O’Neill Park to Reopen Friday With Restricted Use Because of Cougars

After being closed 11 weeks because of concerns about mountain lions, O’Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon will reopen Friday with a ban on overnight stays by children and with large areas designated as off-limits to the public, it was announced Monday.

Richard Dyer, supervising ranger at the park, said adults will be required to obtain free permits before entering. The permits contain a warning of “inherent dangers” such as mountain lions, poison oak, rattlesnakes and rough terrain.

Use of the park’s two campgrounds, with about 160 spaces, will be restricted to adults in groups of two or more. As before, camping permits will cost $6 a night, and campers will be limited to 15 days in a calendar month.

Children under the age of 18 will be limited to the picnic area near the entrance to the park, and they will have to be accompanied by an adult, Dyer said.

More Tracks Seen

The restrictions are much the same as those imposed at Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park east of San Juan Capistrano, which was closed from Oct. 19 to Jan. 2 after the second mountain lion attack on a child there in seven months.

Although there have been no cougar attacks on people at O’Neill, the county-operated park was closed Dec. 26 when mountain-lion tracks were found. Since then, more tracks have been seen, and at least two mountain lions have been spotted, county officials said.

Dyer said a six-foot chain-link fence had been constructed around the picnic area to stop children from wandering into heavy brush areas.

“This fence will not stop a lion from coming into the park, since they can jump a 12- or 14-foot fence,” he said. “But it will keep toddlers from wandering away from their parents.”

He said large groups of children, such as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, will not be allowed in the park because the areas they customarily use are the ones where “we see a lot of mountain lion tracks. We have sightings, mountain lions going across at night, and we found deer skeletons up there that have been killed by the lions.”

“We don’t expect any problems” when the park is reopened, Dyer said. “The mountain lions in this park are pretty much following the textbook information we have and the information we have garnered from others.

‘They Kill Wildlife’

“They come in and out of the area; they kill wildlife; that’s it. They haven’t bothered anybody. If there are sightings, usually the lion is running away. They’re not coming up and looking at people. . . . As soon as they see you they leave.”

Although the closing of O’Neill Park has had some impact on people Dyer referred to as the “mobile homeless,” he said the most popular county park for transients is Featherly Regional Park in Yorba Linda, which is just off the Riverside Freeway.

“When Featherly is full or they want a change of pace, they would come in here, yes,” Dyer said. Now families with children will not be allowed to camp at O’Neill.

In all, he said, about 400 acres of the 1,800-acre park will be open to adults, including one hiking trail.

Dyer said that a horseback rider spotted a mountain lion entering the park about a week ago and that cougar tracks were seen about two weeks ago.

He said he had been keeping tabs on the tracks of a mother and her cub for several months and had not seen any trace of either animal since a cub was picked up in Mission Viejo last week, causing him to speculate that the cub that was caught might have been the one he had been monitoring.