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Thornton State Beach, closed, but still open
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Thornton State Beach and its Iceplant looking north toward Fort Funston
Thornton State Beach on the coastal border of San Francisco and Daly City, is closed.
And yet hikers and horse riders continue to enjoy the vast ocean views as they wind their way through the dunes. Surf fishermen still plant their poles in the hunt for striped bass. Joggers and their dogs continue their routes up and down the beach.
The beach itself looking south toward Mussel Rock
One might imagine that Thornton presents a model of our future with the seemingly regular state budget shortfalls bringing annual threats of park closures.
The park might be officially closed. But you can’t take away the waves or the sand. And the people will still come. They’ll just have to be a little more creative about where they park, and they’ll have to do without rangers and visitors centers and bathroom facilities.
The landslide profile is clearly apparent
And maintenance. The few remaining concrete picnic tables are significantly broken up. Nobody is going to be coming to repair them anytime soon. And the park does not appear to be patrolled regularly. A number of the groves of trees within the dunes provide shelter for homeless encampments which one wouldn’t expect could stick around for along in an active park.
Let’s be clear here in speaking about Thornton’s closure however. This park is not closed due to any budget shortfall or political battle. Thornton State Beach is closed by decision of Mother Nature. Thornton is located at the seaward end of John Daly Boulevard in Daly City. It encompasses the bluffs and dunes and beach which line this edge of the Pacific Ocean. And wave by wave, storm by storm, quake by quake, the ocean is taking it back.
The landscape at Thornton is in fact largely the result of a massive landslide, or rotational slump, caused by the infamous 1906 earthquake. Indeed the San Andreas Fault itself, source of that quake, heads from land out to sea within view from this very spot, beneath Mussel Rock just a quarter mile to the south. This is an inherently problematic landscape. The high cliffs and lumpy, blocky terraces descending to the beach clearly show the landslide’s characteristic crown to toe profile. Many of the trails below follow the slump’s residual cracks and contours.
And yet this was the landscape upon which the state built the park’s access road, bathrooms, and picnic area in the 1930s, and upon which several generations of Californians enjoyed Thornton State Beach. These improvements lasted until 1982 when a strong El Nino year brought rains and high surf, and further landslides. The park road was lost completely that year, succumbing to the fate of previous roads and railroads which had tried to build in this ever shifting area and failed. And so the state abandoned Thornton as an active State Park. Daly City’s Thornton viewing area on top of the bluffs has been developed nicely with parking and informational placards, but the remainder of the park has been essentially left to its own devices.
Thornton has since regressed to a feral state.
Which is not the same as a purely natural state, I might add. If landslides are the dominant feature of Thornton State Beach, then Iceplant must come in a close second. More familiar to us along the highway, this green and red spiky creeper provides an impressive carpet, dominating Thornton’s dunes. But Iceplant is a successful invader, not a native plant. It has squeezed out the previous inhabitants here on this stretch of the coast and its shallow roots fail to hold the slopes as well as the locals did.
From the cliffs above, one can view Thornton’s trails cut clearly and neatly through this overgrown carpet of Iceplant. They are maintained today by the hoofs of horses and the feet of the hiking public rather than any state maintenance personnel.
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