Down-and-dirty fun: Adventure Playground in Huntington Beach turns 50

Summertime must certainly be near, as Huntington Beach’s Adventure Playground — a paradise for fearless and intrepid youth who don’t mind getting a little down and dirty in their playtime pursuits — readies for a June 22 reopening.

A 1.5-acre place where kids can float rafts and inner tubes across a lagoon, slide down a mud hill and construct forts navigable by rope bridge, the city-owned amenity has beckoned generations of adventurers since it first opened in 1974 in an abandoned sand quarry.

Eric Barraza, a city staffer overseeing this year’s operations, has been combing through photo archives that give a peek at Adventure Playground’s rough and ready origins.

A visitor to Huntington Beach’s Adventure Park in the 1970s holds a T-shirt over an open fire pit. Fifty years later, the park is more safety focused but still fosters play and imagination for kids ages 5 to 12.

(Courtesy of the city of Huntington Beach)

“Honestly, it just looks like a Mad Max wasteland,” he said of black and white images of a youth sitting atop a busted recliner, or burning T-shirts over an open fire pit. “Kids brought hammers and nails and plywood boards and just built shanties — I had no idea what it used to be.”

The hammers and nails disappeared when the park ended its 2019 season. A pandemic kept the site shuttered over the next two summers and, in 2022, a statewide Level 2 water shortage preempted city officials from tapping non-recirculated potable water from Central Park’s irrigation system, so Adventure Playground stayed closed.

Locals rejoiced last year when the attraction reopened following a four-year hiatus, enjoying areas and features newly refurbished by Eagle Scouts who’d targeted the park for community service projects.

New play platforms at Adventure Playground in Huntington Beach were installed in 2022 by local Boy Scouts doing service projects.

(File Photo)

Garrett Hay, a Huntington Beach native who serves as scoutmaster for the city’s Boy Scout Troop 1, visited the park last summer just to see the progress that had been made. He recalled many summer days spent traversing mud hills with his siblings in the early ’90s.

“It really is a slice of Americana right out of a Mark Twain novel that you just do not see anymore,” said Hay, now a 39-year-old father of three, who recalled the park’s “feral” days.

“The large cement pool now filled with water was actually filled with mud back then. When you got there, there was a huge pile of muddy tennis shoes. You’d take off your good shoes and put them in a locker, then grab a pair of Converse with no laces. Afterward, you threw them back in the pile, got cleaned up and went home — it was a treat.”

Generations of local youth have fond memories of Huntington Beach’s Adventure Playground, where kids had free rein over dirt hills, forts and a mud pit.

(Courtesy of the city of Huntington Beach)

As a scoutmaster, Hay is now working with a handful of troop members working on Eagle Scout projects dreaming up new ways to make Adventure Playground even better.

For example, teens this summer will be building a series of sensory-rich play tables, complete with arts and crafts, water with floating toys or kinetic sand, for children who may be visiting with parents and older siblings but just miss the mark for the site’s key demographic of youth ages 5 to 12.

Hay hopes the projects will be part of a more formalized arrangement between the Boy Scout troop and the city that will allow teens to keep the spirit of imagination and play alive for future generations.

“[Adventure Playground] is like its own ecosystem, and it’s sort of self-sustained by the community services department and the city of Huntington Beach and scouts and residents — it’s pretty unique.”

Kids slide down a “mud slide” on opening day of Adventure Playground in Huntington Beach in 2023. The city-run facility is part of a beloved tradition among local residents who wish to keep it going.

(File Photo)

Barraza acknowledges that, while similar adventure playgrounds currently operate in Irvine and in Yorba Linda, the Central Park facility is among a handful of cherished and time-honored community traditions the city’s denizens seem to have a keen interest in preserving.

“Huntington Beach really likes to keep its traditions alive and keep things going that people know from the past,” he said. “Also, today playgrounds are very standard. You go to a park and there’s a playground that’s got two slides and a swing set. This is really a park where kids can use their imaginations.”

Adventure Playground, located at 7111 Talbert Ave. in Huntington Beach, runs from June 22 through Aug. 17, Mondays through Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., but will be closed on July 4. Admission is $4 per child and free for parents and adult chaperones. Reservations can be made online at hbsands.org. For more information, call (714) 536-5486.

Huntington Beach’s Adventure Park opened in 1974 on the site of an abandoned sand quarry but later moved to the city’s Central Park.

(Courtesy of the city of Huntington Beach)