China Camp State Park Hasn't Taken State Money Since 2012. This Fall, It's Funded By a Lager.
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
On a Friday afternoon in late September, the Village Cafe at China Camp opens its shutters onto San Pablo Bay, and somebody behind the counter cracks the first can of a beer that didn't exist a few months ago. The can is small and the crowd is smaller, mostly hikers coming off the Shoreline Trail and a few regulars who know Ernie Stanton by name. Nobody here is thinking about park budgets. They're thinking about the tide, the light on the water, whether the Quan Bros. snack shop still has ice cream.
But the beer in their hands is the answer to a question most San Rafael residents have never thought to ask: who actually pays for this place? Drive past the sign on North San Pedro Road and it reads like every other California state park, a slice of the coast maintained on the public's dime the same way Samuel P. Taylor or Angel Island are. It isn't. China Camp hasn't received direct state operating funds in over a decade, and the newest line item in keeping it open this fall is sitting in a cooler for five dollars a can.
In 2012, the state suspended funding for 70 California parks, and China Camp was on the list facing closure. Rather than watch the gate close on 1,500 acres of oak woodland and meadow and roughly 100 acres of tidal wetland, a group of locals formed Friends of China Camp, a nonprofit that took over daily operations. Since then, FOCC has run every mile of the park's 15-mile trail network, every picnic table at Miwok Meadows, every ranger conversation at the Peacock Gap Trail entrance, without a cent from Sacramento.
That distinction matters if you've ever assumed a "state park" comes with a state park's budget. This one runs almost entirely on volunteer hours, membership dues, parking fees, and donations. When a mountain biker pays to park at Bullhead Flat or a family buys a day pass at the entrance kiosk, that money isn't supplementing a public budget. It is the budget.
The newest addition to that patchwork came from Phil Cutti, a San Rafael-based brewer who runs Ripple Beer Project and co-founded Headlands Brewing Company before serving as president of the Bay Area Brewers Guild. Cutti is a regular at the park, and he approached Friends of China Camp with an idea: brew something specifically for them.
The result is China Camp Lager, a light, citrus-forward beer that Ernie Stanton, the longtime FOCC volunteer who manages the Village Cafe, suggested framing around the lager style rather than the hoppier IPAs Ripple usually makes. Ten percent of every sale goes back to Friends of China Camp.
"I wanted the beer to be a celebration of community, and the hard-working people who make it happen."
That's Cutti's own description of the project, and it fits the way the can looks. The artwork was designed by local artist Julia Jackson-Clark, whose sister Carly Jackson-Clark is FOCC's program coordinator, which makes the whole thing a fairly literal family affair for a park that runs on exactly that kind of overlap.
You can find it at the Village Cafe for five dollars a 16-ounce can, poured most reliably on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons when the cafe is open. It's also on shelves elsewhere in San Rafael and the surrounding area: Andy's Market at the Loch Lomond location carries four-packs, Big Rock Café in Marinwood has it both in four-packs and on tap, and Mill Valley Market stocks four-packs as well.
Ten percent of beer sales isn't going to repave a trail on its own, and nobody at FOCC is pretending otherwise. What it represents is one more thread in a funding model that has, by outside accounts, become something of a template for other under-resourced parks. Last year, a volunteer with Friends of China Camp ran into the executive director of Crystal Cove Conservancy, the nonprofit partner for Crystal Cove State Park in Southern California, who told her that whenever people debate how a state park should be run, China Camp's name comes up as the example that works.
That's the actual return on a can of lager sold at the Village Cafe. It isn't the dollar amount. It's that the model keeps proving itself durable enough that a park facing closure in 2012 is still open, still fully volunteer-run, and still finding new small revenue streams fourteen years later. Every mile of the Shoreline Trail, the climb up to San Pedro Ridge, the heart-shaped loop of Turtle Back Nature Trail, exists because that model keeps holding.
China Camp Village dates back to the 1860s, when it was a working Chinese shrimp-fishing settlement that at its peak was home to as many as 500 residents. Frank Quan was the last person to actually live there, running the market until 2016, four years after the state handed park operations to FOCC and decades after the fishing camp itself had faded into a historic site rather than a working village.
That history got a physical reminder recently when a visitor walking the shoreline found a Qianlong Tongbao, a copper-alloy coin minted during the reign of Emperor Qianlong sometime between 1736 and 1795. It's a small object, a coin with a square hole through the center, but it's a tangible link between the tidal flats visitors walk today and the trade networks that connected this stretch of San Pablo Bay to Qing Dynasty China nearly three centuries ago.
The same shoreline reminded the park of its fragility in January 2026, when king tides flooded China Camp Village. It's the kind of event that FOCC's own volunteers describe as a reminder that no amount of cultural preservation work changes the fact that this is a low-lying site next to open water. The park's signature Heritage Day festival, held this past August with lion dancers, steamed buns, mahjong tables, and performances from the Marin Chinese Cultural Association, is as much a statement of resilience as it is a celebration. The village keeps flooding and keeps hosting a festival anyway.
A few practical notes if this is the weekend you finally get out there:
The Quan Bros. snack shop at the village is typically open weekends for basics like ice cream and drinks, a small detail that ties directly back to the family whose name is still on the building.
None of this changes what China Camp has always been to the people who live near it: a place to walk the dog, catch the light over the bay, or spend a Sunday afternoon with a Chinese coin's worth of history under your boots. What's different this fall is that the park's survival is a little more visible than usual, sitting right there in a can on the counter, a five-dollar reminder that the place keeps itself open because enough people decide it's worth keeping open.
That's the kind of local detail that doesn't show up on a park brochure, and it's the same kind of attention Nicole Burton brings to every corner of Marin she covers. If China Camp is part of why you love this side of San Rafael, or if you're weighing what else the neighborhood offers, reach out for a personalized Marin market consultation.
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