A gate on a 58-acre bluff off Highway 1, once notorious for all-night raves, swings open at 8 a.m. Monday as Don Horsley County Park — the first stretch of San Mateo County coast built into a park from scratch in over ten years.

On a bluff off Highway 1, eight miles down the coast from Half Moon Bay and about halfway to Pescadero, a gate that kept people out for a generation swings open at 8 a.m. Monday. Behind it lie 58 acres of cliff and sand — nearly a mile of beach under sandstone more than 100 feet tall — reopening as Don Horsley County Park (external source, opens in a new tab), the first stretch of coast San Mateo County has built into a park from scratch in over ten years.

The beach it wraps, Tunitas Creek, was public in name only for years. As the county tells it, the shore had no official way in, so people scrambled down a web of informal trails, and in that vacuum the creek delta filled up with parties, illegal camping and trash. Paul Rogers of the Mercury News put the wild years at roughly a decade and a half — hundreds of people, stereo rigs and kegs, fireworks, a beach used as a toilet — and reported a San Jose man drowned in the surf here in 2016. Scott Lombardi, the county parks superintendent, told the paper the all-night crowds had "been put to bed."

The turnaround cost $19.6 million, Rogers reported in the Mercury News, split among private donors, the county and the state. That money bought an 80-space parking lot, restrooms, a ranger station, a small outdoor amphitheater for the interpretive talks, and wide graded paths built so a wheelchair can roll down toward the surf. Ground broke in late 2023; the work ran most of a year and slipped past its first target date when two winter landslides gnawed at the cliffs and crews had to shore up the emergency access road.

The land itself took a slow route into public hands. A trust tied to singer Chris Isaak paid $3.1 million in 1998 for the clifftop and most of the sand, Rogers reported; the Peninsula Open Space Trust (external source, opens in a new tab) bought it for $5 million in 2017 and, three years on, resold it to the county at a discount — $3.2 million — in 2020. The park carries the name of the late Supervisor Don Horsley, who leaned on the county to buy rather than let it go the way of Martins Beach a few miles north, padlocked for years by a billionaire owner.

"This new park is a jewel," Supervisor Ray Mueller, whose district includes it, said in the county's announcement. Interim Parks Director Emma Gonzalez called it "a welcoming place for everybody."

Walk the tideline this week and the only residents are birds: brown pelicans, gulls and sandpipers, a creek mouth that holds threatened steelhead and, come winter, western snowy plovers. Monday is the first morning anyone can legally stand there to watch them.