Massive parks connectivity plan to create trails network from Carmel to Big Sur announced.

The rugged stretch of coastline that greets visitors to Big Sur as they move south of Carmel is slated to get a major makeover. 

Representatives of four entities signed a memorandum of understanding Wednesday morning that sets the stage for connecting a patchwork of public and private land in the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains.

A future trail network will likely connect the mouth of the Carmel River to Palo Corona Regional Park, and extend south all the way to Garrapata State Park, allowing thru-hikers to descend at Soberanes Canyon and cross back over the highway to the ocean. A campground somewhere along that route is also possible.

The MOU signatories are California State Parks, Big Sur Land Trust, Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District, and the Point Lobos Foundation. 

"We've been in hundreds of meetings together, working on the same issues together. I can't think of one instance where we disagreed to the point that we were adversaries," said Mat Fuzie, superintendent of the Monterey District of State Parks.

The next step is plans for new trails, which are expected to take about two years. Timeframe and budget remain fuzzy. We are cobbling together as best we can sources of funding for each project," Fuzie said.

While parks officials hope that new and longer trails attract more users—particularly young people and people of color, who they say are under-represented in regional parks—they're also hopeful that new hikes will help ease crowds on some popular routes, like Point Lobos and Soberanes.  

"Trying to get up Garrapata on a Saturday can be like trying to get up Half Dome," Fuzie said.

The inter-agency agreement, called the Lobos-Corona Parklands Project, was unanimously approved by all four boards of the participating entities. 

The Regional Park District acquired Whisler Wilson Ranch from Big Sur Land Trust in 2012, an important parkland transaction that followed a decade of Big Sur land deals for the purpose of conservation. 

Palo Corona Regional Park remains a limited-access park pending plans for a parking area. 

Rafael Payan joined the Regional Park District less than a year ago as the new general manager. "This gives us a magnificent opportunity to develop a tapestry, to look at these individual properties not as individual properties but a broad landscape," Payan says.

"If we are successful in pulling this off, it could be a model not just in California, but it could be a global model for government agencies in coordinating their efforts."