04-07-2025
- Climate
- San Francisco Chronicle
This Bay Area park is popular with campers. Could the ocean wash it away?
For about a half-century, Denise Longacre's family has dug for clams and stoked seaside campfires on Doran Beach, a crescent swoop of sand jutting out of the Sonoma County coast at the mouth of Bodega Bay.
The Pacific Ocean's relentless winds have been the only constant — apart from camaraderie. Beach sands shift dramatically season-to-season and year to year. Clam populations have plummeted. Storms seem more dramatic.
'I've seen tents blown into the water,' she said. 'One December, all the roads flooded. It was pouring rain.'
County experts warn that ocean waters increasingly cover areas of Doran from sea to harbor during winter storms and King Tides — inundations that provide a grim glimpse of a future in which rising seas could overwhelm this narrow but important spit of land. Doran's two-mile peninsula shelters Bodega Harbor, the largest fishing port between San Francisco and Fort Bragg.
More than one-third of Doran Regional Park could be permanently underwater by the end of the century, if worst-case scenarios for sea level rise developed by the U.S. Geological Survey and National Research Council unfold as projected.
Parks officials say there are actions they can take to lessen the impact, but they involve compromise. Natural dunes like those at Doran are masterful water absorbers, but restoring them might require moving — or removing — hardscapes like roads, picnic areas or campgrounds.
Steve Ehret, planning manager for Sonoma County Regional Parks, said the county is in the very early stages of studying how to prepare Doran Beach for the next 50 and 100 years. Every major flood at Doran is a chance to learn how they might preserve the beach for people and wildlife for decades to come.
'It's a shot across the bow — a warning shot,' Ehret said.
Most California beaches stand square-shouldered against the Pacific Ocean's pounding surf. But Doran curves southward, creating a relatively safe boogie-boarding paradise where children are more free to splash in crashing waves.
Doran's northern shoulder hosts a rich ecosystem of tidal mudflats and salt marshes with eelgrass, shorebirds and endangered salmonids.
Its 139-site campground for tents and RVs was built on land built up from dredged material decades ago when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers carved the harbor out of the original lagoon.
Coastal ecologist Peter Baye said Doran shares key similarities with Stinson Beach. They are relatively protected south-facing barrier beaches with lagoons. Both lie on the San Andreas Fault and are vulnerable to large earthquakes that can cause the sand to compact and settle.
Baye said beach erosion occurs in big pulses triggered by storms, bursts of rising seas triggered by global changes and earthquakes.
'One hundred years of erosion usually occurs with a few big storms,' Baye said.
But unlike Stinson, which is largely lined with homes, cabins and businesses on private parcels, Doran is all public land with relatively minimal infrastructure including a road, campground, picnic areas, parking lots and septic systems.
Baye said that could make it easier to cede areas to dunes and other natural systems. Resilient beaches must be able to shift with ocean movement, and they can't do that if they are hemmed in by hardscape and infrastructure.
'How can we buy some time? How can we….slow the most catastrophic, disruptive changes?' Baye said.
Ehret said there are no plans yet for what the county will do. Officials are studying critical habitat areas and recreational infrastructure as well as federal sea level reports to understand which areas are most vulnerable to sea level changes.
The county will hold many public discussions and present scenarios for balancing recreation and natural ecosystems at Doran in the coming years.
'It's not one day Doran is gone — it's slow,' Ehret said.
The county already has many dune restoration programs underway.
One of the greatest successes in restoring dunes at Doran has come from a group of stalwart volunteers.
Jan Lochner and a crew of native plant society members have pulled invasive ice plant out of Doran's sands almost every Wednesday for eight years.
Lochner said it seemed like a Sisyphean task at the outset but has proved remarkably effective. They have cleared more than a mile of beach of invasive plant species and watched the dunes and native plants readily reclaim the space. They've seen the threatened snowy plover begin to rebound with the removal of tall European dune grasses that were hiding prime predators like skunks.
'It's so daunting, but week by week it adds up,' Lochner said.
