Huge bonfires. All-night raves. Piles of trash. Drunken parties. Graffiti. Ten years ago, a scenic mile-long beach on the rural San Mateo County coast was notorious for bad behavior.
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On Monday, the stunning property, once owned by rock singer Chris Isaak, will open to the public as a new oceanfront park.
When the free park opens at 8 a.m. Monday, beachgoers will find a landscape transformed through a $19.6 million project funded by private donations, county money and state funding. People will be able to legally — and easily — access the property without trespassing.
“It’s a welcoming place for everybody,” said Emma Gonzalez, interim director of the San Mateo County Parks Department. “The view. The bluffs. There is so much to take in. It’s breathtaking.”
The 58-acre property features picturesque cliffs more than 100 feet tall on its northern edge. This week, hundreds of brown pelicans, California gulls and sandpipers rested along the shoreline as waves rolled in. Studies have shown that endangered steelhead trout live in Tunitas Creek, which flows through the sand to the ocean.
Construction began in late 2023 to build restrooms, a parking lot with 80 spaces, a ranger station, a small amphitheater for ranger talks, and wide paths that will enable access for those with disabilities. The park was scheduled to open last year, but was delayed when winter rains caused two major landslides along its cliffs, requiring significant shoring up to keep an emergency access route open.
The beach and hillsides around it have a long and colorful history.
Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola and his men camped along Tunitas Creek in 1769 during their expedition from Baja California to San Francisco Bay. The property was in private ownership for generations, its soaring cliffs and sand dunes hidden from motorists zooming along the road between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay.
A company known as Todd Gelfand Trust, linked to singer Chris Isaak, purchased the bluff-top land there, with a modest 1950s-style house and most of the sand on the beach, for $3.1 million in 1998. But the trespassing created a growing liability. And the property’s water system failed during winter storms.
Isaak, 70, a Stockton native who had hits in the 1990s with songs such as “Wicked Game,” was never seen at the property, locals say. The singer has declined interview requests to discuss the land purchase.
Starting about 15 years ago, the beach became the site of wild, sometimes dangerous parties. Hundreds of people with stereo systems, disco balls, tents, kegs and mattresses left huge amounts of trash, set off fireworks and used Tunitas Creek Beach as a bathroom during all-night events. In 2016, a San Jose man drowned there.
“We had overnight camping, people living on the beach, massive raves,” said Scott Lombardi, San Mateo County Parks superintendent. “It was unbelievable. Thankfully that has been put to bed.”
Isaak’s trust sold the property to a Palo Alto environmental group, the Peninsula Open Space Trust, for $5 million in 2017, which in turn sold it at a discount for $3.2 million to San Mateo County in 2020.
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“The property is incredibly scenic,” said Gordon Clark, president of the Peninsula Open Space Trust, also known as POST. “It has a lot of dramatic vistas and viewpoints. It’s hard to see it when you are zooming past on Highway 1. But it is going to be loved and enjoyed by people for generations to come.”
Former County Supervisor Don Horsley first notified POST in 2016 that Isaak might be interested in selling. The Tunitas Creek Beach property was never put on the market or it may have been snapped up by a Silicon Valley billionaire for a trophy house. Another scenic property, Martins Beach, several miles north of Tunitas Creek, was purchased in 2008 by billionaire venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, who locked the gates and sparked years of lawsuits and battles with surfers, the California Coastal Commission and others over public access.
Watching that drama play out, Horsley led efforts for the county to buy Tunitas Creek Beach and to build amenities there.
“We are standing along a strip of beach that I truly believe will become known as one of the great public beach parks in California,” Horsley said during a visit in 2018.
After Horsley, who was also the former county sheriff, died in November 2023 at age 80, county leaders named the new beach park after him: Don Horsley County Park at Tunitas Creek Beach.
The park, located just south of the intersection of Highway 1 and Tunitas Creek Road, will be open seven days a week. Dogs, alcohol and camping are not allowed. There will be no lifeguards, and county rangers caution that the beach, like many along the Northern California coast, can have rip currents that pose a threat to inexperienced swimmers.
For generations, the property was owned by the Schilling family. August Schilling came to San Francisco from Germany at age 16 in 1870, and made a fortune after he quit work at Folger’s coffee company to co-found A. Schilling & Company, a major spice and foodstuffs business. He purchased real estate along the San Mateo Coast and along San Francisco Bay’s shoreline, which later became Leslie Salt Company. After his death in 1934, Schilling’s spice company merged with McCormick’s, a Baltimore firm, which remains a leading international food business.
Andy Schilling of Woodside, his great-grandson, remembers going to the beach as a child in the 1960s and 1970s. He and his family climbed down the rocky cliff paths to the sand that his family had owned since the 1920s.
“We had bonfires, we went swimming, we played on the beach,” he said. “It was a magical place.”
One of the trails to the beach is now named Schilling Trail.
The restoration project didn’t occur easily. It struggled with delays and setbacks over the past six years. First, the COVID pandemic slowed planning efforts in 2020. Then, that fall the CZU Lightning Complex Fire burned 86,509 acres in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, destroying more than 1,400 homes and other structures, including facilities at several parks.
POST and San Mateo County launched a public planning process with meetings and workshops. In June 2023, the county awarded an $11.6 million contract to Gordon Ball Inc., of Alamo, to build parking, trails, a ranger station, restrooms, interpretive signs and other amenities.
Several wet winters slowed work. And then the landslides happened, increasing costs.
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“It took time to get here,” Gonzalez said. “But now we have a remarkable park.”
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