A long, narrow strip of coastal bluff opens ahead of you here, home to Shoreline Park on the Mesa. From here you can feel why it is one of Santa Barbara’s most popular parks: a whale-watching area with a telescope sits beside a large concrete whale tail, a sister city Japanese garden offers a quiet counterpoint, and there are places to picnic and a playground where families gather. On a good day you will see the Channel Islands out at sea, and during migration months a Gray Whale may pass by; dolphins and seals are frequent visitors too.
A Torii gateway marks the bluff’s edge and leads to a wooden staircase that descends roughly 53 feet (16.15 m) to the tidal beach below—completely submerged at high tide and only reachable at low tide. When the tide is out, the sandy stretches of Leadbetter Beach and Arroyo Burro Beach, also known as Hendry’s Beach, are accessible to the east and west. Before it became this public outlook, the area of the Mesa was farmland used by the Low and Babcock farms until the 1920s, its fields running from Cliff Drive.
Somewhere past the Channel Islands, the Pacific stretches on, waiting for your next glance.