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    Wildcatters Park

    4.8 (12 reviews)

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    Little playground.
    Joe F.

    I love this park. It is extremely well-maintained. The play areas are separated for parents for your little kids from 2 to 5 years old and then your big kids from 5 to 12 both bathroom play areas. Each of the plate areas as well-maintained. The ground has fantastic padding Having twins one of the things that I love is the swings for your small kids from 2 to 5 they have the bucket seats. They had four of them which often when we go visit there's one or two, and sometimes those are already taken which can be troublesome. There was a nice shaded picnic area for the parents to wait in between the two playgrounds. There's a nice walking path for families restrooms were clean and readily available. One of the other things that are often tough to find a Parks is shade over the equipment, which both playgrounds had.

    Sherie K.

    Holy cow, we came here recently and LOVED this park! It was so clean and spacious with some fun park amenities. Most parks are fairly standard with slides, monkey bars...sometimes swings, but this park had it all and fun spinning disks, climbing rocks and a snack shack! I don't know if the snack shack is always open, but it was when we attendee's on a Tuesday afternoon as there was a little league baseball game happening at the very nice baseball field. This field was fully equipped with so much and then after the game ended, the kids filed over to the playground for a birthday party, so it was very convenient. My son is 3, and he was able to navigate this park pretty well on his own aside from one of the climbing ladders, but he had a blast. He even wanted to walk around the trail multiple times trying to catch Pokemon because this park had multiple gyms, pokestops and an easy route to follow. There were also so many places to sit and watch your child from nearly any angle which was great. The bathrooms were a little dark, but were clean enough...there was toilet paper and the soap was stocked, so you can't ask for much else. All in all, we actually can't wait to come back here!

    John S.

    I hope you like learning, because I'm about to school you a little bit. This park has a dog park, but you may have been afraid to bring your pooch because of the park's name; why risk having a walk in the park turn into the worst (and last) day of Fido's life, as a hungry bobcat or mountain lion drags your poor dog away? But it's not named "Wildcat Park." It's Wildcatters Park. What are wildcatters? Well, they're multiple things, but in this case, although it doesn't tell you anywhere, the wildcatters being referred to are those people who drill exploratory oil wells. How do I know this? Because I came here long before it was a public park--in fact, long before any neighborhoods existed here. When I first came here in the mid-'80s, my mom worked for what was still called the Union Oil Company of California. It eventually changed its name to Unocal, and it eventually sold its logo to ConocoPhillips before being swallowed entirely by Chevron and ceasing to exist. The 76 logo is still used by ConocoPhillips, but Unocal is defunct. Why is this important? Because some of the land that Wildcatters Park now occupies used to be part of A.C. Rubel Park. A.C. Rubel was one of the early presidents of Union Oil, and the entire area around the current park was and is an active oil field. You'll see pumpjack wells just to the north of the park, and there are plenty more that you're not able to see. So the park is named in honor of the industry that sold the land to the developers of the nearby neighborhood, which has one street name Rubel Drive (definitely a reference to A.C. Rubel Park, if not to Rubel himself) and another named Phillips Court (probably a reference to Phillips Petroleum, before it merged with Conoco in 2002). I love the current park because it's beautifully done. But I really love the park because just north of it (and possibly where its playing fields now stand) is where I spent three or four really wonderful picnics with my mom, her coworkers, her coworkers' families, and my cousin Greg. I don't remember each of the dates of those picnics, but I know one for sure: August 7, 1986. Want to read about that day in my life? Well, check this out: https://www.asceoc.org/newsletter/article/august_bbq_and_field_trip_august_1986 So nine-year-old me was enjoying the Santa Maria-style barbecue (which was delicious; I didn't stop eating meat until much later) and the plentiful soft drinks in huge coolers on hand. I also loved all the weird "amenities" of A.C. Rubel Park--namely, all the strange and mysterious and randomly placed half-buildings and platforms and what looked like stages and bandstands made of various metals and corrugated steel that could have come straight off the set of M*A*S*H. In fact, the entire place felt like the set of that beloved TV show. There were barely any trees (contrary to the newsletter's tease), but there were plenty of hilly places to explore, even though we all knew as kids that we weren't really supposed to, as everything felt just a little bit dangerous. And it was. Of course, there must have been rattlesnakes even though we never saw any, and there was definitely random oil-well machinery that was dangerous to play around. One of the pumpjacks was even dolled up to look like a huge insect, complete with antennae that ended in orange spheres (an homage to the 76 ball?) and cute orange eyes, even though decorating pumpjacks had long been illegal in California because of the risk of children being attracted to and playing on the equipment. But this was in a private park, so I guess they didn't have to follow that law--or maybe they were still supposed to. One of the highlights of the picnic was the softball game, which pitted people of all ages against one another on massive teams whose batting orders seemed to last forever. What I mostly remember is that Joey was a spectacularly fast baserunner and that my mom's boss was a good catcher. The softball "field"--it was mainly a piece of dirt that was flatter than the rest of the park--was south of the main picnic area, which is why I believe it occupied the space that the northeastern corner of Wildcatters Park now occupies. The current Wilcatters Park has plenty of parking, and in addition to the baseball and football/soccer fields and dog park, there's a playground, a picnic area, and some nice paths that I'll need to come back to explore. There are also public restrooms, and when I came earlier this month, there was what looked like a temporary, rain-created pond in the southwest marshy area. I really want to climb up the hill to see how much of A.C. Rubel Park remains, especially its strange structures. (Were they ever used as intended, or was the promise of the picnic park oversold and exaggerated, as it was in the newsletter?) It's all fenced off now, and the old entrance off of Valencia Avenue that we used to enter has a locked gate. Oh well. Maybe one day. It's close to Carbon Canyon Regional Park.

    Beautiful walking paths

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    9 years ago

    This is by far our favorite park around. Bathrooms are close and there is some shade for the parents to sit. We love it!

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    Review Highlights - Wildcatters Park

    The ground has fantastic padding Having twins one of the things that I love is the swings for your small kids from 2 to 5 they have the bucket seats.

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    Wildcatters Park - parks - Updated August 2026

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