Quick look: Nearly six years after the Bond Fire devastated Rancho Soñado, OCDE broke ground on a new $21 million environmental education center that will return Inside the Outdoors to its longtime home in the Santa Ana Mountains.
For nearly 20 years, Stephanie Smith knew Rancho Soñado at nearly every hour of the day.
As operations manager for Inside the Outdoors, OCDE’s long-running environmental education program, she saw it before coworkers arrived in the morning, before some of the animals woke up and before the sun came over the hills.
She watched generations of students step off buses, take in the rugged landscape and experience what staff came to call their “awe moments.”
On Tuesday morning, Smith stood on the same property under bright blue skies and talked about returning to a place she once called home.
“There’s a lot of big feelings today,” she told a crowd of about 50 people gathered for the groundbreaking of OCDE’s new Inside the Outdoors Education Center at Rancho Soñado. “It’s not just an office. It really is a place that speaks of who Inside the Outdoors is and why.”
The gathering marked the beginning of a new chapter for a site that was devastated by the Bond Fire in December 2020, when two of its three structures were destroyed, including the home Smith shared with her family. A number of the program’s animal ambassadors also died in the fire.
Nearly six years later, the landscape offered a visible reminder of recovery. Vegetation had returned across the property and surrounding hills, leaving relatively little outward evidence of the blaze that once swept through the site.
Speakers on Tuesday took turns on a raised metal stage beneath a white tent, while a nearby video screen showed images from Inside the Outdoors’ past — including footage dating to the 1970s — alongside animated renderings of the new center.
County Superintendent Dr. Stefan Bean called the groundbreaking a milestone moment for everyone who helped bring the program back.
“Nearly six years ago, the Bond Fire swept through these hills with extraordinary speed and force, and much of this site was destroyed,” Bean said. “But something important survived: the mission.”
Bean noted that Rancho Soñado had already provided more than 100,000 students with opportunities to experience science outside a traditional classroom before the fire. Inside the Outdoors has continued that work afterward, serving students in classrooms and field settings across Orange County.
“Recovery does not mean returning everything to exactly the way it was,” Bean said. “Sometimes recovery means adapting. It means changing, improving, getting better, learning and building differently because of what we have experienced.”
Ultimately, he said, the project is less about facilities than the experiences that will happen there.
“Students will return to these grounds,” Bean said. “They will walk these trails. They will learn from the beautiful landscape behind me. And today, at the groundbreaking, we open the door to thousands of experiences that have yet to happen.”
Designed for future generations
At the new Rancho Soñado Education Center, the landscape will continue to be part of the classroom, with indoor and outdoor spaces designed to support hands-on environmental learning.
At the center of the $21 million project will be new classroom and administrative spaces, a multipurpose building for environmental science, an outdoor dining pavilion and a large covered learning area. Four additional teaching pavilions will be spaced along trails throughout the site, which will feature a 133-seat amphitheater for programs and gatherings.
The rebuilt campus will also make it easier for school buses, students and emergency vehicles to move through the property, with expanded parking, accessible spaces and improvements to the access road. Native and drought-tolerant landscaping will help the center remain closely tied to its natural surroundings.
The design also reflects lessons from the 2020 fire. Buildings will use noncombustible materials such as concrete block, steel and metal roofing. Fire-safety features will include interior sprinklers, exterior systems designed to wet the ground around Base Camp on high-risk days and a new on-site fire hydrant.
C.W. Driver is serving as the construction partner, with tBP/Architecture leading the design. Construction is expected to continue through December 2027.
Getting to this point required years of coordination around environmental permitting, drainage, access and other site-specific challenges. The Orange County Board of Education approved the construction agreements in September.
Feels like another world
For Smith, who has spent 27 years with Inside the Outdoors, including her time as a Rancho Soñado resident with her family, the day carried both joy and loss.
“It’s kind of bittersweet today, because we’re saying goodbye to one more chapter of Rancho Soñado,” she said in an interview after the ceremony. “We watched it kind of regrow since the fire, and then we’re going to watch it kind of get grounded and rebuilt.”
