Ask anyone in Ben Lomond how Big Basin is doing and you'll get some version of the same answer: still recovering, still years from finished, still not what it was before 2020. That's true. It also misses the more interesting thing happening right now, a few miles up Highway 236 from downtown Boulder Creek. The park's next entrance is taking shape closer to town than the old one ever was.
In February, California State Parks and the Sempervirens Fund announced the permanent addition of 153 acres known as NoraBella to Big Basin Redwoods State Park, the park's first expansion in fifteen years. The last time State Parks added land here was the Little Basin acquisition back in 2011. The $2.415 million purchase closes a chapter on a property with a strange history: an eccentric collector once used it to store cars and debris, Verve Coffee Roasters co-founder Colby Barr bought it from Santa Cruz County in 2020 and had it cleaned up, and Sempervirens Fund purchased it from him in February 2021 before finally handing it to the state this year.
What makes NoraBella matter isn't the acreage. It's the location. State Parks calls it the "Gateway to Big Basin," and the property sits along Highway 236 at roughly the same point as Saddle Mountain, the interim lot where the summer shuttle already picks up visitors. The park's historic core, the old headquarters site deep in the redwoods, sits farther up the road. Every plan State Parks has released so far, including a forthcoming welcome center at Saddle Mountain, points the park's future front door toward this stretch, closer to Boulder Creek than the historic headquarters entrance visitors used before the CZU fire.
"It feels like redemption to finally secure the forest's future as part of Big Basin," said Sempervirens Fund executive director Sara Barth.
Sempervirens Fund is working on four more land deals in the area, none as large as NoraBella, but the pattern is clear enough. The rebuild isn't just replacing what burned. It's redrawing where the park begins.
What's Actually Open Right Now
While the long-range planning continues, this is the third summer the shuttle has run, and it's already changing how people move through what's open.
The free shuttle returned May 23, ahead of Memorial Day weekend, building on pilot programs from 2024 and 2025. It loops between the Saddle Mountain overflow lot and the main day-use area near the historic core, running weekends and holidays through Labor Day. The day before it started, State Parks reopened the Sequoia Trail and its Sempervirens Falls loop for the first time since the fire, a 2.9-mile trail that can be combined with 1.4 miles of the Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail for a 4.3-mile loop past a 20-foot waterfall.
The scale of the recovery is easier to see set against what existed before. Before the fire, Big Basin had roughly 80 miles of trail and 35 miles of fire road. About 20 miles of each have reopened since, meaning something closer to a quarter of the old trail network and a bit over half of the fire roads are usable again. More than 230,000 people have come through the gates since the park's partial reopening in July 2022, on trails that still cover a fraction of what used to be there.
A few practical details for anyone planning a visit this fall:
- Day-use parking at the main area runs $6 plus a $2 reservation fee, or $10 without one
- The shuttle is free, ADA accessible, and carries a bike rack
- Dogs are allowed on leash only in paved areas, not on trails or fire roads
- Camping remains closed everywhere in the park except the interim walk-in and bike-in sites at Rancho del Oso on the coastal side
- Santa Cruz METRO's Route 35B also runs weekend service from Scotts Valley into the park
The Valley Keeps Its Own Calendar
None of this waits on the state to finish its planning process, because the valley never stopped running on its own schedule.
Boulder Creek's KBCZ Music Festival, now in its eighth year, has become an early-August fixture, an event that grew out of an idea from KBCZ alum Matt Buchanan, who now runs Balefire Brewing under the name DJ Matt Slayershoes. Over at the Santa Cruz Mountains Art Center on Mill Street in Ben Lomond, the current exhibit, Rhythms Within, is hanging through mid-September after opening in mid-August, a rotation the Art Center has kept going since it incorporated as a nonprofit in 1997. A block away, Mountain Community Theater opens its fall production of Neil Simon's Rumors next month at Park Hall, the same historic Ben Lomond venue that's hosted the group's shows for years.
The food side of the valley has its own fixtures. La Placa Family Bakery in Ben Lomond still turns out pizza and hand-made cookies. Casa Nostra sits among the redwoods nearby, one of the restaurants that gives Highway 9 its reputation as a corridor of small, specific places rather than chains. Highlands Park, home to the Jim Keeffe skate park, has hosted the valley's arts fairs for decades, including the Redwood Mountain Faire's earliest incarnation, which the Valley Women's Club ran there from 1980 to 1996 before it grew into the two-day event it is today. Down the road, Joe's Bar keeps its usual crowd in Boulder Creek.
None of this is waiting on a facilities plan. It's the valley being the valley, redwoods, mountain roads, and small venues that have outlasted a fire and a fifteen-year gap in park expansion without missing a season.
Closer, Not Just Bigger
The easy assumption about Big Basin is that recovery means restoration, a slow rebuild back toward what existed before 2020. NoraBella complicates that story in a way that matters for anyone who lives near it. The park isn't just regrowing inside its old footprint. It's extending its edge toward Boulder Creek, building its next entrance at a point closer to town than the one that burned. For a community that measures its year by KBCZ in August, an art show on Mill Street, and a shuttle that only runs until Labor Day, that's the kind of shift you feel before you read about it: the forest getting a little easier to reach, one gateway at a time.
If you're already living under these redwoods and thinking about what comes next, whether that's more space, less commute, or just a better sense of where the valley is headed, Mike and Tara O'Boy have spent close to three decades tracking exactly this kind of change across Santa Cruz County. Connect With Us Today to talk through what it means for your corner of the San Lorenzo Valley.
