It’s Monday. California has a new state park. Plus, Stanford joins other elite schools in once again requiring standardized test scores from applicants.
California officials will formally open the state’s 281st state park on Wednesday, and it’s an unusual one. Dos Rios is a riverfront oasis in the San Joaquin Valley that offers a window into what the region was like before it was transformed into an agricultural powerhouse.
The 1,600-acre property, eight miles west of Modesto at the confluence of the Tuolumne and San Joaquin Rivers, for decades housed dairy farms and almond orchards. It has now been restored to a broad natural floodplain, where visitors will be able to hike, watch birds and other wildlife, and have a picnic along the riverbanks. Officials hope to eventually add trails for bicycling and more river access for swimming, angling and boating.
“It’s a great addition to the state parks system in a part of the state that’s somewhat park-poor,” Rachel Norton, executive director of the California State Parks Foundation, told me. “If you look at a map of California, you see tons of parks going up the coast. You see tons of parks in the Sierra Nevada and in the desert. There’s a lot along the edges. But in the center of the state, there’s just not a lot.”
Dos Rios is a rare stretch of riverside forest, an ecosystem that was common in the Central Valley before the mid-19th century but that has largely been supplanted by farms. The park provides habitat for several endangered and threatened species, including the riparian brush rabbit, riparian wood rat, Chinook salmon, Swainson’s hawk and others.