Newport Beach’s largest-ever nature restoration, at Big Canyon Park in Upper Newport Bay, is just weeks from entering its last and most interesting phase.
The park is already becoming a more scenic hiking area, with habitats that are increasingly vibrant and healthy as the restoration effort continues, city officials said. At its completion, Big Canyon Park will become an inviting place for hiking, biking and birdwatching, they said. It will likely also be a great area that can be used as an outdoor classroom for the public and environmental and research groups.
The project, which began in 2016, is restoring the nearly 60-acre Big Canyon Park to its original state, as it might have been 100 years ago, said Bob Stein, assistant city engineer, who has helped oversee the project.
“This next phase is the most exciting and important,” he said.
Now, thanks to an approval by the Newport Beach City Council last week, which allocated the final $6 million budget for the construction contract, work is scheduled to start in September on the last piece that will connect the entire park to the water at Back Bay.
As part of the project, a reed- and cattail-filled pond, once meant to be a mitigation effort in the 1980s, but is now a mosquito magnet, will be weeded of invasive plants and filled in with dirt dug out from what will become a six-acre lagoon nearby. The wetland area will fill and drain with tidal currents.
The location where the work will be done now has a bridge where a small amount of water flows from Back Bay Drive into Back Bay. But Stein said the planned excavation, which is expected to bring the lagoon down by 10 feet to the water level, will dramatically increase the flow.
“We’ll create a tidal-flushing lagoon, almost what it might have been like 100 years ago,” he said.
Once the construction phase, which restores 13 acres near Back Bay Drive, is complete in early May, the area will be seeded with wetland plants, which will be allowed to grow and mature. Stein predicts the lagoon will become one of the best places to watch birds.
“It will be a bird watcher’s paradise,” Stein said of the work that is transforming degraded land into a healthier, more resilient ecosystem.
At that point, its care and oversight will be put into the hands of the Newport Bay Conservancy for oversight and monitoring over four years.
The project’s first phase involved removing selenium contaminants from the creek while also capturing pollutants from stormwater runoff. The work was finished in 2017 and included six acres near Jamboree Road.
In the second phase, 11 acres taken over by a dense canopy of Brazilian pepper trees were cleared and replanted with native plants. That work was completed in 2021.
“Before, there was no habitat; it was kind of a nasty place to hike,” Stein said. “Now there are birds, a thriving coyote family and amazing amounts of native vegetation.”
The $10 million restoration is being done in partnership with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which owns much of the project site, and the Newport Bay Conservancy, which has been instrumental in securing more than $7 million in state grants that will cover 100% of the last phase construction costs, Stein said.
The State Coastal Conservancy, the Ocean Protection Council, the city of Newport Beach and the Wildlife Conservation Board have also provided funding.
Beyond the environmental benefits, the Big Canyon restoration will also serve as a successful model for other projects the city has in the future.
“We’ve learned a lot for further restoration in the upper bay,” Stein said.
Next on tap is a 10-to 12-acre restoration planned for the Santa Isabella Channel across the bay near Dover Shores. That project will be done in partnership with the conservancy, OC Parks, the County of Orange, and the Fish and Wildlife Agency.
It could start in 2028, Stein said.