China Camp State Park

China Camp, I have neglected you. Yes, you are slightly beyond the bounds of my official Novatan territory. Yes, you are mostly covered in mixed oak woodland that I can find in abundance closer to home. But still: you have wonderful bay views that exceed anything we have up here. You offer woods, yes, but woods and marsh and rocky shoreline. You have history – enough to masquerade as the Chinese coast in that mediocre old John Wayne movie. And you were the site of the even more historic event known as Jack’s first picnic! Today, let me make amends and give this park its long overdue recognition.

I’ll start with the obligatory park brochure-esque summary: what has this plot of land done to earn its spot in the California pantheon alongside the Mount Tams and Samuel P. Taylors, the Points Lobos and Patrick’s of the world? It always helps your case for State Park status if you can point to both historical and ecological uniqueness.

The cultural heritage of the park relates primarily to its time as the site of an immigrant Chinese fishing community, which thrived for a period in the late 1800s. This legacy endured until the nearly present day in the form of Frank Quan, who lived in the park until his death in 2016. Substantial traces of this past still exist in the historical buildings and exhibits at China Camp Village and in the reconstructed traditional shrimping junk the Grace Quan, now part of the San Francisco Maritime Museum fleet, but which returns to China Camp each summer.

China Camp’s ecological highlight reels center on its significant area of intact tidal salt marsh, a community which was often diked, drained, or filled for conversion to other land uses. Some 90% of the tidal marsh that originally surrounded the greater San Francisco Bay has been destroyed. Much of Novato’s salt marsh suffered this fate, and we are heroically undertaking the difficult, expensive, and experimental labor of reconstructing such a marsh at the Hamilton Wetlands. It’s a long, slow process of many decades for tidal inflows and outflows to create a more or less stable conglomeration of accumulated material, built-up plant life, and meandering channels.

As you approach the eastern part of China Camp, protruding out into the bay on the peninsula of Point San Pedro, the bay interface becomes more sudden and rocky, providing the first such shoreline as you travel south from Novato. Meanwhile, the upland habitats climb away from the bay towards the modest summit of San Pedro Mountain (1058’), containing a spectrum of woodland communities, including an unusual population of blue oaks, a tree that typically favors hot, inland areas rather than cool, coastal locations. All three of these habitats are worth exploring for their plant and bird life.

Marsh

I’ve touched on marshes before: at Bahia, Rush Creek, Hamilton, and Las Gallinas. Those marshes are in varying states of good health, often existing in a patchwork of intact tidal zones, non-tidal areas that are seasonally inundated, and adjacent areas that are undergoing restoration to a marshland state after many decades of other human use. China Camp has a relatively large expanse of undisturbed tidal marsh, extending naturally from its original bayshore to the wooded hills, gradually climbing in elevation and consequent plant zone in the incremental way to which its inhabitants are adapted. Different plants can tolerate different salinity levels and frequencies of tidal inundation; the basic idea is something like this:

Cordgrass → Pickleweed → Saltgrass and Gumplant → Coyote Bush and Oaks

It’s important to have this gradient – something that humans were generally not that interested in during our time of settlement. We wanted dry land. Sometimes we wanted to be right on the water. But “periodically inundated” at high tides didn’t really mesh well with our habits. If you are a marsh-dwelling harvest mouse or black rail, however, you need to have some adjacent higher land with adequate cover to prevent you from becoming egret food when the waters rise.

Obviously, marsh is not exactly inviting to human exploration. But we can get close to it here as it extends in patches along the undulating shoreline. Particularly good marsh proximity is on the short and easy Turtleback Island loop, which circumnavigates a hill on the bay side of North San Pedro road in about .9 miles. Some of the inhabitants are easy enough to see: great egrets stalking prey, kites and harriers hunting overhead, ubiquitous song sparrows perching out in the open to sing in spring. Others are less conspicuous, at least when not singing, such as common yellowthroats (our unusual wetland warbler) and marsh wrens. And some are near invisible, such as the salt marsh harvest mouse and the two saltiest rails, Ridgway’s and black. You can hear both of these with some regularity, however, especially if you visit at dusk or early morning.