Oceano Dunes — Driving on the Beach
Near Pismo Beach, California
Just south of Pismo Beach the sand piles up into a vast wall of dunes, and here you can do something possible almost nowhere else in California, drive your own vehicle straight onto the beach and out among the dunes. The Oceano Dunes are the only unit of the California state park system where street cars, trucks, and off road vehicles may be driven on the sand. People have been motoring here since the early nineteen hundreds, when the flat, hard packed sand near the water proved perfect for land speed runs and the softer hills behind became a playground for four wheeling.
The dunes were named a National Natural Landmark in nineteen seventy-four, and the vehicle recreation area that survives today was formally authorized in the early nineteen eighties. The park sits inside the far larger Guadalupe Nipomo dune complex, the biggest remaining coastal dune system in California south of San Francisco. It has also long been contested ground, with riders, neighbors, dust regulators, and conservationists arguing over engines, air quality, and the fate of nesting shorebirds.
Long before any of them, the Chumash lived among these dunes, and the artists known as the Dunites made the same sand their refuge.
