Napa County Now Owns Skyline Park. It Still Doesn't Own All of It.

If you've walked into Skyline Wilderness Park anytime in the last two years, nothing at the gate looked different. Same kiosk on Imola Avenue, same six-dollar day-use fee, same person checking your annual pass, same sign warning that dogs stay off the trails and stick to the lower general-use acreage on a leash. The disc golf course still runs eighteen holes through the oaks, plus a flatter nine-hole loop near the entrance for anyone who'd rather not lose a disc in the chaparral. The Silverado Archery Club still shoots its NFAA-approved range on twenty-five acres inside the park boundary. None of that changed.

What did change is who holds the deed, and that fact matters more to the park's future than anything on the trail map.

The Lease Nobody Renewed

Skyline sits on land the State of California owned outright and only rented to Napa County, first informally, then formally, for a hundred dollars a year starting in 1980. That arrangement was set to run through 2030, which meant every improvement the county or the nonprofit Skyline Park Citizens Association made to the property, every trail cut, every fence repaired, sat on borrowed ground with an expiration date.

On December 17, 2024, the Napa County Board of Supervisors ended that uncertainty. The board voted to authorize a $7.26 million purchase of the 874-acre parkland outright, closing more than a decade of negotiation. Board Chair Joelle Gallagher marked the moment plainly in the county's own announcement of the sale, saying the purchase meant "we can ensure Skyline thrives as a space for recreation, and a place for residents and visitors to reconnect with nature."

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only skim the headline: buying the land didn't hand the county a new job running the park. It handed the Skyline Park Citizens Association, the same volunteer nonprofit that has operated Skyline since it opened in April 1983, the security of knowing the ground under its programs isn't going anywhere. The lease that used to cap the relationship at 2030 is gone. The people who staff the kiosk, mow the disc golf fairways, and maintain the Martha Walker Native Habitat Garden are the same people who did it last year.

What the Park Actually Offers, Unchanged

For residents who use Skyline the way a park is meant to be used, meaning regularly and without much ceremony, the inventory of what's here hasn't moved. Twenty-five-plus miles of trail cover terrain that ranges from wide fire road to narrow, rocky singletrack climbing toward Sugarloaf Peak and the Rim Rock Trail, where a clear day gets you sightlines to Mount Diablo, Mount Tamalpais, and Mount Saint Helena all at once. Lake Marie sits at the far eastern end of the main trail, a legal fishing spot and a natural turnaround point for anyone doing an out-and-back rather than a full loop.

Camping options split three ways: RV sites with hookups, a tent area on open grass, and horse camping for anyone bringing a trailer. None of it is glamorous, and none of it needs to be. It's five minutes from downtown, which is the actual selling point for a resident who wants to pitch a tent without driving to Lake Berryessa or further into the Mayacamas.

The dog rule trips people up every time they visit for the first time. Dogs are not permitted on the trails or inside the Martha Walker Garden. They are allowed, on leash, in the lower fifty acres near the entrance, which is a different arrangement than a lot of visitors expect from a wilderness park this size. It's worth knowing before you load the car, not after you've hiked in.

The 80 Acres Still Locked Inside the Park You Already Use

Here's the thing about the December 2024 purchase that most coverage left out: it didn't include everything inside Skyline's own boundary.

Tucked into the park's footprint is an 80-acre parcel called Camp Coombs, completely surrounded by Skyline on all sides but never part of the deal. It's reachable today only by a roughly one-mile hike through terrain that's otherwise closed to the public, which means most people who've spent years at Skyline have never set foot on it. What's back there is a shaded ravine with rocky walls, ponds, and a ten-foot stone dam built in 1872, a piece of Napa County infrastructure older than the state park system itself.

Camp Coombs stayed out of county hands because of a paper trail that goes back further than most people following Skyline realize. A 2010 state statute authorized selling other surplus Napa State Hospital land while specifically requiring the state keep this particular parcel. When Senator Bill Dodd's 2019 legislation opened the door for the county to eventually buy the surrounding 874 acres, Camp Coombs was carved out of that bill too, because the adjacent state hospital was still actively using the site. That changed in late 2023, when the hospital decided to stop operating there, which is what finally made a sale possible at all.

Dodd introduced a follow-up bill in 2024, co-authored with Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, to authorize the sale of the 80 acres specifically. That authorization expired on January 1, 2026, before a deal could close.

Now there's new movement. A trailer bill attached to the 2026 state budget, working through amended text in Assembly Bill 184, extends the state's authority to sell Camp Coombs to Napa County (or the county's park and open space district) through January 1, 2028. Governor Newsom has until September 30, 2026, to act on the underlying budget legislation. County and state officials expect to sit down in the coming weeks, and the county's own stated goal is closing the purchase sometime in the first quarter of 2027.

None of that changes what you can do at Skyline this weekend. It does mean that the park most Napa residents think of as a finished, static piece of the landscape is still, quietly, in motion. The gate to Camp Coombs stays closed until a second land deal clears a second round of Sacramento paperwork.

What's Actually Happening on the Trails This Month

Skyline earns its keep as a working trail system, not a museum piece, and September proves it. On Saturday, September 26, 2026, Inside Trail Racing brings the Napa Lapa Trail Adventure to the park, a format the organizers are running here for the first time: instead of a fixed distance, runners cover as much ground as they can within a set time window on a course built mostly on fire trail with sections of moderately technical dirt.

The same trail network also carries JP's Backyard Ultra/Hike, now in its fourth year, a fundraiser for the Pheo Para Alliance built around the story of Napa endurance athlete Jonathan Pascual, who's living with a stage IV mediastinal paraganglioma diagnosis and turned his own trail time into an annual event that raises money for other patients and families facing the same rare condition. It's the kind of thing that only happens because a community park stays open and staffed year after year, run by the same volunteer association that's been doing it since 1983.

Trail conditions have been favorable through the summer. As of this past July, the park's own status page listed every trail open, with no seasonal or storm-related closures in effect, though the association notes that status can shift quickly after rain and is worth checking directly before a longer trip like the Rim Rock climb.

The Same Park, One Unfinished Corner

The version of this story that's easy to tell is that Napa finally owns its own backyard wilderness park, full stop. The more accurate version is that the county closed on the 874 acres everyone already uses, while an 80-acre piece with a 154-year-old dam sits inside the boundary, still owned by the state, still waiting on a second act of legislation to change hands. For a resident, the practical takeaway is small: nothing about your day pass, your dog's leash rule, or your Saturday loop past Lake Marie is different. For anyone who cares about how this corner of Napa actually gets decided, the more interesting story is the one still being negotiated in Sacramento, with a deadline now set for 2028.

Skyline isn't going anywhere. Camp Coombs, for now, still is.

If you're thinking about where you'd actually want to live near a park like this, or what a home near Napa's open space is worth in today's market, Joe Brasil has spent years working these exact neighborhoods and is glad to talk through it, no obligation attached.