Weekend crowds lead to closures of park entrances
In the face of heavy visitor traffic over the Fourth of July weekend, entrances to three East Bay parks were blocked off after parking areas filled, and a fire on adjacent land closed another park.
The three parks that filled and were closed off were Lake Chabot and Point Pinole regional parks, and Sunol Regional Wilderness, according to Park Superintendent Bob Doyle. Mission Peak Regional Preserve near Fremont, another that received high use, was evacuated after a 100acre brush fire flared on adjacent private land along Calaveras Road.
At the same time, Doyle and other park managers across the Bay Area said that 80% to 90% of visitors took care to social distance and wore masks when that was not possible, in respect to laws in place to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. Other park managers reported similar encounters.
“Parks are the only game in town and we were really busy,” Doyle said. “People did well, better than ever, masks and distancing, even on Alameda Beach, our biggest beach on San Francisco Bay.”
To provide oversight over the holiday weekend, it was “all hands on deck,” park managers said. At East Bay Parks, Doyle said nearly 200 park rangers, park police and fire officials were monitoring the district’s 73 parks.
In Marin County, at
Point Reyes National Seashore, three roads to popular trailheads were shut down to reduce the chance for clustering, said Christine Beekman, acting chief of interpretation at the park.
The park closed the outer reaches of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard to Point Reyes Lighthouse and Chimney Rock Headlands, as well as the road to Mount Vision. North of Bolinas, the park closed Mesa Road to the Palomarin Trailhead, a potential logjam site as the staging area and launch point to the Coast Trail and trips to Bass Lake and Alamere Falls.
On the Peninsula, San Mateo County Parks Director Nicholas Calderon called the weekend a success, with large numbers of visitors following socialdistancing and facemask protocols, something affirmed by rangers across the district’s 23 parks.
He called the number of visitors comparable to any popular summer weekend.
The most dramatic event Saturday at parks in the Bay Area was the evacuation of visitors at Mission Peak.
“We had a pretty good fire near Mission Peak,” Doyle said. “It was on private property, but we had to evacuate the park anyway. We had to do the whole loudspeaker thing, get a helicopter up there, scare everybody off the mountain.”