber the barnstorming bikers who are no doubt made all the more angry because their volunteer work hasn’t panned out for their unimpeded high-speed endorphin-laden ‘rad times.’ Such glowering is occasionally interrupted by the too-frequent trailside plastic tacky signs profusely gushing about the generosity of mountain biking volunteers for everything the visitor might experience.
“Innovative” Cattle Grazing
One of the mandates for BLM at Cotoni Coast Dairies was changing the historic livestock regimes to something more innovative and natural resource protection oriented. Up went super expensive high-tech antennae. Cattle were fitted with electronic shock collars designed to train them into grazing within ‘invisible fences.’ Innovative, indeed- especially if there was a grazing PLAN (there isn’t)! As of Spring 2026, this technology remains innovative in one way only: convincing the public that something innovative is happening with the livestock program: otherwise, no one has turned on the switches to make the system active. However, innovative livestock management isn’t the only thing lying dormant on the landscape…
Science-Based Land Management
At the apex of conservation lands are National Monuments, which (logically!) must publish science strategies to support their (also mandated) Management Plans. Being one of many units of the California Coastal National Monument, Cotoni Coast Dairies required BLM to publish a “science strategy;” this was completed in April 2026 with the help of experts at the US Geologic Survey, a decade and two years after BLM acquired the property…and long after the agency made seemingly permanent decisions about recreational access.
Along with such science-based strategies, BLM is required to update its California Special Status Animal Species list every 5 years. The last one was published in 2019 and the most recent update was due in 2024. Where is it? Not on their website. Have they, as required, worked with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to collaboratively develop that updated list? Who knows? (a message back from CA BLM says that they have not updated the wildlife list as of March 2026) One thing of interest…the mountain lions on the Central Coast have recently been listed as Endangered by the State of California. As such, pumas should receive priority protection by BLM at Cotoni Coast Dairies, applying Dr. Wilmers’ (UCSC) research findings indicating the importance of protecting large areas from any human visitation whatsoever and planning for wide, forested movement corridors. The emphasis here is on forested areas, which on Cotoni Coast Dairies are being threatened by French broom invasion.
Broom Farming
The BLM at Cotoni Coast Dairies has been officially recognized for their expertise in French broom farming by the Invasive Species Agricultural Association (ISAA). President Rex Fowler, in awarding the distinguished prize noted, “BLM has exceeded expectations both in fostering the health of, and increasing the spread of, the dreaded and most pernicious invasive species French Broom. We look forward to marveling at extensive fields of this excellently invasive pest for generations to come.”
Hillsides of once diverse prairies, stands of majestic coast live oaks, and ridgelines of coastal scrub and maritime chaparral are being overrun by monocultures of French broom at Cotoni Coast Dairies. With a seedbank that lasts 40+ years, the scope of any eventual control program is expanding rapidly. BLM managers’ unsubstantiated smokescreen for corrupt, self-serving sole-source contracts with mountain bikers for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on visitor use access was the proclamation that ‘there shall be no land management until visitors are flooding the park.’ Well folks- what now? Visitors are flooding the park! Now we hear ‘we must drill baby drill!’
What Next?
There is an opportunity in the current Administration to solve this mess. What?! How so?? The Federal government has been murmuring about dumping federal property: why not give it back? Back to who? How about the Amah Mutsun? California’s land back movement is gaining momentum. Let’s give the land back to the tribal people! Why not?
Large Sideways Rain
Sideways rain washed the windows clean this past week. Well, sometimes it blew the screens clean, depositing the early season dust and pollen onto the adjoining windows. For a few days, trees and shrubs did their crazy wind dances, nodding and bowing and whipping and shaking. It was a sporadically blustery and showery affair, mainly. Towards the end of the storm, there was sunshine in between the gales and rain and…rainbows! So happy to get a bit more rain. It seems to have (re)wet the soil, which had dried two feet down. A big sigh of relief, giving us more time to get the orchard irrigation up and running again without the trees wilting (like last year!).
And, it’s been cool, again. A few nights in the mid-forties. The woodstoves were at work keeping our dwellings warm.
Active Critters
The first squirrel started squeaking this past week, joining the crickets and birds with the high notes. Western bluebirds sure are bright and particularly vocal. Song sparrows are also very song-y. I saw one picking seeds off of grasses in a fallow field – it was very shy and jumpy-nervous. There are innumerable robins posted across the farm. Maw and Caw chased two interloping ravens recently: that was a noisy air battle – noisy, but not long lasting. Perhaps they were just saying ‘hello!’ In the past, there has been less aggressive interactions, which I assumed was one of the offspring bringing a mate back ‘home’ to meet the parents. This was different.
Fox and bobcat have been frequently sighted by various neighbors. One very young bobcat is wandering the road just onto our property at the top.
Greenhouse
The Two Dog Farm greenhouse is vibrantly full of baby plants. There are large tomatoes looking ready for the ground as well as lots of other things. It is the drum roll to planting time.
Orchards
Each Spring presents a mandatory 40 hours of mowing, but the run up is quite beautiful. The artistry of cover crops is overwhelming: lush, flower-filled stalks of bell beans are more than 5 feet tall where they are still growing. Some areas are already mowed, stubs of bell beans sticking up, crunchy-green still. Between those stubs, mushy ground up plants, sometimes stinky-rot, black slime. Patches of mown radish grounds present a particularly unseemly brassica stench. Between mowing sessions, I wander into the uncut cover crop, appreciating the ranks of lush flowers, the fleshy leaves, and the impressively thick shoots.
Fire!
The last bit of backyard burn season is upon us and folks around the farm have been burning accumulated biomass in piles. Alligator lizards snake away from the stacks of branches that we move one-at-a-time into an adjoining flaming pile. Burning in the rain is particularly exhilarating…if you can get the piles started. Bright poppy orange flames counter the graying dusk. The following morning presents an ash pile with satisfyingly little left unburned.
Grey Hayes 