Another popular beach near Santa Barbara is preparing to become a construction zone in 2025.
El Capitan State Beach, right off Highway 101 about 20 miles west of downtown Santa Barbara, is set to close to overnight campers in early January for a $5.5 million construction project that will update the camping area facilities, better mitigate stormwater runoff and modernize roads, Kate Wilson, planning chief for California State Parks’ Channel Coast District, told SFGATE.
The park is scheduled to be closed for a year to overnight visitors, and, while it will remain open for day use, parking will be impacted, Wilson said.
Though the campground is still technically open until construction starts in early 2025, State Parks has suspended online reservations. Campers looking for one last night at El Capitan before construction begins can take their chances at the park itself on a first-come, first-served basis, Wilson said.
The construction at the park will include a new entrance kiosk, replacement of a bridge and widening of the park’s roads. The construction timeline is January 2025 to January 2026.
Wilson said public feedback on these types of projects can be mixed.
“We sometimes get, ‘Why aren’t you fixing your janky bathroom?’’’ Wilson said, adding that once a project is underway, people then may do an about-face and say that they just want their park back.
“It’s tricky,” she continued, noting that State Parks is trying to take a more active role in surveying the public for what they’d like to see for the three popular Santa Barbara-area parks. “We get pushback for doing projects that require closure and we get pushback for having old rundown facilities. You have to keep people safe, and sometimes you have to close.”
Wilson admits this popular beach corridor has become known more recently for park closures as well as seemingly constant roadwork. Due to last winter’s storms, Refugio State Beach, about 3 miles west of El Capitan State Beach, remained closed for much of the first half of 2024. When it reopened, visitors were dismayed to find tree stumps where many of its historic and treasured century-old date palms once stood.
But even when the state parks are open, large-scale projects, like Caltrans’ three-year road improvement project that kicked off earlier this month right along the Refugio State Beach exit, can also impact the area and people’s access to the beach.
The amount of construction activity in the region, both on the roads and at the parks themselves, is a major reason why State Parks choose to do major work at one park at a time. “Barring some sort of disaster,” Wilson said Refugio and nearby Gaviota State Park should remain open during the construction at El Capitan State Beach.
“We try to keep whatever we can open,” she said. “We try our absolute hardest to not close two nearby parks at the same time.”
