Preserving the Pleasures of Our Wilderness Parks

The recent heat wave may have had Orange County residents seeking out beaches more than parks, but the grass, shrubs and trees of places like Laguna Coast and O’Neill parks provided their own forms of respite from the workaday world.

Despite the great wave of development that occurred in the county after World War II, there do remain enclaves of nature, offering glimpses of the way things were and the chance to get away from offices and malls at least temporarily.

The county generally has done a good job of running a variety of parks. Centennial Regional Park in Santa Ana is popular with workers taking a lunch break, eating a sandwich on a picnic bench or reading a newspaper in a car parked beneath a jacaranda tree. Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley has a perimeter of morning joggers and an interior of golfers on most mornings. The county’s wilderness parks, including Caspers and Laguna Coast, offer just that: wilderness. There are trails galore and chances to see wildlife not spotted in the city.

Laguna Coast Wilderness Park now has 3,000 acres. In the years ahead it is due to add another 3,300 acres, which would make it one of the largest of the county’s parks.

For years county planners have discussed how best to make Laguna Coast more accessible to the public, without of course putting in so many roads and tons of asphalt that the whole purpose of the park is defeated.

The county’s plan, presented to the Coastal Greenbelt Authority at Irvine City Hall 10 days ago, calls for areas at the edges of the park to be used to control access. The park now sprawls across Laguna Canyon Road. The additional acres will come to the north and on the other side of Crystal Cove State Park, so that eventually the wilderness area will be bounded by the cities of Newport Beach, Irvine and Laguna Beach.

The plan calls for the main entrance to be one of four access points along Laguna Canyon Road. The main one will include a parking lot for 40 cars, an administrative headquarters and an amphitheater where rangers can give campfire talks.

The county’s rangers do a good job of helping visitors to the wilderness parks, explaining what people are likely to see if they follow certain paths and warning against dangers ranging from snakes to mountain lions.

The Laguna Coast plans have been in the works for several years, but were delayed by the county’s bankruptcy. That fiscal calamity has put a strain on the county’s parks department, which unfortunately was chosen to take much of the pain of the recovery from fiscal disaster. Money that otherwise would have gone to acquire and operate parks instead will go to pay off bonds that were sold as part of the emergence from bankruptcy.

But parks planning can take a long time even when there are no fiscal disasters. At O’Neill Regional Park in the foothills of South County, improvements have gone on for a decade. This month an interpretive center opened at the park, which has 3,100 acres and is close enough to most of Orange County to draw sizable crowds of visitors.

The planning is needed to walk the tightrope between opening the parks to as many people as possible but keeping them in as natural a state as possible. Caspers, Laguna Coast, O’Neill and other parks have hundreds of miles of hiking trails that provide an off-the-beaten-track atmosphere that is refreshing because it is so different from office life.

The county was right to include the public in drawing up the Laguna Coast plans. These are public lands; shaping access to parks and providing features sought by visitors can help maintain the popularity of some of the county’s featured attractions.