China Camp Village

Started: 2025-09-11 20:10:45

Submitted: 2025-09-11 21:40:47

Visibility: World-readable

A loop hike to a Chinese fishing village

On Saturday, the 5th of July 2025, we spent the day at China Camp State Park on San Pablo Bay in Marin County.

Morning at China Camp

While we were getting up a huge white shore bird swooped in over the hill and landed on a fence post on the other side of the dry creek bed from our campsite. I only had my phone camera, limiting the quality of picture I could take of this bird, but from the photo I identified it as a great egret, common in the waters of California. The bird perched on the fence post for a few minutes until a child got too close. The bird launched itself into the air with its massive wingspan and landed to perch in a dead tree a short distance down the creek, which turned out to be slightly closer to our campsite. It perched there while I tried to quietly alert my family to the presence of nearby wildlife, then flew off into the distance. The visitation from a great white bird felt like a good omen for the day.

Great egret sits in a tree at China Camp

After breakfast (which we had to ferry from the cooler in the car, a few hundred meters away in the parking lot) we set out on a hike from the campsite to the crest of the ridge, and from there eastward along the ridge to China Camp Village. The state park is located on the north side of a lumpy peninsula east of San Rafael, capped by San Pedro Mountain at 1052 feet above sea level. From the campground a gravel fire road climbed the wooded hillside above above the camp, leading deep into the oak woodland on the shady north side of the ridge. We turned onto Bay Ridge Trail, heading east below the crest of the ridge, zigzagging back and forth as it followed the contour of the hillside.

Bay View Trail in China Camp State Park

The trail did provide views of the bay, in the distance through the trees on the hillside. This was an oak woodland, dominated by the coast live oak and backed up by the bay laurel. The bay trees smelled like a hearty simmering soup, adding a bit of seasoning to the morning air. (Many of these trees, I pointed out, were real trees, with trunks too large to wrap one's arms around them.)

Julian, Kiesa, and Calvin on the Oak Ridge Trail

We emerged from the oak woodland on the north side of the ridge to the sunny grassland on the south side of the ridge. Here valley oaks soared above the golden grass, each tree standing on its own, socially distanced from its neighbors. This trail followed the ridge as it descended towards the bay, then turned to the north to descend the hillside (putting us once again in the cooler woodland on the north side of the hill) to reach Bullhead Flat, featuring a parking lot on the paved road hugging the edge of the hill just above the bay. We stopped to eat lunch at a concrete picnic table overlooking the small muddy beach, then walked along the Shoreline Trail to China Camp Village, at the bottom of a road lined with fragrant eucalyptus trees towering above.

China Camp Village

China Camp Village was a fishing village populated by Chinese immigrants and their descendants starting at the end of the nineteenth century, after Chinese laborers built the railroads though the Sierra-Nevada Mountains. The primary product of the fishing village was tiny shrimp that lived in the bay; they caught and dried the shrimp and exported them to China. A small museum on the dock presented the story of the village and the people who lived there, along with the racism and discrimination they faced. People lived in the village into the twenty-first century; the displays introduced us to them and their stories, along with artifacts from the shrimp fishery.

Fishing boat on a ramp at China Camp Beach

A rickety pier reached out into the bay from the beach with the Grace Quan, a replica sailing boat of the style the people of the village would have used to fish along the shore. The boat had a movable knife board ahead of the mast that could be lowered to give extra stability when sailing or raised to reduce the draft of the boat when sailing along the coast in shallow waters.

Grace Quan on the dock at China Camp Village

There was a tiny store on the dock in the village where we got ice cream sandwiches and ate them next to a brick dryer that was supposed to help process the shrimp but didn't quite work. (It still smelled vaguely fishy, though I wasn't sure if that was from the shrimp that had been dried there long ago, or the bay ten meters from where I stood, or just the power of suggestion from the interpretive signs.)

We were next to the bay, on a gravel beach designated for swimming opposite a new building with changing rooms. I did not come fully prepared to swim, but it was a warm day and I wanted to get my feet wet so I took off my shoes and socks and walked awkwardly down the pebbles on the beach (rounded by endless waves but still large enough be hard to walk on with bare feet) and waded knee-deep into water, standing at the edge of San Pablo Bay, looking out onto the channel ahead of me and the hills of the East Bay beyond, while the inch-high waves from the bay broke around my feet and splashed onto the beach behind me.

We left China Camp Village to hike back to our campsite. On the way back we took the lower Shoreline Trail to make a loop, staying closer to the water and avoiding the climb back up the ridge. The trail took us through the oak woodland and grasslands at lower elevation, and through a large meadow with a huge group picnic site, before looping back to the campground. We made a big loop hike from our campsite and everyone survived the experience.

Kiesa on the Shoreline Trail at China Camp State Park

I took a few more pictures at China Camp State Park at Photos on 2025-07-05.