HOLLISTER RANCH WILL OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, BUT IS THAT A GOOD THING?
NEWLY-PASSED BILL ENDS THE ERA OF EXCLUSIVITY FOR SOCAL'S MOST PRISTINE COASTLINE
OCTOBER 11, 2019 BY JUSTIN HOUSMAN
Other than a party, a sporting event, maybe a concert, few things are improved by the addition of a whole lot more people. Take, oh, I don’t know, California, for example. Geographically, topographically, meteorologically, bathymetrically, it’s about as good and beautiful as a hunk of land gets on this planet. It’s kind of magical, really. Be a lot more so, though, with about half the amount of people living here. As the population has skyrocketed in recent decades with development and infrastructure following apace, bit by bit, the magic has faded.
Same goes with idyllic surf spots. What a freaking joy it must have been to surf Rincon when there were, at most, a couple hundred surfers in the entire state. You would actually get to experience the surf and the natural environment it inhabits for what it is. Now, you mostly experience it relative to a crowd. It’s impossible to filter out the effect of human activity; that aspect is now as much a natural part of Rincon as the cobblestone point.
Every so often when my mind drifts it gets hung up on a lingering fantasy: What if I was given the keys to a time machine? Where would I go? See the dinosaurs? Cool, but, nah. Take in a joust in medieval France? Tempting, but nope. Visit our potentially space-touring future? Yawn. My fantasy is California before the hordes fucked it up. Northern California salmon running in huge numbers in small streams, brown bears patrolling coastal forests, functioning river systems emptying into the sea. And in Southern California, beautiful, mostly untouched beaches.
That last part has always been the charm of privately-held Hollister Ranch. Sure, the waves there can be incredible and much less crowded than Santa Barbara to the south on the same swell, but the pristine coastal bluffs and ocean at the Ranch are as close as we’ll ever get to the experience of hopping out of a time machine and into a pre-modern California. That’s the real magic of the place.
Whether that magic can be sustained is now in question with the passage into law of California Assembly Bill 1680 this week. The bill guarantees public access to Hollister Ranch. For nearly four decades various lawsuits have sought to provide public entry into the Ranch, but they’ve been summarily swatted away by the Hollister Ranch Owners Association. But in recent years a lawsuit built around an old YMCA easement into the Ranch gained enough steam to attract the attention of the California Coastal Commission and then the state legislature and finally Governor Newsom himself.
Just like that, with the swipe of a pen, the guardhouse at the entrance to the Ranch has been razed.
Well, sorta. The bill sets a deadline for a public access plan to be in place by April 2022. It allows the state to exercise eminent domain to seize land in order to create that public access. It makes it a crime to delay or otherwise obstruct public access, which raises the question of whether it will even be legally possible to bring a lawsuit to combat the bill. It’s a fairly aggressive use of state power to assure the public can get to the beaches of the Ranch.
Those have always been public, of course, up to the mean high tide line, you just had to get there without going over the land fronting the beach. Meaning you could always surf the Ranch. You just had to put in the effort. That effort might mean boating or hiking in or scraping together a couple hundred thou with some buddies to buy your way in, but the effort kept the crowds down. Made it special.
I guess at this point I should say that I occasionally get to surf the Ranch. I do not own property at the Ranch. But I have an extended family member who does. I cannot go whenever I want. I cannot go without my family member there. I cannot go anywhere on the beach without my family member present. I am certainly not rich. The Ranch is not my private surf playground, and ha ha, you can’t come in. But I have surfed there many times and I have seen that it’s unlike anywhere else in California. I say that not to boast, but to suggest that it’s easy to read about the Ranch and shake your fist at wealthy assholes keeping you out if you’ve never been there. But, like most things in life, this is a nuanced issue. Am I biased? Sure. If you’ve surfed there, you probably are too. If I didn’t have that access, I wouldn’t have seen what might be lost.
The bill has put me, a bleeding heart progressive liberal, normally on the front lines of protecting public lands against the clutches of private interests, in the awkward position of arguing against public lands, at least in this one unique case, and depending on what “public access” ends up meaning. Hollister Ranch is the last major slice of undeveloped coastal land south of Point Conception. If that changes, it’s gone forever. I don’t anticipate major development there in the wake of this bill, but I do anticipate a whole lot more traffic and people and all of the impact that may bring. I wonder if there will be compensation for property owners who will surely see their land values plummet in the wake of the bill. I wonder how the state will decide what access means. I wonder if this will result in something as relatively harmless as a state-funded access road and a few bluff-side parking areas and restrooms. Or if houses and infrastructure will pop up in a place that’s beautiful and special precisely because it has none of that. I wonder how crowded Rights and Lefts will get.
I find it difficult to believe that anyone who would enjoy a place like the Ranch, in all its natural beauty, would really think that allowing countless more people access to the place is a good thing. For surfers, that’d be even more dubious. Do we really want Big Drakes to become another Rincon? Another Pleasure Point? A hundred surfers in the water on any hint of swell?
The bane of every single surfer’s existence is a crowded lineup. It’s the one thing we all can agree on—crowds suck. They threaten to ruin the fun of surfing. We all dream of uncrowded waves. We pay thousands of dollars to fly across the world to surf without hordes of people. So, here’s an idea: let’s maybe keep at least one part of this state (south of the mostly poor-wave-filled-and-empty northern coastline) crowd-free. Why would we, as surfers, want to import the thing we hate most about surfing—crowds—right into one of the most pristine surf zones in the US? Because everyone should get to enjoy that pristine beach, you say? Sure, that’d be nice. But if everybody does, then it’s no longer pristine, and you’re no better off than when you started—the coast, however, is much worse off.
Growing up in San Luis Obispo County, long before I had my Ranch connection, the place was whispered about. A surfing Shangri-La that held a mystique and a romance. It wasn’t exactly untouchable but it invited a kind of quest. “Let’s get a zodiac and boat in,” we’d say, teenagers drunk on beer and ambition and naivete. “Let’s sneak in at night,” we’d say, poring over topo maps and tide books. “Joe hiked in once, he knows secret paths,” we’d overhear while bobbing in the lineup during south swell lulls. If the Ranch had been open then, there’d be no such magic.
If in a decade the Ranch resembles the coast off Highway One between Santa Cruz and Pacifica—mostly private ag land with occasional state beaches every few miles—that’s a best-case scenario. If the Hollister Ranch Owners Association can maintain its rigorous standards of protection against development, and the beach is run as a state beach with no buildings other than restrooms, then, it’s probably not going to physically change the character of the Ranch much.
But it will lose its magic. That sense that there is still a place where you can surf California in the days before it was the California we know, a living time capsule. Whether you have a key to its pearly gates or not, there’s a kind of comfort knowing that it exists. But now, it seems, its days are numbered.
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