The field included two major productive areas with a total surface extent of only 210 acres (0.85 km2), and produced 3,700,000 barrels (590,000 m3) of oil during its brief lifetime.

The northern boundary is Lavigia Hill, which rises north of Cliff Drive; some of the oil wells were drilled on the southern slopes.

[3] Prior to the oil field being developed, the flat top of the mesa was farmland, with one imposing former residence, the abandoned and earthquake-damaged "Dibblee Castle" built at the eastern end, overlooking Santa Barbara harbor.

[4][5] Climate in the area is Mediterranean, with mild, sometimes rainy winters and dry summers, with the temperature moderated by ocean breezes and a morning marine layer.

Oil was trapped in two anticlinal structures in a band of the porous Miocene-age Vaqueros Sandstone formation, at a depth of between 2,000 and 2,500 feet (760 m).

[13] The Mesa field was discovered during a time in California history when oil exploration and drilling was virtually unregulated.

Santa Barbara alone of the cities in the region opposed the development of oil fields within its boundaries, with most of the population seeing the industry as incompatible with the town's character with regard to aesthetic and environmental values.

[15] In the 1890s and 1900s The Summerland Oil Field sprouted hundreds of oil derricks on the beach and along piers into the surf, just five miles (8.0 km) east of the Santa Barbara city boundary; its westward expansion occasioned a midnight raid by a party of vigilantes, led by Reginald Fernald, son of newspaper publisher Charles Fernald, who tore down one of the derricks that had just been built on Miramar Beach.

[17] It was a wildcat well, and while not commercially viable and quickly abandoned, suggested to prospectors that it was worth looking more carefully for oil in the vicinity.

The discovery of the giant Ellwood Oil Field in 1929 in a similar geographic setting – a blufftop mesa twelve miles (19 km) west of Santa Barbara – commenced a frenzy of wildcat well drilling along the entire coastline from Carpinteria to Gaviota.

[18] It was during this burst of activity that the discovery well for the Mesa field was put in, May 1929, by Olympic Refining Company in the Palisades residential tract, near the intersection of Mohawk Drive and Hudson Road.

The sight of these derricks, plainly visible from Santa Barbara harbor, occasioned the first anti-oil protest within the city of Santa Barbara, but since an ordinance had been enacted specifically allowing oil production on the Mesa, which had only recently been considered for residential development, the protests failed to stop drilling and development.