Countywide : A Beach to Call Their Very Own

Call it an outpost.

Sandpipers dart up the lonely beach. A handful of surfers ride the waves offshore. On the warm, vacant sand, a lone visitor dozes against his backpack.

Here, where the Santa Ana River meets the ocean, is an isolated stretch of beach, away from the madding crowds. It is cut off from the rest of the mainland by the new Talbert Channel, built last year. Even in midsummer, when thousands of tourists dot the rest of Huntington State Beach, this outpost section of the beach draws few visitors. Now, in early fall, even fewer humans come here.

“I really love this part of the beach,” said state parks maintenance worker Bob Barry, 50, on a recent afternoon. “You can stand here and not realize where you really are. It’s not like the rest of the beach. People can come here and have the beach all to themselves.”

Huntington State Beach extends three miles along Pacific Coast Highway, covering 164 acres. It draws huge crowds: 3,044,000 people came last year. Its attendance figure is the second-highest of all state parks in California. Only Old Town State Historic Park in San Diego drew more visitors last year.

While the crowds are big at Huntington State Beach, they seldom spill into the southern tip, near the river jetty. It has always been a semi-isolated spot, but since last year--when engineers cut the new Talbert Channel into the beach near Brookhurst Street and Pacific Coast Highway--the southern end of the state park has become even more difficult to reach.

The Talbert Channel made a river-like opening into the beach, bringing the ocean waters into the nearby Huntington Beach Wetlands. The channel both flushes the wetlands and allows rainy-season inland waters to drain into the ocean for flood control.

The channel has made it more difficult for people to get to the jetty area near the Santa Ana River, but no one is complaining. Those who go to the jetty like the isolation.

“It’s peaceful here,” said Craig Mattie, 36, of Newport Beach. “I used to surf here; I surfed here for years.”

Mattie came to the beach in the early afternoon with a backpack and a yen to lie on the sand and sleep in the sun. The waves offshore made soothing, rhythmical sounds. Soon he was fast asleep, with only a curious sea gull anywhere near him.

About two miles away, at the lifeguard headquarters on the heavily traveled portion of Huntington State Beach, state lifeguard Jim Balok, 31, said he fully understands the attraction of the isolated slice of strand.

“It’s very pretty there, and a little lonely,” Balok said. “An interesting crowd of very few people goes there. They stay pretty much by themselves.”

Balok noted that geography and man-made construction have all but severed the river mouth from the rest of Huntington State Beach.

“There’s a fence around a least tern nesting area at that part of the beach,” Balok said. “That’s why some of the surfers call that area ‘The Bird Cages.’ Others call the area ‘The Tomato Patch,’ because I guess some wild tomatoes sprang up there at one time.”

Least terns are an endangered species. The shy, tiny creatures nest in the fenced-in, protected area that faces the beach.

“It’s very nice for the birds,” Balok said. “It keeps them isolated from most of the general public.”

Balok said surfers come to the lonely stretch of beach for a very good reason: Waves are generally excellent. “It’s a very good surfing area, usually with steep, hollow waves,” he said. “That area of the beach is also where we train the junior lifeguards in the summer.”