While Smith will not return to Rancho Soñado as a resident caretaker — the rebuilt site will use different security measures — she said she is most looking forward to sharing the property again with students, educators and community members.
“The spot itself deserves to have people learn from it,” Smith said. “It’s gorgeous. It’s magical. … It’s resilient, it’s quiet. There’s creatures all over the place. It’s just wonderful.”
Inside the Outdoors Outreach Manager Yarib Dheming similarly described Rancho Soñado as deeply personal. Dheming has been with Inside the Outdoors and OCDE for more than 20 years and spent a large part of his career teaching along the site’s trails.
“One thing that I heard over and over and over was, ‘This is the best field trip ever,’” he said.
Students may have traveled only 20 or 30 minutes to get there, Dheming said, but arriving at Rancho Soñado often felt like entering another world.
“When people think of Orange County, they often think of beaches, freeways, neighborhoods and theme parks,” he said. “They don’t always think about our canyons, open spaces and the Santa Ana Mountains. But this is real Orange County, too.”
Dheming said the rebuilt site will be a “living laboratory” where students can investigate real questions and learn directly from the environment. It will also support educator learning, staff training, volunteer events and collaboration with community partners.
“More than anything, we look forward to hearing students say, ‘This is the best field trip ever,’ at Rancho Soñado once again,” he said.
Connections to the land
Orange County Board of Education President Tim Shaw reflected on his own childhood experiences in the outdoors and said Rancho Soñado offers students something increasingly rare in an urban county.
“You go just a few minutes that way, and we’re in that concrete urban jungle that we all live in,” Shaw said. “But then you go a few minutes out here — wow, look at that.”
Shaw, who joined the board in 2020, recalled seeing video of the site after the fire.
“It was just so heartbreaking,” he said. “But here we are. We’re going to come back better than ever, and we’re going to keep this program available to students in the future.”
Fellow trustee Dr. Ken L. Williams, who has served on the board for nearly three decades and lives a few miles from Rancho Soñado, spoke about the board’s longstanding connection to the property and the responsibility that came with it.
The roughly 110-acre site was conveyed to the Orange County Board of Education in the early 2000s with the intent that it be preserved and used for outdoor education. Rancho Soñado became Inside the Outdoors’ official home in 2006.
“The legacy is that we are responsible for this,” Williams said.
Williams also recalled returning to the property after the Bond Fire and seeing the destruction firsthand, including the loss of the residence and the program’s animal ambassadors.
“This is a very special moment,” he said.
Board member Mari Barke also offered brief remarks, thanking the Inside the Outdoors team and project partners. Other speakers included Lynne Pentecost, CEO of Schoolhaus Advisors Inc., and Robert P. Demmond, AIA, LEED AP, associate principal with tBP/Architecture, which designed the new center.
Continuing a 50-year mission
Inside the Outdoors has been connecting students with science and the natural environment since 1974 through field trips, classroom programs and other hands-on learning experiences.
Over more than five decades, the program has reached more than 3.5 million students. Rancho Soñado became an especially important part of that work, annually welcoming thousands of students before the Bond Fire.
The program continued operating after the fire and, Smith said Tuesday, is again serving about 100,000 students during the school year.
What has been missing is Rancho Soñado itself.
Near the conclusion of Tuesday’s ceremony, OCDE and county board leaders, Inside the Outdoors staff and project partners donned white hard hats and gathered with ceremonial shovels for the official groundbreaking photo.
Afterward, Inside the Outdoors staff offered guests short trail tours, giving longtime supporters and newcomers alike a closer look at the landscape that will soon become an active construction site.
Smith said that even after the fire, the land continued to offer lessons.
“It’s forgiving,” she said. “It reminds you of what’s important.”
And soon, she and the rest of the Inside the Outdoors team will have the chance to share it again.
“I’m so glad today is today,” Smith told the crowd. “We have to be patient for a little bit longer, but we’re getting there.”