The last holdout of Duck Cove is gone. Family and friends of the late Mort McDonald arrived at his old cabin, the last of more than a dozen that once stood clustered around the small inlet on Tomales Bay, last weekend. With help from National Park Service staff, they cleared out the scattered belongings that remained—wooden spoons and tea kettles, vases of plastic flowers and nature posters—and took down the handwritten signs that read “this cabin is still occupied.” Within a few years, the cabin will be torn down.
Duck Cove, once home to a small development of summer homes, had just one part-time resident for the last 10 years. Nine other families who once leased second homes from the Point Reyes National Seashore had to leave in 2012 after the park denied their requests for extensions on their 40-year agreements. Mr. McDonald had negotiated a 50-year term that ends in June, and before his death in 2020, the Berkeley resident who worked in publishing enjoyed his bayside retreat for several summers after the neighboring cabins were demolished.
“We enjoyed it for the quietness, the solitude,” said Jane Barrett, Mr. Morton’s widow. “It was very lovely being at Duck Cove.”
The community was born in 1946 when Richard Wistar, a chemistry professor at Mills College, and Norman Danielsen, a retired Oakland police lieutenant, spotted the secluded beach while sailing in Tomales Bay. The neighbors had been searching for a place where they could teach their children to sail, and they soon purchased a piece of shoreline from real estate developer Leonard David. Digging their own wells, building their own cabins, bulldozing a new road to the cove from L Ranch, the families saw themselves as pioneers. In reality, the coves along the western shore of the bay had been dotted with isolated cabins for years, home to Coast Miwok families who often worked for local ranchers.
But the Wistars, Danielsens and the families who moved into the other eight lots at the cove felt a special tie, and they fought back hard when the federal government moved to purchase the land from under them. They had prohibited commercial development and promised to protect the natural environment. “We carved this place out of the wilderness,” Mr. Wistar told the Oakland Tribune in 1962. “We’ve put our life’s blood into it and we’re not going to give it up without a fight.”
Despite appealing to a senate subcommittee and appearing at congressional hearings on the newly formed Point Reyes National Seashore, the families lost their battle, and went the way of their rancher neighbors: they sold the parcels, then leased them back from the park under reservations of use and occupancy. Mr. McDonald and his first wife, Marianne, were among those who purchased a cabin at Duck Cove in the early 1950s. In 1972, he managed to negotiate an R.U.O. 10 years longer than any of the others.
In 2011, amid the much more conspicuous debate over the future of Drakes Bay Oyster Company, another fight brewed at Duck Cove as nine out of 10 leases were set to expire. That year, the park denied all requests for 10-year extensions; only Mr. McDonald got to stay.
Park officials said ending the cove’s private use would open more opportunities for public access. “The area is a beautiful natural cove on Tomales Bay that for the first time will go from exclusive use to public use,” seashore spokesman John Dell’Osso said at the time.
But the angry cove residents saw no purpose in their displacement, and they pointed to what they described as negligent park management of nearby coves like Laird’s Landing, where historic Coast Miwok cabins had deteriorated. In 2017, the park demolished all but Mr. McDonald’s cabin, leaving only concrete foundations. “People were very disappointed that it worked out this way,” Ms. Barrett said.
Between October 2023 and September 2024, the park will deconstruct and remove Mr. McDonald’s cabin, park spokeswoman Christine Beekman said.
Since the seashore was established in 1962, around 100 housing units have been demolished or abandoned beyond repair across the park and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area lands that are managed with it, according to West Marin historian Dewey Livingston. These lost homes included ranch houses, fishing cabins and a dozen vacation houses that once stood at Limantour Beach. Ms. Beekman said the park didn’t consider the Duck Cove cabins for staff housing or other uses because of the limited infrastructure: the water and wastewater systems had deteriorated beyond repair.
While technically open to the public, the cove has not become a widely known hiking destination in the years since the demolition of the cabins. There are no signs marking the uneven dirt road that leads up from a cow pasture to a low gate, which hikers must scale or crawl under to access the trail. The hike down to the cove, a steep gravel drive that wends its way past bishop pines and lichen-covered laurels, is a favorite for some locals because it’s well hidden.
Just up the hill from the McDonalds’ cabin, next to the foundation of another cabin and a decrepit redwood water tank, a mailbox holds a few ruled notebooks where regular visitors keep a record of their hikes. With entries going back to 2011, the notebooks show how often the McDonalds and some of the other former residents returned to the cove.
Mr. McDonald and his son, Ian, last signed the book in March 2020. Mr. McDonald died on May 16 of that year. Ian’s last entry in the book with his wife, April, was from this January. Ian has been in a coma since February after a biking accident in the Berkeley Hills.
The park hasn’t yet evaluated any new long-term uses for the cove, and Ms. Beekman provided no timeline for planning them. Inverness Foundation board member Jerry Meral, a regular visitor to the cove, told the Light that the park should use the opportunity to finally open the cove to easier public use, adding a parking lot near the gate and turning the old cabin foundations into campsites.
“This is one of the most beautiful parts of the park,” Mr. Meral said. “There’s nothing there to be vandalized anymore. It should be open to the public.”