Miles of North Coast hills and grasslands are set to open with trails at the Cotoni-Coast Dairies National Monument unit in 2025. (Bureau of Land Management)

The federal Bureau of Land Management manages the site, and on Nov. 13 it approved a parking lot and trailhead off Cement Plant Road in Davenport for visitors.

A 30-day appeal period closes Dec. 13, after which “BLM will initiate the final stages of site design and can start construction of the parking lot on April 15,” Zachary Ormsby, BLM’s Central Coast field manager, wrote in an email. He said the parking lot would have about 60 spaces.

Matt De Young, executive director of Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship, which is constructing the trails, said he hoped they would fully open by summer. “It looks like we’re over the hump,” De Young said, adding that he’s “excited to see people on the property and enjoying it.”

De Young called the project “a really good showcase of what we can do as a community to improve our quality of life.” The views atop the ridge, he said, are especially sublime, with whales sometimes seen breaching offshore. “You really feel like you’re perched over the whole Pacific,” he said. 

Parking lots marked “P” and trails are planned at Cotoni-Coast Dairies. Loops 1, 2 and 3, at the northern end of the national monument unit, neared completion late this year. The other trails have not yet been built. (Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship) 

A roughly 60-space parking lot is planned near Warrenella and Cement Plant roads in Davenport. (Bureau of Land Management)

Trail building

Consisting of three loops totaling nine miles, the hiking and mountain biking trails are nearing completion, De Young said. “We’re doing some final touch-ups and finishing a bridge,” which should be done by the time the parking lot is done, he said.

The trail loop closest to the parking lot and Cement Plant Road trailhead is the widest and least steep, made to accommodate people with disabilities riding adaptive mountain bikes, he said. The other loops “will be more challenging.”

To construct the 9-mile trail network, Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship raised around $3 million, De Young said. “Our staff had to look at every inch of the alignment before the trails were even built,” he said. “That involves bushwhacking and crawling through 30-foot-tall bushes of poison oak.”

Until recently, there were also several bulls on site. “They have knocked a few mirrors off cars and threatened a few of us occasionally,” said Tim Miller, an avid mountain biker and regular trail crew volunteer. 

The trails were largely built with mini excavators, though staff and volunteers also used chainsaws, shovels, picks and a variety of other tools. “It’s time and labor intensive,” De Young said. “That’s why it costs so much to build these things.”

A Cotoni-Coast Dairies parking lot is planned near Warrenella and Cement Plant roads in Davenport. Trails could open as soon as summer 2025. (Jesse Greenspan — Santa Cruz Local)

Environmental concerns

De Young said the trails were designed to minimize erosion and to avoid disturbing sensitive habitats and Native American cultural sites. However, critics of the parking lot and trail system contend that not enough was done to protect the area’s plants and wildlife. 

Grey Hayes, an ecologist and farmer who lives on nearby Molino Creek Farm, praised a BLM project to expand habitat for red-legged frogs, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Otherwise, he said the BLM has spent all its time and money on recreational use rather than land stewardship. 

Hayes said that pampas grass, fennel, French broom, cape ivy and other invasive plants were spreading unimpeded across the landscape. Unmaintained ranch roads were dumping sediment into creeks, and the area was never properly surveyed for rare species, Hayes said. He contended that a trail was hacked through one of the largest native wildflower patches in the county.

As stated in an environmental assessment, the BLM conducted a 2022 plant survey around the parking area and trailhead. It asserted that the project would have only minor adverse impacts on wildlife habitat. 

“We are currently partnered with several universities and NGOs and agencies conducting research on a wide variety of species and topics, from eDNA stream sampling to coho and steelhead, mammals to monarchs, ethnobotany, climate change, red-legged frogs, newts and salamanders, forest health and wildfire resilience,” wrote Ormsby, of the BLM. “‘We science’ is a common phrase used in our office.”

Twelve eucalyptus trees were cut to stumps around the parking lot that were a known monarch butterfly roosting site. “They just cut the trees without any information about how it would affect the suitability of that habitat,” Hayes said. “They should know better.”

In October, Emma Pelton, a biologist with the invertebrate conservation group Xerces Society, wrote to the BLM that removal of the eucalyptus trees “may irreparably damage the site’s value to host overwintering monarchs,” and that she believed it would violate the California Coastal Act. 

Citing a report from an arborist, the BLM said that the trees leaned over Pacific Gas & Electric Co. power lines, and that removal was needed to reduce the “immediate risk of wildfire.” The Xerces Society biologist disputed this, saying the arborist’s report “makes no mention of fire risk” and that the trees could be trimmed rather than cut down.

Ormsby called the tree removal “congruent with BLM management activities, along with Cal Fire and PG&E, to reduce risk of wildfire at Cotoni and surrounding areas.” He added that a large wildfire fuel reduction project is due in spring 2025 in coordination with Cal Fire and PG&E.

An October letter from U.S. Reps. Jimmy Panetta, D-Santa Cruz, and Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, agreed with BLM’s decision to remove the trees. “We support our land managers and their efforts to be proactive in reducing wildfire risk,” Panetta and Eshoo wrote.

Jonathan Wittwer, a retired land-use attorney and president of the environmental group Friends of the North Coast, has long expressed concern about the project’s impact on wildlife. The site hosts a plethora of animals, including coho salmon, steelhead, mountain lions, badgers, bobcats, deer, coyotes, gray foxes, spotted and striped skunks, ringtails, about a dozen snake species, several salamander species, newts, red-legged frogs, western pond turtles, grasshopper sparrows, burrowing owls and golden eagles.

