A fenced-off, 80-acre pocket of land east of Napa along Imola Avenue has sat off-limits to the public for decades, but a new state budget provision is reviving Napa County's long-running effort to buy it. The parcel, known as Camp Coombs, sits as an undeveloped inholding completely surrounded by the 874-acre Skyline Wilderness Park, and county officials want to fold it into the park and eventually open it to hikers.
Camp Coombs is reached today only by a roughly one-mile hike through terrain that is otherwise closed to visitors, according to The Napa Valley Register. The land includes a shaded ravine with rocky walls and lush vegetation, along with trees, ponds, and a 10-foot-tall stone dam built in 1872. Napa County has sought to buy the 80 acres from the state since 2024, and the newspaper reports that Skyline Wilderness Park itself lacks any feature comparable to it.
The property has deep roots in the history of Napa State Hospital, which opened in 1875 under its original name, the Napa State Insane Asylum, and used its surrounding land for reservoirs, farms, and dairy and poultry ranches. The hospital used Camp Coombs specifically as a recreation area starting in 1984, according to the same report. Keith Kimbrough described Camp Coombs as “a treasure,” per the Register's account.
A Legislative Deadline That Almost Closed the Door
The path to county ownership has been anything but simple. When legislation passed in 2019 to authorize Napa County's purchase of the surrounding parkland, Camp Coombs was excluded, according to Napa County Board of Supervisors records. That exclusion traced back even further, to a 2010 surplus property statute, Assembly Bill 2279, in which the state legislature authorized selling other Napa State Hospital lands while explicitly mandating that the state retain ownership of Camp Coombs, according to California Legislative Information.
The calculus changed once the hospital decided by late 2023 to stop operating Camp Coombs, opening the way for a county purchase. Sen. Bill Dodd, who had championed the 2019 bill, introduced Senate Bill 958 in 2024, co-authored by Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, to grant state authorization for selling the 80-acre parcel. But that authorization expired on January 1, 2026, before a sale could close, according to the Napa County Board of Supervisors' account of the timeline.
The California Budget Act of 2026 trailer bill includes a section reauthorizing the sale of Camp Coombs, and amended text for Assembly Bill 184 extends the California Department of General Services' authority to sell the parcel to Napa County or the Napa County Regional Park and Open Space District through January 1, 2028, according to LegiScan. Gov. Gavin Newsom must act on the bill by September 30, per the Register's reporting. County and state officials expect to meet within the next few weeks, the newspaper adds, and Napa County hopes to close the purchase during the first quarter of 2027.
What Comes Next for Skyline's Missing Piece
Napa County bought the surrounding 874-acre Skyline Wilderness Park from the state for $7.2 million in 2025, according to the Register, after leasing the oak-covered hills from the state for $100 per year under an arrangement set to expire in 2030. That earlier purchase, which the county's Board of Supervisors formally approved as a $7.26 million agreement in December 2024, according to SFGATE, notably excluded Camp Coombs from the deal. Skyline Park itself opened in 1983 and is run day-to-day by the Skyline Park Citizens' Association on the county's behalf.
Under the purchase agreement for the main park, Napa County also assumed ongoing environmental monitoring obligations previously handled by the state hospital, including creek oversight along Camille Creek and dam safety inspections on artificial lakes, per county board records. Whether public access to Camp Coombs could begin relatively soon after acquisition depends on how much initial work the county completes, since the parcel is described as relatively flat with an area suitable for camping and events. Camp Coombs remains separate from the surrounding park while any sale is pending.
Hoodline previously covered the $7.26 million park deal that brought the larger Skyline parcel under local control. Beyond its trails, the existing park already includes an 18-hole disc golf course spanning 400 acres and the 2.5-acre Martha Walker Native Habitat Garden, according to Napa County. Camp Coombs, if acquired, would add a rare shaded canyon landscape that county officials say has no equivalent elsewhere in the park.
