Muir Woods Revival

In 1908, shortly before president Theodore Roosevelt established Muir Woods as a national monument--the nation’s tenth--a U.S. Forest Service official wrote in a report: “There is no other Redwood grove in the world so remarkably accessible to so many people.” He also noted that the grove of ancient coast redwoods was in “absolutely primeval condition.”

Surely neither this official nor Roosevelt foresaw the dilemma these twin attributes of the park would present: How to protect the grove while accommodating crowds of visitors. Throughout the park’s history, its caretakers have struggled to balance the public’s right to use it with the need to protect its natural resources, and they didn’t always succeed. Today, however, 100 years after its founding, Muir Woods National Monument is an inspiring example of how--with much work, creativity, and dedication--it is possible to protect and restore a fragile ecosystem, even in a highly popular park.

Nestled within a steep canyon on the western slope of Mt. Tamalpais, only 12 miles northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge and three miles from the ocean, Muir Woods National Monument is within a metropolitan area of 7 million people. It is managed by the National Park Service (NPS) as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA).

The park encompasses 553 acres, which is more than twice its original size but minuscule compared to other highly popular national parks. About a million visitors come to admire the redwoods each year--in some peak years, as many as 1.5 million. Yosemite National Park, with 760,000 acres, and Yellowstone, with 2.2 million acres, each averages around 3 million visitors per year.

Muir Woods is frequently overcrowded, its limited parking overwhelmed. During the summer, the California Highway Department posts a sign just north of the Golden Gate Bridge when the lots are full, to spare prospective visitors a long ride along a winding two-lane mountain road that would end in disappointment, and to let them know that a shuttle is available. The sheer number of visitors virtually guarantees a certain amount of disturbance of the park’s flora and fauna, not to mention its tranquillity. Despite the crowds, however, today the natural systems in Muir Woods are healthier than they have been during several decades of the park’s existence.

A History of Wear and Tear
Even on a chilly winter weekday, the main parking lot at Muir Woods is nearly full. People wander through the groves in clusters, children race along the boardwalk shrieking and giggling, camera flashes twinkle in the gloom beneath the canopy. Visiting this grove is not a solitary experience, and yet there’s something in the trees that grabs you, makes you look up in wonder, regardless of the distractions around you. They are serene, they are beautiful, they are . . . really, really big. Here in Muir Woods, you cannot help but respect your elders.

Further up the trail, the crowds grow more sparse and human sounds begin to drop away. Now you hear more clearly the rushing of Redwood Creek, which flows through the park, and the coo of a lone band-tailed pigeon somewhere in the woods nearby. At least to the untrained eye, the forest floor looks lush and healthy, covered with sword ferns and redwood duff and bright green redwood sorrel. Back at the parking lot, the bushes are a-twitter with tiny birds in search of their dinner, seemingly unperturbed by the presence of people.

In its early years Muir Woods had relatively few visitors, but some of them managed to wreak a fair amount of damage. They drove cars into the canyon and even on side trails; trampled the delicate forest understory and scrambled up steep slopes. They camped, picnicked, built fires, played ballgames, left litter behind, and reportedly even made off with ferns and other plants. By the early 1920s the wear and tear on the park was obvious, leading NPS to close the road into the monument to motor vehicles and horses, and to ban camping.

Park staff unwittingly did their own share of damage. Following what was standard practice at the time, they “tidied” the forest floor and the creek, removing downed trees and picking up branches and other natural debris, thus depriving some plants and wildlife of an important source of nutrients, as well as altering the creek’s flow. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps channelized Redwood Creek and built riprap walls to prevent flooding.

By the time Mia Monroe, now the park’s supervising ranger, arrived in 1978, she was struck by the absence of wildflowers, mushrooms, and other wildlife. “There were lots of Steller’s jays,” she said recently, “but no quail, no chipmunks.” Pools where salmon would have been able to lay their eggs had been lost. Clearly, the forest’s ecosystem wasn’t functioning as it should.

