Thousands of elephant seals are returning to Año Nuevo State Park, where construction is finishing on spiffy new facilities

It’s one of Northern California’s most famous wildlife shows.

Every year, up to 10,000 elephant seals — the giant, blubbery pinnipeds that can weigh 5,000 pounds, grow as long as a Toyota Corolla and hold their breath underwater for 2 hours — haul out of the ocean at Año Nuevo State Park along the San Mateo County coast to breed, give birth, fight, harrumph and generally carry on.

Nearly 100,000 people from all over the world join guided tours at the park between Dec. 15 and March 31 to watch a Serengeti-like scene play out on the windswept beaches.

Hoping to improve the experience, particularly for young people learning about science, volunteers have teamed up with California’s state parks department to tear down the old facilities at the staging area on the trail where the tours begin and construct a new building with interpretive signs, a deck, a ranger office and later this summer, new restrooms.

“The old building was built by a volunteer in 1988,” said Ziad Bawarshi, a ranger at the park. “It was half as big as this one. The wood was rotting out. It hadn’t changed in 37 years and wasn’t meeting the needs of the visitors.”

There were mice. There were termites. No heat. The new facility, which construction crews are putting the finishing touches on this week, is built of large cedar timbers with rock facing. It has elegant painted panels that are 8 feet high showing the wildlife of the area, the migration pattern of the famous seals, and other facts.

Visitors on the guided tours, who traverse about 3 miles through sand dunes, will get a much better orientation, park officials hope.

“This helps people learn where am I? What am I going to see? What is this about?” said Susan Blake, a park interpreter and director of the docent program at Año Nuevo. “It can help connect them to the park. It’s the gateway.”

Northern elephant seals are one of California’s most stunning wildlife recovery stories.

Before the Gold Rush, there were thousands. But they were hunted in the 1800s for their blubber, which was used to make lamp oil. By 1892, they were thought to be extinct.

Then fewer than 100 survivors were found living on the remote island of Guadalupe off Mexico. In 1922, the Mexican government passed laws protecting them. The U.S. Congress passed similar laws. Their numbers began to rebound. They returned to Southern California. And then in 1955, the first ones came back to Año Nuevo Island, a small island off the park’s shoreline that was named by Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino when he sailed by on New Year’s Day in 1603.

Pups were born. The population grew. By the early 1970s, they were returning to the Año Nuevo mainland. After Sunset magazine wrote a story about them in the mid-1970s, crowds got so big that the park had to set up guided tours with the help of marine biology students from UC Santa Cruz.

Northern elephant seals today

Today there are more than 200,000 Northern elephant seals. They aren’t endangered and have established similar winter breeding areas at Piedras Blancas near Hearst Castle in San Luis Obispo County and at Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County.

The tours at Año Nuevo are one of the only places in California that average people can interact in nature with wild animals larger than them.

“It’s like going on a safari,” Blake said. “But you aren’t in a Jeep. You get to see and hear these huge animals in their own habitat. You walk among them. You see births, you see fights, you see nursing. It’s exciting.”

The new staging area project cost about $500,000. All the money was raised by the Coastside State Parks Association, a nonprofit group based in Pescadero that helps improve state parks in San Mateo County. The project’s biggest benefactor, who donated the initial $100,000, is John Fox.

Fox, a 79-year-old retired software engineer who worked for 3Com, Control Data and other tech companies, has been a volunteer docent at Año Nuevo for 29 years. A keeper of meticulous records, Fox said he has led 524 tours since his first one on Dec. 27, 1995, taking 9,200 people on walks among the elephant seals.

He’s not rich, he says.

“In 2006, I had a Motorola flip phone, with the little antenna,” he said. “I saw that Apple was coming out with a new product called the iPhone, and it looked good, so I bought 1,000 shares of Apple for $6 each. The stock split a bunch of times since then. The money for my donations to Año Nuevo came from the iPhone.”

A San Francisco resident, Fox has also donated money to help the UC Santa Cruz researchers buy tags to track elephant seals, to build wooden decks at the park and fund remote solar arrays to help with research. He said one of his main goals is to inspire young people to want to become scientists.

“Elephant seals dive 5,800 feet under water,” he said. “They don’t breathe for 2 hours. How do they do that? They can swim to the Aleutian Islands and back without a compass. They are fascinating creatures.”

He said he hopes others will donate to the park and UC Santa Cruz’s research.

Other docents and lovers of the park are energized by Fox’s example and the new staging area. They say Año Nuevo is part of the landscape that makes Northern California unique.

“Even if you didn’t have the elephant seals it would be a worthwhile visit,” said Bill Murray, president of the Coastside State Parks Association. “The beach, the dunes, the natural beauty of the place is amazing. When you add these fascinating creatures, you feel like you are in another world, particularly being only 1 hour or so from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We get a chance to see Mother Nature doing its thing. It’s a spectacle.”