California's Lost Attempt to Build a 10th National Park

SFGate ^ | June 15, 2026 | Erin Rode

[nickcarraway]

Initial conservation efforts for Toyon National Park began in the 1920s

The widow of Frederick Hastings Rindge, who purchased thousands of acres in the Santa Monica Mountains in 1892, May eventually became known as the “Queen of Malibu” for her fierce opposition to anything that would bring more people to her coastal empire, including railroads, roads and homesteaders. In short, she wanted to keep the pristine coastline and the chaparral hillsides to herself.

But all of her legal fights cost money, and Rindge started selling land to family members and renting out beachfront lots to celebrities. In the end, even that wasn’t enough. Rindge declared bankruptcy in 1936, several years after losing a legal battle that allowed the Pacific Coast Highway to cut through Malibu, providing some of the first public access to the area.

As Rindge’s grip on the land loosened, all hell broke loose. Suddenly, vast tracts of untouched land were available to developers, just as the state’s burgeoning highway system seemingly made it possible to bulldoze through anywhere (mountain ranges included) to further development. In response, a decadeslong effort began to protect the Santa Monica Mountains as a national park, rather than see it carved into a series of freeways and housing tracts.

Proposals to turn the Santa Monica Mountains into a national park (or, at the least, a national forest) were floated as early as the 1920s, including by May Rindge herself as a method to prevent anyone else from moving in nearby. But it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that these efforts really gained momentum, motivated in part by other mountain-dwelling homeowners, leading to the proposal of legislation that would have formally created Toyon National Park in the Santa Monica Mountains.

By then, the state park system had begun acquiring and conserving some chunks of

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TOPICS: Culture/Society; Government; News/Current Events; US: California
KEYWORDS: california; fraud; grift; malibu; nationalpark

[Soul of the South]

“But there just weren’t enough resources available for state and local sources to snap up pieces of land for conservation before developers.”

Why not? Why should it be up to the federal government to shoulder the cost of a land preservation project in the state of California.

California is the wealthiest state in the nation and some of the wealthiest people in the world live in California. Why don’t the Hollywood celebrities and tech billionaires cough up the donations needed if this is a critical project? Why not add additional income and property taxes on the population of the state. If it is a good idea the people of the state will be happy to pay more to see the land preserved.