Playa del Rey's Favorite Walk Is Also Its Longest-Running Fight

Most Saturdays, the loop looks the same. Someone circles the duck pond at Del Rey Lagoon, climbs the short paved rise at Bluff Trail Park, drops into the wetlands trail that skirts the bluffs below Loyola Marymount, and comes out near Ballona Creek in time to cross the bridge toward Dockweiler. It takes about an hour if you don't stop for the herons. It feels like one continuous, uncomplicated stretch of nature tucked into a corner of the Westside.

It isn't one thing. The walk threads through a state ecological reserve the state doesn't fully control, a restoration plan that's been legally stalled since 2023, and a volunteer program quietly finishing, one Saturday morning at a time, what several government agencies have spent two decades arguing about. You can do the loop without knowing any of that. Knowing it changes what you're looking at.

Four Names for One Walk

Locals rarely think of this as four separate places, but it is, and each piece has its own name if you go looking for it on a map:

• Del Rey Lagoon Park, a 14-acre city park at 6660 Esplanade Place, built around a six-acre lagoon that regulars just call the duck pond. It once had a boat dock where the city ran canoeing and sailing classes into the early 1990s. The dock is gone now and swimming was never allowed, but the waterfowl never left.
• Bluff Trail Park, tucked into the One Westbluff development, home to a short, paved out-and-back path a little under a mile long with benches and views stretching from the wetlands to the San Bernardino Mountains on a clear day.
• Bluffs Creek Trail, the longer loop near Loyola Marymount University, roughly four miles with a gentle climb and almost no shade, popular with birders as much as walkers.
• The Ballona Creek bike path, which connects the wetlands to Dockweiler State Beach via the creek bridge, the same bridge that marks the final stretch of the Park to Playa Trail, a decades-long project linking Crenshaw and Baldwin Hills to the ocean.

Put those four together and you get the loop everyone in Playa del Rey has walked at least once. What sits between the lagoon and the beach, though, is the part worth slowing down for.

A Reserve Nobody Fully Owns

The land between Bluff Trail Park and the creek is the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve, and the state of California doesn't run it alone. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife owns the property, but SoCalGas still holds the mineral and gas storage rights underneath it, along with surface access to maintain its equipment, because the reserve sits on top of the Playa del Rey Natural Gas Storage Facility. That arrangement means active gas wells have coexisted with nesting shorebirds for years, and SoCalGas is only now working through a list of wells to permanently abandon. As of November 2025, three had been sealed for good: Del Rey 4, Del Rey 17, and Vidor 5. Two more, Del Rey 14 and Del Rey 19, were in progress with a target completion of January 2026. Roughly a dozen others, including Del Rey 5, 9, 11, 12, 13, and 15, remain on a list the company describes as a project for the next several years.

So the wetlands you're walking past aren't finished being decommissioned, let alone restored. They're mid-process, on a timeline measured in individual wellheads.

The Argument That Won't End

The bigger project, the one meant to actually restore the reserve's hydrology and habitat, has been in development since 2004. In December 2020, the state certified an environmental impact report and picked a preferred plan. Then, in May 2023, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant ordered that report decertified after environmental groups sued, splitting the coalition that had spent years pushing for restoration into camps that disagree on the specifics. As of a December 2025 report from LAist, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife still had no estimated timeline for a rewritten environmental review, let alone for groundbreaking.

Here's the number that puts the stakes in perspective. A 1995 Los Angeles Times description of the area, cited in its own historical record, put the original marsh at roughly 1,800 acres, stretching from Venice down to the bluffs of Playa del Rey. What remains today is 577 acres, the second-largest open space in the city after Griffith Park. Less than a third of the original wetland survived a century of oil drilling, flood control channeling, and the construction of Marina del Rey, which alone paved over roughly 900 acres by the 1960s. The state paid $139 million in the early 2000s just to buy back what was left. More than twenty years later, it still hasn't agreed on how to fix it.

That's the piece of the loop most walkers miss. The bluffs and the creek look settled. The reserve underneath them is still, legally and administratively, an open question.

Progress You Can Measure in Pulled Weeds

While the lawsuit works its way through, the only visible progress on the ground is coming from volunteers. Friends of Ballona Wetlands, a local nonprofit, runs regular Community Habitat Restoration mornings where anyone seven and older can show up, pull invasive mustard grass and other non-native plants by hand, and give the reserve's slower-growing natives room to establish. The meeting spot is unglamorous on purpose: the dirt parking lot behind Local Market, a deli at 303 Culver Boulevard, just blocks from the lagoon where the loop technically begins.

The group's work has produced measurable results even without a finished restoration plan. In 2025 alone, volunteers logged over 200 pounds of trash during Coastal Cleanup Day and kept showing up for Earth Day habitat restoration despite heavy rain that year. Habitat crews, led by the organization's Manager of Habitat Restoration, have also worked to bring back the El Segundo blue butterfly, a species local advocates consider one of the reserve's genuine recovery stories. Hometown News, the local paper covering Westchester, Playa del Rey, Playa Vista, and Marina del Rey, named the group the area's top nonprofit for that work.

None of this replaces the large-scale restoration the state has been debating since 2004. It does mean the reserve isn't simply sitting and waiting. Progress here happens by hand, on a schedule set by volunteers rather than litigation, which is a strange but honest way to describe how a piece of protected coastline actually gets maintained.

What the Loop Owes You at the End

However far you go, the loop earns a stop on the way back. Playa Provisions, right on the sand, packs four separate concepts into one 7,000-square-foot space from Top Chef winner Brooke Williamson and co-owner Nick Roberts: King Beach Cafe for casual breakfast and lunch, Dockside for a sit-down dinner with a beachside patio, Small Batch for house-made ice cream, and Grain for a whiskey bar tucked in back. A few blocks inland, Caffe Pinguini has built a reputation as one of the neighborhood's more romantic Italian dinners, while Bacari PDR leans into brunch with dishes like shakshouka and a five-cheese mac. For a longer-standing option, Cantalini's Salerno Beach Restaurant has been serving Italian food, and reportedly excellent bread, to the same stretch of Culver Boulevard for years.

None of it requires reservations at dawn or a special occasion. That's the point. The loop and the food at the end of it are built for repetition, which is exactly why most people in Playa del Rey have done both more times than they could count.

The Walk Stays the Same. The Story Underneath It Doesn't.

The lagoon will still have ducks next weekend. The bluffs will still offer the same view toward the mountains on a clear morning. What changes, slowly, is the reserve underneath it all: a well sealed here, a lawsuit ruling there, a few more square feet cleared of mustard grass by volunteers who show up whether or not the state has settled anything. Whether the full restoration ever breaks ground in a way anyone can put a date on is genuinely unclear. The walk itself isn't waiting on it.

If you've spent enough Saturdays doing this loop that you've started wondering what else is changing in the neighborhood around it, from housing stock to what's actually selling nearby, that's a conversation worth having with someone who knows the area at the same level of detail. Lisa Potier has spent more than 22 years working the Westside and coastal Los Angeles market, including Playa del Rey, and is happy to talk through what your part of the neighborhood is worth right now. Get a Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready to ask.