San Fran Travelogue

"Walk the Sequoia woods at any time of year and you will say they are the most beautiful and majestic on earth. Beautiful and impressive contrasts meet you everywhere: the colors of tree and flower, rock and sky, light and shade, strength and frailty, endurance and evanescence, tangles and supple hazel-bushes, tree-pillars about as rigid as granite domes, roses and violets, the smallest of their kind, blooming around the feet of the giants, and rugs of the lowly chamaebatia where the sunbeams fall."
     – John Muir, from The Mountains of California

The story of Muir Woods, 12 miles north of San Francisco, is one more example of the far too often bittersweet history of natural resources in America.  The majestically mammoth Redwood trees (some can grow well over 300 feet tall), now one of the most popular attractions in the entire Bay Area, almost entirely vanished by way of the sawmill, man-made fire, and overall mindless exploitation by the turn of the 20th century.  A congressman by the name of Kent recognized the diminishing trend of the Redwood trees and bought the 611 acres that is now Muir Woods for $45,000 from a water company in order to preserve it from guaranteed destruction.  Years later Teddy Roosevelt decided to claim the forest as a national monument.  When he asked Kent if he would like the forest named after him, he declined, but suggested instead that John Muir, the great forest advocate and naturalist of the Sierra Nevada, deserved that title.  Knowing this brief history, it makes it all that much easier to appreciate the delicate nature of a species of tree that might otherwise be perceived as nothing more than rugged survivors.

Muir himself says it just fine what it is like to walk under the broad natural structures of the sequoias.  The appreciative visitor might sense inspiration in such a gathering of trees – to see, in a sense, what is naturally possible, and that nature itself is considerably more interesting than anything man made, for the very reason that it is natural...unmanipulated, free, just as it should be.  We hiked up the old Ben Johnson Trail for an hour and a half; as the trail vista elevated, there were the tree canopies, lush, green, beautifully imperfect.

I'd sense that Man has always perceived such trees as beautiful and inspiring.  When sheer use and profit goes unchecked by appreciation and understanding however, exploitation will occur by human nature virtually by definition.  To visit such a spot once is enough to support it.  Muir walked the Sierra Nevadas by himself for years lending his eloquent, self-taught voice to a mountain region.  By doing so, he preceded most of what we commonly think of conservation by a century.