The City of Dana Point says the Center for Natural Land Management’s (CNLM) mismanagement of the Dana Point Headlands results in visitors routinely being trapped on the wrong side of the automatically-locking gates – forcing them to call the Sheriff’s Department for assistance.
The CNLM claims trespassing in the Headlands is rampant.
Who is correct?
The Headlands Preserve is really the only publicly-accessible wilderness area local to Dana Point residents, and is a significant draw for Dana Point’s tourism industry.
“Our local trails, in particular the Dana Point Headlands continues to be a significant tourist attraction,” Visit Dana Point’s executive director, Heather Johnston, told the Dana Point Planning Commission on April 22 of this year.
CNLM data confirms this. According to trail counters at the gated trail entrances, the number of visitors to the Preserve doubled between 2011 and 2017. The CNLM says its most recent visitor data (October 2022 through September 2023) showed that on average, there were 648 visitors per day to the 1.4-mile trail.
“From a human perspective, I’d like to point out that Dana Point residents have almost no access to wilderness areas in our city,” Capistrano Beach resident Toni Nelson told the Planning Commission at the same meeting.
“We have many parks but unlike larger cities that are able to set aside large wild areas for hiking, [the Headlands] is about it for Dana Point,” said Nelson.
The agreement creating the Headlands in 2005 called for public access from 7:00 a.m. to sunset, seven days a week. That was the case until March 2020, when the CNLM shut down public access, citing the COVID pandemic. Although it soon became clear that closing public spaces did nothing stop the spread of COVID, CNLM refused to re-open the trail.
Eventually, the CNLM relented and allowed public access on an extremely limited basis: at on point, trail access was restricted to six hours a week – Tuesday and Thursday from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.)
Dana Point filed a lawsuit, and the court in November 2022 forced the CNLM to restore the traditional tail hours of 7:00 a.m. to sunset every day.
Even so, not everyone is convinced CNLM is up to the job of managing public access to the Headlands. They point, for example, to repeated examples of people being trapped behind the gates, which lock automatically at sunset and are extremely physically challenging to scale. As a result, trapped visitors have to call 911 for assistance from Orange County Sheriff’s deputies.
The gates close automatically at sunset – and although the is signage posting trail hours and advising visitors they “should be out of the Preserve by sunset” – that admonition conflicts with a more deep-seated human desire to see the beauty of sunset – including the twilight – especially in such an iconic location.
Dana Point resident and Headlands advocate Denise Erkeneff has first-hand experience with being locked in. Erkeneff said the CNLM ranger walked away.
Erkeneff is a long-time proponent of both Headlands preservation and public access to it. She was the original litigant in the legal fight that led to the establishment of protecting the Headlands from development and creating the Preserve.
Erkeneff contends the CNLM is ill-suited to job of managing public access, and believes this to be a factor in past – and potentially future – attempts to restrict trail access.
“They have no other property that they manage that has a trail system,” said Erkeneff.
Her husband Rick Erkeneff, Erkeneff is a member of the South Coast Water District Board of Directors and formerly chairman of the Surfrider Foundation’s South Orange County chapter for 10 years. He has also experienced being locked in.
“I’ve been locked in like five times,” said Rick Erkeneff.
“One time, the sun had gone down and I walked by a [CNLM] ranger on the trail,” said Erkeneff. “He walked to the other end of the trail and left us locked in for 20 or 30 minutes.”
On one of those occasions, a group of tourists were locked in along with Erkeneff. All of them had were forced to scale the tall security fence in order to get out; fortunately, they were young and strong enough to do so.
Erkeneff himself fell while climbing over the fence.
“If the CNLM can’t manage the Headlands for the benefit of the public, there needs to be another solution,” said Denise Erkeneff. “They weren’t even part of the original litigation. They were an afterthought.”
For its part, the CNLM states that after-hours trespassing on the Headlands Preserve is out of hand. In an April 2 letter to the City of Dana Point, the CNLM claimed “between January 1, 2024 and March 14, 2024, CNLM documented over 600 instances of people on the Preserve after closing hours.”
The letter provided no further explanation of how the CNLM came up with that number, nor what was being done about the trespassers.
Dana Point disputes the CNLM’s assertion, stating it “investigated this claim and has found that in the last twelve (12) months there has only been 33 calls for service at the site – and of those 33 calls, only one (1) related to trespassing. City Staff is unaware as to how CNLM has calculated this figure.”
OC Independent requested a record of calls for service to the Headlands, covering the period January 1, 2022 through June 19, 2024. During that period, there were 44 calls for service – all from hikers trapped on the wrong side of the automatically locking Headlands access gate.
Rather than point fingers, the City of Dana Point asserts CNLM ought to apply the “significant funding” it has received in the last three years to deal with trespassers, since that is a stated reason he DOD is giving the funding to CNLM.
This writer visited the trail in mid-July. About 20 minutes before sunset, an armed security guard employed by the CNLM said the gates would shut soon and recommended walking to the exit, before proceeding along the trail. He returned to the gate at the Nature Center at sunset.
