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The hardest (and easiest) California state park campgrounds to book right now
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San Clemente State Beach in Orange County, Calif.Courtesy of California State Parks, 2019
Even pre-pandemic, the demand for state park campsites outstripped supply. But this year, with travel still being actively discouraged by California’s Department of Public Health and the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the search for reservations in the most sought-after parks is more challenging than ever.
A recent search for sites in one of my favorite campgrounds, New Brighton State Beach near Capitola, south of Santa Cruz, returned almost no two-day reservations between now and September. Even planning six months ahead wasn t enough to secure a site.
As historic moments go on the Central Coast, 9 p.m. on March 18, 2021, and the 10 minutes or so leading up to it, will always be hard to beat. That s when it began to dawn on hundreds of people who had hung on to the end of that day s marathon meeting of the California Coastal Commission that the commissioners were really, finally going to do it: The shutdown of off-road vehicle activity at the Oceano Dunes had clearly gone from a question of if to a question of when. Throughout the day, the cracks had been appearing in the old regime. The good burghers of Pismo Beach and the South County chambers of commerce popped up to intone once again that no more dune buggies would mean economic ruin, still citing the 2017 economic impact analysis commissioned by State Parks, which the Coastal Commission knew had been thoroughly discredited.
For years, people flocked to California s central coast from October to February to observe thousands of monarch butterflies.
Recently, California State Parks released a draft of its 900-page Public Works Plan. The plan could affect Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area and Pismo State Beach in a myriad of ways if accepted, especially when it comes to the Monarch Butterfly Grove.
Before last year, the Pismo Beach butterfly grove was one of only five sites in California that saw over 10,000 butterflies yearly, as they sought shelter from northern winters, according to the Conference & Visitors Bureau of Pismo Beach.
The Pismo Beach colony is one of the largest in the nation and is run by state parks. In 1990, there were more than 230,000 monarchs counted.