The placid ocean smudges into the horizon. Light filters through clouds and softens the yellow grass on the hills like a painting. As the morning mist retreats to higher ground, more of the landscape emerges, revealing conifers and slashes of green scrub.
This is the view as you approach the first trails open to the public at Cotoni-Coast Dairies. (Cotoni is pronounced “Chuh-toe-knee.”) The 5,800-acre property bends like a broad horseshoe around Davenport, north of Santa Cruz, and was added to the California Coastal National Monument in President Obama’s final days in office. The first nine miles of hiking and biking trails opened on August 15, giving the public access to its sweeping coastal prairies, redwood forests, and oak woodlands for the first time in modern history.
“The trails are unique in that we have the opportunity to design them from scratch,” says Matt De Young, the executive director of Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship. Over the last few years, his organization rallied nearly 900 local volunteers over 10,000 hours to help craft the trail infrastructure.
That effort shows up in details that Katy Peterson, a Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship employee, points out as we stroll the first and gentlest loop, the Hawk or Káknu Trail. It’s designed to adaptive mountain biking standards, and we wend up the wide, even terrain to a broad bend where a swale funnels winter runoff into Agua Puera Creek.
“We dug about 18 inches below the surface of the trail, and then buried rock and wedged it, and covered all of that with dirt,” explains Peterson. This reinforcement allows water to flow beneath the trail and minimize erosion.
We cut north over the grassy slopes while she describes other subtleties: Hand-chiseled cuts define the contours of the path. Volunteer carpenters crafted benches and bridges, many from local rocks and fallen redwoods. Peterson’s enthusiasm is infectious as she describes a coworker who “billy-goated” across the slopes through poison oak and consulted “all the ologists”—engineers and scientists—to choose the best paths through the land.
The scent of coyote brush signals the approach of the intermediate loop, the Tree or Huyya Trail. The path narrows through redwoods and enters a lush mixed conifer forest, then drops into a ravine. Between trees draped with lichen, there’s a glimpse of ocean, close enough to watch whales breach. We don’t make it to the hardest loop, the Wildcat or Toróma Trail, but from afar it resembles a narrow snakeskin shed across the chaparral.
This rich landscape once supported the Awaswas-speaking Cotoni, who lived here for thousands of years—millennia before the Roman Empire, notes Valentin Lopez, board chair of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust. He believes visitors will “feel the sacredness of the land.” The Land Trust worked with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to make sure important cultural sites are protected from visitors. But reminders of the Cotoni exist throughout the landscape, from the rare patches of native coastal prairie where they gathered edible seeds (unlike the introduced European grasses that dominate most California hillsides) to the red maids, irises, and dozens of other plant species still growing along the trails that nourished untold generations.
“There are no known survivors from the Cotoni tribe,” says Lopez. “And so that is why our state, our tribe, works so hard on this territory. We work there to honor the ancestors and to ensure they’re never forgotten.”
These trails are just the beginning of the land’s new chapter. In the coming months, more interpretive signs and benches will arrive. In the next few years, the BLM will restore the dilapidated historic cheese barn beside the parking lot. Ten more miles of trails for hikers and equestrians are tentatively slated to open by 2027 on the other side of Davenport. These southern routes will be wheelchair accessible and connect to Santa Cruz via a pedestrian overpass and the Coastal Rail Trail.
As the trail loops back along the slope of the grassy hillside, the Davenport Landing surf break comes into view below the coastal bluffs. The ocean stirs, marbled with deep blue. I breathe in the light breeze.
If I’d stood on this spot a millennium ago, a Cotoni crafter or healer may have harvested supplies from any of the dozens of native plant species growing beneath my feet for medicine, baskets, or ceremonies. A century ago, I may have felt a lazy flick of the tail from a dairy cow. (Their brethren still dot the hillsides and cluster near the parking lot.) This place almost became the site of a nuclear facility, then of a luxury housing development.
More recently, some public advocates have raised concerns about Cotoni-Coast Dairies amid reports that the current administration is considering stripping some national monuments of federal protection to allow resource extraction. But according to Lookout Santa Cruz, when the Trust for Public Land donated the parcel to the BLM, it mandated the property be used only for open space and public recreation, prohibiting commercial timber harvesting and motorized off-road vehicles. The trust also retained mineral and water rights.
Now this land is “for the people and by the people,” says Zachary Ormsby, the field manager for the BLM’s Central Coast Field Office.
“So many alternative outcomes could have happened here,” says Sempervirens Fund Executive Director Sara Barth, who helped the land achieve monument status. “You have this local treasure that so many people have come together to fight, to save. . . . It’s really exciting to see it finally coming to fruition.”
If you go
Cotoni-Coast Dairies
The draw: Free access to coastal terraces and grassland overlooking the ocean, as well as redwood forests, and chaparral-covered hills.
The trail: Nine miles of three looped trails, with increasing levels of difficulty for hikers and mountain bikers. The first loop (Hawk or Káknu Trail) is accessible to adaptive mountain biking. On-leash dogs are allowed on the first loop and the second loop (Tree or Huyya Trail).
Facilities: The parking lot has a bathroom. The trails have benches throughout, and Tree or Huyya Trail has a picnic table.
Getting there: Cement Plant Road and Warnell Truck Trail, Davenport 95017.
