Life's so depressing: the new electronics

The beach is for residents only. They enforce it by requiring a beach access sticker, which only residents can purchase, on any car parked within walking distance of the beach. We can't have the Boston riffraff cluttering up our beach and leering at our womenfolk, can we?

In California, all the beach is public property, and access is required by law.

John

Uh ? What's all that about or was it irony ?

Graham

Actually, that's federal law. The "wet-line" (between high and low tide) is federal property. Some of your folks in Malibu (IIRC) just got their cumupins for trying to block access.

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  Keith

Is it private property then ?

How do they define walking distance ?

Sounds much better. :-)

And you ppl say you have the Land of the Free ?

The Swedes have one of the most interesting concepts called allmannsrat IIRC. Literally everyone's right to roam the countryside.

You may not be so impressed by their liberal social democracy though !

Win some - lose some.

Graham

That's sad to hear. I used to live near there in Hingham and back then -

1960's - beach access was open and available to all. Also, unlike California, every town beach had a *free* public access boat ramp.

Bob

Santa Barbara had a nude beach. Could not be seen from anywhere on land, had to climb down some rather steep rocks to get there. Yet - some dingkleheads complained and kept sending the cops!

--
Luhan Monat: luhanis(at)yahoo(dot)com
http://members.cox.net/berniekm
"Any sufficiently advanced magick is
indistinguishable from technology."

Beach-walking rights (up to the high-water mark) are state law, but severely-restricted parking is allowed and widely practiced. It's been that way since before I came here 40 years ago.

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 Thanks,
    - Win

On Mon, 30 May 2005 13:19:55 -0700, John Larkin put finger to keyboard and composed:

Private ownership of beaches, mountains, rivers, lakes, and forests is an obscenity.

- Franc Zabkar

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Please remove one \'s\' from my address when replying by email.

Too bad for a people who are pretty stumped when they try to think of ways to get to places by other means than a car.

But actually I think this sticker is meant to insure that residents who live close to the beach don't have all their parking space blocked by tourists.

tobert

One of Australia's great early TV funny-men died the other day; his funeral was actually televised. One of his former side-kicks recalled many years ago that the dear departed complained about nudists using the far end of the beach near his very up-market home. "It's very inconvenient!" he complained. "Inconvenient?" "Yes, it's very difficult holding the binoculars one-handed!"

Ken

I believe you'll find it to be federal law. ...much the same for all waterways, including the stream that may wander through your property. As long as the fisherman entered the wanter on public land, there isn't much you can do abou tit. Navigable waterways are even more open. The Coast Guard "owns" them.

That's the issue, even in CA. The movie types wanted to restrict access, even though they didn't own tha access. They couldn't restrict the beach, since the federal government owns it, but they tried to restrict the access. AFAIK, "private lakes" are the same deal. If you enter on public property, there is nothign the "owner" of the lake can do. Man-made lakes may be a different deal, though it it's on a public stream...

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  Keith

I've lived in Oregon all my life. I thought I'd point up some interesting details about our coastal land, here.

When Oregon gained statehood in 1859, the federal government granted the State of Oregon title to sections (each section is a square mile, or 640 acres) 16 and 36 in every township and range. Proceeds from the sale of this land or the resources on it were constitutionally dedicated to the Common School Fund to finance public schools here. The federal government also gave Oregon title to the beds and banks of the navigable waterways of the state as "common highways and forever free," which the courts have since interpreted to mean the Oregon Legislature cannot impose tolls to traverse its waterways.

In 1911, Gov. Oswald West got the Oregon Legislature to pass a bill declaring Oregon beaches a public highway. Up through the early 1900s the beach was the only way to travel between coastal communities without long detours inland. Oregonians became so accustomed to this open access they believed the public ?owned? the beaches, including the dry sand above high tide.

In 1966, though, a Cannon Beach motel owner challenged this "folk wisdom." Bill Hay roped off a section of beach in front of his motel, excluding the public from his ?private? beach. House Majority Leader Bob Smith, a Republican from Burns, Oregon, then tried to give away the public's claim to the dry sand portions of Oregon's beaches. But Smith brought down a rare firestorm of public indignation on Salem (our capital city.)

The Legislature here then produced a compromise plan, which was immediately challenged in court.

The Oregon Supreme Court eventually ruled that unrestricted public use of beaches since aboriginal times granted the public a "prescriptive right" of access to the dry sand beaches above the high tide line, regardless of what any title documents may have said about it.

That 1967 decision still guarantees public use of Oregon's beaches today. No one may build a structure closer to the beaches here than the line where bushes and trees naturally grow.

The state's title to the beds and banks of Oregon rivers flows with the river bed. When a river slowly erodes one bank and deposits gravel on the opposite bank, one property owners loses land, the other gains land and the state's title also moves with the river bed. Lawyers call this slow change an "accretion." If the river cuts a new channel suddenly in a flood or storm -- what lawyers call an "avulsion" -- the state takes title to the new river bed. But the state also retains title to the old river bed. The state's Common School Fund is entitled to money from gravel deposits mined from the old river bed.

None of the Oregon beaches are fenced or barricaded and all are available for free public use. The beaches are also available to all to see, without private buildings and structures to block the view.

Some of the examples, and by no means are these special in any way at all except that I've loaded this pictures up to my web site, are here:

And here's a picture of one of the trails at my home in Oregon:

Jon

San Francisco has a nude beach, in a little cove at Land's End, accessable by a couple of hiking trails, but blocked off from the rest of the coast by cliffs and stuff. Actually, given the climate here, it should be posted as a "parkas optional" beach.

John