Fort Ord National Monument view alongside wildflowers growing at Fort Ord. Credits – Wikipedia
When the facility finally shut down in 1994 under a government realignment scheme following the end of the Cold War, most of that area was left in a condition rarely seen elsewhere along the more populated California coast. Recognising the ecological and historic significance of what remained, President Barack Obama signed a proclamation in April 2012 designating about 14,651 acres of the former base as Fort Ord National Monument . The government said the site’s dual heritage will be part of a broader celebration of American service in 2026, when the very same ground on which soldiers prepared for war is now welcoming hikers, bikers and families experiencing one of California’s last vast expanses of open coastal wilderness.
Because huge portions of Fort Ord were live fire training zones and artillery ranges, allowing native grasslands, oak woods and marine chaparral to continue mostly undisturbed, for much of a century the landscape remained closed to farming, housing and roadbuilding. The proclamation, signed under the authority of the Antiquities Act, permanently protected the property, citing both its unique ecological diversity and its significance to generations of American military service. Ironically, the heavy military use protected most of the surrounding terrain from the kind of commercial growth that transformed other parts of the Monterey Peninsula. More than three decades after the last soldiers trained there, Fort Ord has become a silent counterpart to its own history, a site once marked by artillery fire and marching columns now defined by birdsong, wildflowers and the sounds of mountain bikes on packed dirt trails. The BLM is continuing to improve public access and trail infrastructure at the site, creating milestones that tie the monument’s military history to its present-day role as protected public property.
Fort Ord was created by the US Army in 1917 as a field artillery training location along Monterey Bay and eventually became one of the largest Army installations on the West Coast. During its active years, Fort Ord was one of the largest training grounds in the country’s military history, with 1.5 million American troops passing through it, according to numbers supplied by the Bureau of Land Management. It served as an important staging area for forces headed to the Pacific during the next several decades, training soldiers prior to World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.