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.
The park also offers many benefits for people, including a respite from extreme heat in a fast-growing region without much green space, as well as opportunities for families who wouldn’t otherwise have a place nearby to picnic, camp or go trail running. And because it functions as a floodplain, giving the rivers room to spread harmlessly if they overtop their banks, the park will help prevent or mitigate destructive flooding in the San Joaquin Valley.
“I think of this literally as a park of the future,” Armando Quintero, director of the California Department of Parks and Recreation, told Bay Nature magazine, referring to the multifaceted benefits of Dos Rios.
When Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in April that California’s first new state park in several years would open this week, he made a similar point.
“The benefits don’t just stop at recreation,” he said in a statement. “This park is a key asset to fighting the climate crisis, home to the state’s largest floodplain restoration project. We’re not just protecting these spaces, we’re restoring them for future generations.”
For more:
See a map of all of California’s state parks.
The rest of the news
A judge in Orange County halted a strike by University of California academic workers who were protesting the university system’s treatment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators on campuses.
Southern California
Crime statistics are not being uploaded to the Los Angeles Police Department’s public website while the department works on updating its records system, The Los Angeles Times reports.
Two men have stolen thousands of Lego sets from retailers in Southern California, the police say.
A Disneyland worker died after falling out of a moving golf cart at the park, NBC Los Angeles reports.
Northern California
Smiley Martin, one of the three people charged in the April 2022 mass shooting that killed six people in Sacramento, has died in a county jail while awaiting trial. He had pleaded not guilty.
Stanford University will once again require standardized test scores from undergraduate applicants starting next year; it had suspended the requirement in 2020.
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And before you go, some good news
The California Migration Museum works to tell stories of how migration has shaped, and still shapes, life in the state, using self-guided audio tours and other experiences.
The museum, founded in 2021, has introduced Melting Spots, an interactive map featuring 38 immigrant chefs, restaurants and dishes in San Francisco, along with audio stories that help explain them. Explore the map to find a new spot to eat.
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The post California’s New State Park Opens This Week appeared first on New York Times.