Two-Heel Drive

The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors will mull the matter tonight.

Yurts are only part of a five-year effort by the county to attract more campers. Officials recently started putting up Spanish-language posters on buses and light rail advertising “Camp Here,” after surveys showed Hispanics are a promising untapped camping market. But despite those and other efforts - like promoting county parks at various outdoor stores - attendance has still dipped. The sites are booked for only about 17,000 nights a year on average - or between 12 percent and 20 percent average annual capacity.

So, why don’t more people like to camp in the county parks?

A product sample from the company Pacific Yurts. More on yurts here.

I hear tell the parks department in Santa Clara County wants to put up 24 yurts in five of the county’s parks. Here’s a link to the proposal. Estimated cost: $832,000 (a handy illustration of housing costs around here: A Mongolian-style tent on a raised platform will set you back 34 grand — the county could buy barely used second-hand camping trailers for much, much less, but hey, yurts are the in thing these days).

Current plan is to put them in parks that already have campgrounds — Sanborn Skyline, Uvas Canyon, Grant Ranch, Coyote Lake, Mount Madonna — but that issue isn’t settled. Heck, Grant Ranch is big enough that you could have yurt-to-yurt hikes, just like in Mongolia, but minus the horsemen.

A colleague at the paper is working on a story about the yurt plan and is interested in the opinions of hard-core campers who’ve used the county parks, and specifically whether they think much of the idea. Use the comments to weigh in, and perhaps you’ll see your name in the paper in the next few days.

With any luck I’ll remember to link to the story when it actually runs.

(Here’s a PDF of the Yurt Feasibility Study … tons o’ interesting facts in there)

Arlene, a local hiker/reader (last seen at this post about Ed Levin County Park), dropped me an e-mail this morning with the news that she’d just learned you don’t have to pay to park at Joseph D. Grant County Park — you can park free at another lot just down the road from the main entrance.

The parking fees are not that high — usually 6 bucks — but they are irksome in light of the fact that the county parks department is sitting on a surplus of some $85 million (while the rest of the county has a $140 million deficit and is cutting services).

There can’t be any doubt that the parking fees keep people away. Rancho San Antonio has free parking and the place is mobbed every weekend. Same story at Mission Peak. Parks with parking fees generally never draw the same kinds of crowds. I hike on weekends in some of the best public parks in the country near a city with nearly a million people and usually have the trails to myself if I’m in a park with fees.

From a hiking perspective this isn’t such a bad thing, but if the point of having parks is for the citizenry to partake in healthful outdoor activities, and the fees are discouraging said activities, you have to ask yourself whether the fees truly serve the parks’ purposes.

I can always rationalize that it’s not that much money, that my money’s going to a good cause (and even celebrate the first time in recorded history that bureaucrats have set money aside rather than spend every penny they can scrape up), but I can’t get totally over the annoyance.

(Not that I’d want a world without annoyance; what would I blog about?)