Best Time to Visit Santa Monica Mountains

Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is a National Recreation Area in CA and a moderately visited park, drawing about 723,000 recreation visits in 2025. Visitation has eased over the past decade, down about 10.3%. Crowds concentrate sharply by season: May is the busiest month at about 1.3× the park's average month, while December is the calmest at roughly 0.8× — a 2-to-1 swing between high and low season. Roughly 26% of the year's visitors arrive in the three summer months of June, July and August alone, so timing a trip outside that window is the single biggest lever on how crowded the park feels. If avoiding people matters most, December offers the thinnest crowds of the year, though you'll trade some warmth and daylight for the solitude. Daylight ranges from about 9.7 hours in midwinter to 14.3 hours near the summer solstice, which shapes how much ground you can cover in a day. These crowd figures are drawn from 1982–2025 of National Park Service visitor-use records, and are updated as new monthly data is released.