There had been troubling signs long before then. In 1971 one of the big redwoods toppled and park staff realized that its premature death might have been caused by visitors trampling the roots. “That was one of the earliest, biggest wakeup calls,” Monroe said. “When a big redwood in a park full of redwoods comes down, you’ve got to pay attention.”

One of the first steps staff took to ease pressure on the forest from its many visitors was to ban picnicking in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s attempts were made to protect the forest floor by paving the main paths and putting up fences to keep people away from trees and the creek. In 1988, volunteers established a native plant nursery and began replanting the trampled forest floor. The compacted soil around the redwoods has been planted with native ferns, redwood sorrel, and other plants that grow in redwood forests. Staff also stopped clearing debris and left fallen trees in place when possible.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, asphalt was removed from the most heavily used sections of the main trail and boardwalks were built, making the grove more accessible to people with limited mobility while also protecting the trees. An old road and a portion of the main parking lot near the creek were removed. In 1996 and 1998 planned fires were set, returning a key natural process after nearly a century of fire suppression (though prescribed burns were then halted while NPS reviewed its fire management plans, and have not yet been reintroduced). In a redwood forest, periodic fires make room for new trees to flourish, provide nutrients for redwood seedlings, and check the spread of diseases.

Since the improvements began, plants and animals that had disappeared from the forest have been returning--including a pair of river otters that, to the delight of park staff and visitors, gave birth to a pup last year.

Most visitors to Muir Woods probably have no idea that it took more than two decades of hard work to bring the forest to the relatively healthy state they see today. “It was an eye-opener for me,” said Maribeth Halloran, a Mill Valley resident, of a tour that she and a group of volunteers took with Monroe in the summer of 2007. Halloran had been to the park many times over the years, but “I had no idea that they felt they’d gotten to a point where the redwoods were doing more dying than they were regenerating. Now they’re bringing life back. I was really impressed by what they had done to regenerate the forest, on a limited budget.”

Freeing Redwood Creek
During the 1980s, park staff also began to worry about the health of Redwood Creek and its tributaries, whose once-impressive runs of coho salmon and steelhead trout had dwindled because of upstream flood-control measures and development in the creek’s floodplain. NPS and other government agencies that own land in the creek’s watershed, which extends from the peaks of Mt. Tamalpais to the Pacific Ocean and encompasses just under nine square miles, are now working to restore the creeks to a more natural condition.

One major site that is being restored is a former flower farm, now owned by NPS, in what was once Redwood Creek’s floodplain. The long-time owners, the Banducci family, had planted crops on much of the floodplain, moving and straightening the creek in some places, clearing out woody debris, and building levees to control its flow. One stretch of the creek through the Banducci land was so flat and straight it had been dubbed the Bowling Alley. Straightening the creek eliminated the pools that the salmon needed and caused severe flooding downstream during heavy rains, when the water rushed through unimpeded.

NPS began restoring the site in 2003, and since then most of the levees have been removed and log structures have been installed to encourage the creek to meander. What was the Bowling Alley is now “a series of pools and gravel bars that are great for salmon,” said Redwood Creek Nursery manager Chris Friedel, who coordinates the restoration work in the watershed, including the efforts of volunteers who do all the planting and weeding. The nursery is now run by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, a nonprofit association created to assist park staff in the GGNRA.

Another, even more ambitious restoration project is scheduled to begin next year at the mouth of Redwood Creek. Its goal is to bring back part of Big Lagoon, the estuary that connects the creek to the ocean at Muir Beach. Before most of the lagoon was filled in for agriculture and by the construction of roads, levees, and a parking lot, its brackish waters were important habitat for juvenile salmon that had not yet adapted to the ocean environment. Because restoring Big Lagoon has to be balanced with the needs of neighbors and public access to Muir Beach, park officials have “spent years talking about how much lagoon is feasible there,” Monroe said. Now the conflicts have been minimized and the plans are almost ready, though the funds must still be raised.