“We were always seeing this as an area that would give priority to the wildlife,” Wittwer said.

Wittwer has also critiqued the location of the parking lot, and he said Cement Plant Road would need to be widened near its northern terminus. Right now, he said, “there is not room for an RV and a passenger car, nevermind two RVs, to get past each other.”

Although Friends of the North Coast has fought previous BLM decisions regarding Cotoni-Coast Dairies, Wittwer said it would not appeal this time around. “I’m not looking to pick another fight with BLM,” Wittwer said. Nor is he aware of anyone else planning to appeal prior to the Dec. 13 deadline.

A second parking lot

In addition to the parking lot and trailhead off Cement Plant Road, BLM is planning a second parking lot and trailhead further south near Panther Beach. This would connect to 10 miles of future trails for hikers and horseback riders.

Eight organizations want a parking lot in this location near Panther Beach rather than further inland. (RRM Design Group)

BLM initially proposed an access road to the southern parking lot that would bisect an agricultural field. But Wittwer said this has been opposed by the Trust for Public Land (which owns that land), along with Friends of the North Coast, the Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau, the Santa Cruz Puma Project, Big Creek Lumber Co. and three other organizations. They have proposed an alternative parking lot closer to Highway 1, directly across the road from where another parking lot is already being constructed as part of the North Coast Rail Trail. 

Ormsby wrote on Dec. 6 that they were “nearing the completion of a formalized agreement for the southern parking area,” but that he was “not able to provide the details of that agreement at this time.”

With or without a southern parking lot, De Young said those trails would be built. If necessary, he said, hikers would be able to access them from the Panther Beach rail-trail parking lot by traversing a planned pedestrian overpass of Highway 1. 

The site’s history

Cotoni-Coast Dairies lies within the ancestral home of the Cotoni (pronounced chuh-TOE-nee) people, a subgroup of the Ohlone. 

“There are shellmounds and other indicators of old habitation on the site that include stone flakes and tool fragments,” Hayes said. “The thought is that [the Cotoni] occupied seasonal camps from the ocean to the ridge.”

BLM has consulted with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band to preserve indigenous cultural sites at Cotoni-Coast Dairies.

Hayes said the Cotoni shaped the landscape into something resembling what it looks like today, with multiple habitat types, from grasslands and chaparral to stands of oaks, redwoods and douglas firs. “It would all be forest without 10,000 or 20,000 years of Native American management,” Hayes said.

Many Cotoni were forcibly taken to Mission Santa Cruz following its founding in 1791, Hayes said. Around that time, the Spanish began grazing cattle on the land. 

Soon after California became part of the United States, a group of Swiss families moved to the area to establish a dairy, according to the BLM. They eventually went back to Switzerland—after the male dairy owners faced conscription into the U.S. Army, Hayes said. But the land remained agricultural and off limits to the public.

Around 1970, PG&E reportedly considered the site for a nuclear plant. Then, in the 1990s, a real estate developer expressed interest in building 139 luxury homes there. With help from several other conservation groups, the Trust for Public Land raised a reported $40 million to buy around 7,000 acres and keep them free from drilling, mining, logging and development. 

The Trust for Public Land, which did not return a request for comment, later donated 407 acres on the ocean side of Highway 1 to State Parks. In 2014, it then transferred 5,843 inland acres, to be known as Cotoni-Coast Dairies, to the BLM, with the idea that it would be opened to the public. The Trust for Public Land retained the rest of the property for agriculture, leasing land, for example, to the popular Swanton Berry Farm.

In early 2017, at the end of his presidency, Barack Obama designated Cotoni-Coast Dairies as a unit of the California Coastal National Monument. Three years later, the BLM published a resource management plan and environmental assessment for Cotoni-Coast Dairies, sparking the first of multiple challenges from Friends of the North Coast and other organizations. 

Land at Cotoni-Coast Dairies was transferred to the Bureau of Land Management in 2014. (Bureau of Land Management)

Conflicts take shape

Originally, the BLM wanted to open the northern and southern parking lots simultaneously. But when the Trust for Public Land denied access to the planned southern parking lot, the BLM decided to push forward with the northern parking lot first. 

Construction began in summer 2022. Four eucalyptus trees were cut down and a bulldozer flattened the parking area–only to be quickly halted when Friends of the North Coast and two other organizations filed an appeal with the Interior Board of Land Appeals.

The board ruled in their favor, saying the BLM had never assessed the impact of having only one parking lot and trailhead, rather than two, open to the public. This prompted the BLM to issue another environmental assessment and further delayed the opening of the trail network. Meanwhile, eight additional eucalyptus trees were felled this fall.

All parties have been left frustrated.

“I really want to see this thing get opened up, and I’ve been frustrated by some of the pushback in the community,” said Miller, the trail crew volunteer. He said he’s hopeful that those who have objected “will also come to appreciate” having access to the trails.

Read more

• Improved access planned for Santa Cruz County’s North Coast – Jan. 12, 2024
• Opening delayed at Cotoni-Coast Dairies National Monument – Sept. 2, 2022
• Cotoni-Coast Dairies trails, bike plans face appeals – July 27, 2021

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