Map of Cambria shows Rancho Marino Reserve near Strawberry Canyon, Lampton Cliffs County Park and Camp Ocean Pines.
By Keith Pendleton
The Kenneth Norris Rancho Marine Reserve, KNRMR, south and east of Cambria’s Lampton Cliffs County Park, was placed in care of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2001. The “open classroom school” celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary this year. Many Central Coast residents do not even know it is there!
UCSB administers seven facilities as part of the UC Natural Reserve System: Norris Rancho Marino Reserve, Carpinteria Salt Marsh, Coal Oil Point (at the western edge of the Isla Vista peninsula), Santa Cruz Island, Sedgwick Reserve in the Santa Ynez Valley, and two parcels named Valentine Eastern Sierra near Mammoth Ski Area according to the UCSB website. Named for Kenneth S. Norris, a former UC Santa Cruz professor and a founder of the UC Natural Reserve System, the ranch remains privately owned by a philanthropist who wants it protected and set aside for research and teaching, managed by UCSB.
The Cambria campus is a part of the larger, 39-property UC Natural Reserve System, which since its founding in 1965 has become the largest system of its kind in the world, with more than 750,000 acres of protected natural land. The UC system was instituted by the California Legislature to place land tracts under various University of California campuses for preservation and ecological study. UCSB runs the most reserves of any UC campus.
The KNRMR property was once owned by rancher Hiram Sibley. Sibley is said to be responsible for bringing Western Union across the U.S. and Canada. He reportedly bought Rancho Marino because he was a close friend of William Randolph Hearst and spent time at nearby Hearst Castle, according to an article in The Current, UCSB’s newspaper.
The Cambria Air Force Station, near Rancho Marino, was used by the military as a small radar and artillery base during World War II, following a Japanese submarine attack on the oil tanker SS Montebello off the coast of Cambria. The 34-acre former Air Force Station is currently for sale pending a court-ordered bankruptcy proceeding pending July 7.
The KSNRMR area has been a cattle ranch, a dairy farm, and home to Chinese seaweed fishermen. It was historically homebase for indigenous people, the Chumash tribes to the south and the Salinans to the north.
The Rancho Marino Reserve may play a role in the Strawberry Canyon-to-the-Ocean Trail proposed with the 2022 GreenSpace purchase of additional Strawberry Creek frontage. The trail would end at Lampton Cliffs County Park. According to the UCSB site map, the county park is inside the Rancho Marino boundary. The Reserve boundary runs up to the GreenSpace Strawberry Canyon lands.