Moonlight Walks and Celebrations
Being in the middle of a dense urban area has benefits as well as drawbacks. “We have huge challenges, but we also have this great resource” in the number of volunteers available to help restore and maintain the park, said nursery manager Friedel. “It works both ways; we can offer so many opportunities for urban kids to get out into nature and see how it works. The most exciting thing to me is to show them how to take care of this landscape.” Such close involvement, Friedel said, can help young people overcome the paralysis they feel when faced by big issues like global warming. “You tell them, ‘Here’s this creek, this watershed, get to work.’”

The nursery had more than 400 volunteers last year to help with planting and weeding. A lot of people like to pitch in during big events such as Earth Day, but a small band of regulars shows up each week. Schools send groups of students, and companies sponsor employee work days--some of whom come out year after year and “start to get a sense of ownership of the place,” Friedel said.

Beyond volunteer opportunities, Muir Woods offers a slate of programs tailored to different types of audiences: guided walks where visitors can learn about the park’s history and its redwoods, birds, salmon, and other natural resources; workshops and classroom curricula for teachers as well as field trips for schoolchildren; popular moonlight walks during summer months; and
celebrations of both the summer and winter solstices. “They sang and danced, and luminaria lighted the way through the woods,” Maribeth Halloran said of the winter solstice celebration she attended in 2007. “It was very simple, but very beautiful.” (See www.nps.gov/muwo for information about upcoming events.)

A Rhododendron Returns
A willingness to adapt and change and to learn from experience may well be key to many of the successes at Muir Woods. Staff and volunteers are always on the lookout for early signs that something isn’t working, so they can fix it as soon as possible. For example, they quickly realized that their elaborate new critter-proof trash cans were making too much racket and disturbing the visitor experience. “We have an engineer out now looking for solutions,” Monroe said.

Traffic jams and full parking lots are perennial problems, particularly in summer, although shuttles from east Marin, instituted in 2004, are helping. Shuttle connections to the Sausalito Ferry were added in 2007, and the park recently received a special grant to acquire hybrid vehicles for the shuttle service. Another serious problem--one with no remedy in sight, so far--is Sudden Oak Death, which is now reaching epidemic levels. “Our whole understory is dying, and all the old oaks around us,” Monroe said. Climate change will add a whole new raft of problems, not least of which will be whether the redwoods, which need moisture and cool temperatures, can adapt.

There remain many things that the staff would like to learn about the park--for example, how tall the trees are exactly (they recently received funding to measure them), and what life is like in the canopy. Monroe would particularly like to learn more about the bats: An initial survey found that 15 different species use Muir Woods, but because the staff is rarely there at night, they don’t know much about the nocturnal creatures. “The survey showed that they tuck themselves between leaves and even use fire scars in the trees as caves,” she said. “We were surprised at how much of the forest they use.”

Monroe hopes that this centennial year will provide time for reflection about the park’s mission. “We’re hoping that a lot of profound questions will be asked this year--like, can we handle a million visitors per year?” Overcrowding not only wears on the park, it also keeps visitors from experiencing the awesome nature of the forest. Park managers are now considering a range of ways to achieve a healthy balance between people and nature, from requiring reservations to establishing quiet zones.

The challenges are endless, but there is also much to celebrate. Leopard lilies are growing in the forest again, and mushrooms and azaleas. Quail, chipmunks, pileated woodpeckers, and a huge flock of band-tailed pigeons have returned, not to mention the river otters. Bobcats, coyotes, and foxes are common. “There are all these exciting things that are giving us hope,” Monroe said.

As part of the park’s centennial celebration on January 9, 2008, volunteers and staff planted a locally rare Pacific rhododendron (Rhododendron macrophyllum) in the forest. The rhododendrons, which can grow to 40 feet, have been found in only three locations in Marin, the southernmost part of its range, but Friedel said that botanists believe it was once much more common locally. This year the nursery will plant more populations in Muir Woods and monitor them. The rhododendron’s return is just one more sign of the regeneration of this park where wildflowers had once all but disappeared--a sign of what can happen when you combine hope with hard work.