Drive the corner of Westlake Boulevard and Avenida de Los Arboles in Thousand Oaks today and you will find a pump track, a disc golf course, a non-motorized glider launch, and 6.7 miles of trail shared by hikers, mountain bikers, and horses. What you will not find is a single soccer field, baseball diamond, or tot lot, even though that is exactly what this 145-acre parcel was originally planned to hold.
The reason has nothing to do with taste and everything to do with soil. The land the Conejo Recreation and Park District now calls Sapwi Trails Community Park was dedicated to the district back in 1993 as part of the master plan for Lang Ranch, and for nearly two decades the plan was conventional: ball fields, tot lots, picnic areas, sport courts. Then geotechnical studies came back on the slopes, and the district discovered the ground could not support what everyone had been promised. The ball-field master plan was formally abandoned in January 2012. What replaced it is a park most Thousand Oaks residents still describe, if they mention it at all, as "that place with the skate ramps off Westlake." It is stranger and better than that description suggests, and understanding how it got built explains why it works.
A Name Change That Wasn't Just Branding
For its first two decades, this parcel carried the generic label Lang Ranch Community Park, a placeholder tied to the surrounding neighborhood rather than the land itself. When the district's board of trustees revisited the project after the 2012 plan collapse, they voted on March 6, 2014 to rename it Sapwi Trails Community Park. The choice was not cosmetic. Sapwi was the name of a Chumash village that once stood in the Conejo Valley, and Beverly Folkes, chair of the Chumash Indian Museum in the Lang Ranch area, was part of the renaming conversation.
"Being a Chumash person, I am very happy to see them acknowledge our site and honor our people."
Folkes also clarified the pronunciation for a public used to reading it phonetically: the "s" is silent, and the word is spoken closer to "awp wah." The rename gave the district cover to reimagine the park's purpose at the same time it corrected the land's own history, a rare instance where a planning failure and a naming correction landed in the same conversation.
What Actually Got Built, and What It Cost
Construction did not move quickly. The district awarded the build to Access Pacific Construction in September 2017, funded through a combination of public sources rather than park district reserves alone.
| Funding Source | Amount | Approved |
|---|---|---|
| City of Thousand Oaks grant | $2.5 million | April 11, 2017 |
| Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (Prop 1) | $1.76 million | June 26, 2017 |
| Total project cost | $7.5 million | — |
The park opened in September 2018, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on September 22. Of the 145 total acres, only 17 were developed. That ratio was deliberate. The design team, working with the Conejo Recreation and Park District and landscape architecture firm RRM Design Group, chose to preserve the rest as native oak woodland and grassland rather than force a conventional park footprint onto land that had already rejected one. More than 400 oak trees were retained on site, and the park carries no irrigated turf at all, a decision that cuts water use roughly 90 percent compared to a standard park of similar size. Four bridges were built across Lang Creek specifically to control erosion and stabilize the slopes that had doomed the original plan.
Four Doors Into the Same Park
Part of why Sapwi still reads as a hidden feature rather than a destination is that it does not present itself as one park with one entrance. It has four distinct access points, each opening onto a different piece of the same 145 acres:
- The Neighborhood Park entrance, closest to the playground and picnic areas
- Arboles Terrace, off Avenida de los Arboles
- Westlake Upper Terrace, reached from Westlake Boulevard
- Westlake Lower Terrace, the other Westlake Boulevard access point, lower on the slope
A family coming for the playground at Neighborhood Park may never realize the same property connects, on foot or by bike, to a working disc golf course and a glider launch a quarter mile away. The park was built to be entered from multiple directions precisely because it borders a mix of single-family neighborhoods, a school, and city arterial streets, and the design team wanted every adjacent block to have its own front door rather than funneling everyone through one lot.
The Combination No Other Conejo Valley Park Offers
The amenities themselves are the clearest evidence that Sapwi is not a scaled-down version of a normal park. It is a different kind of park, built around formal agreements between the Conejo Recreation and Park District and four specific user groups, each of which maintains its own piece of the property.
The Concerned Off-Road Bicyclists Association, known locally as CORBA, built and maintains the pump track and bike terrain course that gives the park its most visible identity from the street. The Conejo Disc Golf Club operates the on-site disc golf course, a separate facility from the district's older Rabbit Flats course elsewhere in Thousand Oaks. The Thousand Oaks Soaring Society uses the non-motorized glider area, a launch and landing terrace for sailplanes that has no real equivalent anywhere else in the Conejo Valley. Thousand Oaks High School's cross country team trains on the park's dedicated running course. Layer in the 6.7 miles of multi-use trail open to hikers, bikers, and horses, and Sapwi ends up hosting five distinct recreational communities on a single piece of land, each with a formal stake in keeping their piece of it running.
Not a Backup Plan for Wildwood
Ask most Thousand Oaks residents where to hike and the answer is almost automatic: Wildwood Regional Park, home to the 40-foot Paradise Falls and the well-known Lizard Rock formation. Wildwood is managed by the Conejo Open Space Conservation Agency, known as COSCA, a joint agency the city and the park district established in 1977 that now oversees more than 15,000 acres and 140 miles of trail across the Conejo Valley. Wildwood earns its reputation. It also gets crowded on weekends, and its parking lot at the Avenida de los Arboles trailhead fills fast once the temperature drops enough to make the hike pleasant.
Sapwi is not competing with Wildwood for that same crowd, and treating it as an overflow option misses what makes it useful. Wildwood is COSCA-administered open space, built around preserving a landscape and giving hikers a way through it. Sapwi is a CRPD community park, built around active use of a much smaller footprint by more different kinds of visitors at once. You do not go to Sapwi for a waterfall. You go because your kid wants to try the pump track, your neighbor plays in the Thursday disc golf group, and there is a decent chance you will see a sailplane catch a thermal off the ridge while you are both there.
Why the History Is Worth Knowing
None of this changes what Sapwi looks like on a Saturday morning. It changes what you understand while you are standing in it. The park exists in its current, unusual form because a conventional plan failed on the actual ground beneath it, and because the district that owns that ground chose to rebuild around the land's constraints instead of fighting them. The renaming to honor the Chumash village that once stood nearby was not a footnote to that process. It was part of the same decision to let the site's own character, geological and cultural, shape what got built on it.
That is a different story than the one most Thousand Oaks parks tell, and it is the reason Sapwi Trails rewards a longer look than the drive-by glance most residents give it on the way to somewhere else.
If you already call this part of Thousand Oaks home and find yourself wondering what a property near a park like this is actually worth in today's market, or you are weighing a move within the Conejo Valley and want a clearer read on comparable neighborhoods, Michelle Price Realty Group is glad to talk it through. Request a Confidential Consultation whenever you are ready.
