A walk in the woods

(Or on the second day, our calves were sore!

On the American Labour Day, this year on the first of September, we went for a walk in the woods with our Aussie mate who was visiting for work. We also met up with an old friend who now lives in SF and his four year old daughter. She's a real sweetie and is going to be a handful when she gets older - pretty and bright! We all were given sticks that had a very special import, though lord knows what it was....

We didn't go to just any old woods, nope, we were off to Muir Woods.




Sequoia sempervirens is the star of the show at Muir Woods.

This is the centennial year of the woods. They've been around for much longer than a hundred years but not as a national monument. These are The Woods to many San Franciscans, but they are lucky to still be around. The April-June edition of Bay Nature outlines how the woods could first have been logged and now be under water - only a freak of topography meant the valley they lie in (Redwood Canyon) was spared from the loggers in the mid to late 1800s and then a dedicated battle by a conservationist by the name of William Kent, who ended up buying the woods for the princely sum of $45,000 in 1905.

Two years later the local water company decided to acquire the land. This was on the 2nd of December 1907. Kent sent a barrage of letters to Washington DC, offering 295 acres to the US government in exchange for turning the land into a national monument, permanently inviolable. By New Year's Eve, the gift was accepted, and President Theodore Roosevelt declared the woods inviolable on 9th January 1908, a day before the water company took possession.



When you think about it, it is truly impressive that such an exchange could take place so quickly. There was no internet in 1907. No faxes either. No planes or automobiles, only trains. The Wild West was barely tamed. SF had been devastated by a major earthquake the year before. The quickest way to correspond was by telegraph. And then there is the government - these days getting a national monument declared would take reams of paperwork and months, if not years, of hand-wringing and bureaucracy...

But what Mr/Congressman Kent left us with was this:





And goshdarnit, we should be grateful and we are.



Muir Woods is not his only legacy. The whole area north of SF is covered in parks that are all thanks to him. He bought land and gave it to the public. The public seems to appreciate his efforts.



We were there on a sunny day. Sunny days in summer are rare in redwood country - they need the sea fogs to survive as not enough rain falls, particularly in summer, in the Bay area to sustain redwoods. They are only found near the coast - if you visit the Bay area, you'll see that the hills and ranges along the coast are clothed in trees whilst the ranges on the inland side of the Bay are clothed in grasses/herbs/forbs and the odd oak. Redwoods simply do not do well when they don't get rain or fog year round. They happily "breathe in" the water droplets in fog. They are ancient trees, gymnosperms dating back many many millions of years.


(Do not adjust your eyes - those shadows really are doubled yet there was only one sun in the sky.)

Noone knows how old these trees are. We can make guesstimates based on their girth and rate of growth, but there is very little genetic variation between the trees of the Muir Woods. When a new seedling manages to get a hold on life (and that ain't easy in a mature forest that is not allowed to burn), it grows and grows for many years. It has little offshoots at its base that eventually take over as the old tree fails. There are lots of "fairy rings" of coastal redwoods. They grow so closely together in their family groupings that it would be hard to sidle in between the trunks of some groves. Individual members of the group may only be a hundred or so years old but the parent tree could be much, much older.





If a tree falls over but manages to survive, a row of trees can grow from its trunk, making lines of redwoods. Here's one we prepared earlier:


We took the road less travelled up above the redwood canyons. We saw groves and dells similar to those that inspired the forest moon "Endor." We saw light and dust and many special things. And we walked up an awfully steep hill and then down the other side of it. It's been a while since we walked up any hills - we live in a flat part of the Bay.


(Up out of the canyon)



We didn't just see redwoods - there are other trees and plants there too up on the hills surrounding the redwood canyons. The lack of fires has reduced the biodiversity some - only recently has US national forest management concluded that little fire is good for the forests - Smokey Bear's policies of no forest fires equals no regeneration of old forests. (I'm not saying people should go round burning forests to the ground but a widespread area of old, even moribund, forest is not good for the forest or any of the critters that rely on it. It is good for water catchments though.)









At the end of the day, we came home with very dirty legs. LOL



Hopefully we will get a chance to visit these woods again (less traffic would be nice too!) and see them in a different mood - autumnal maybe or misty or early spring with leaves just at leaf burst.