Boone's Hillside Trail tale — the vast Bay Area redwood forests that were logged away in a single generation, and why this one lonely canyon was left standing.
Hold up here on the hillside a moment, where you can see out across the whole grove. Boone Merrick again — and I want to tell you a tale about a forest, except this one's a ghost story, because the forest I'm telling you about isn't here anymore.
Look across this canyon, full of thousand-year-old trees, and understand this: two hundred years ago, this was not rare. Redwood forest like this one ran up and down these coastal hills for as far as a body could walk — grove after grove after grove of giants, all around this bay, thick and dark and ancient, from the ridges clear down toward the water. This canyon wasn't a treasure then. It was just an ordinary patch of a vast and endless-seeming forest.
And then, in about one man's lifetime, it all came down. The Gold Rush lit the fuse — eighteen forty-nine — and San Francisco needed lumber the way a fire needs air. The saws came into these hills and they did not stop. Down the hill from where you stand, they built a mill on a creek and cut the mountain's redwoods to feed it, and named the whole town Mill Valley after the doing of it. Grove by grove, the great forest was fed into the growing city — became its houses, its docks, its sidewalks, its fence posts, ten thousand things that have since rotted or burned. A forest that took two thousand years to grow was gone in fifty. And almost nobody thought to stop and wonder at it while it stood; it was just in the way.
This canyon — this one lonesome canyon you're walking — got missed. Too steep, too boxed-in, too much trouble to haul the logs out of. That's all. No hero saved it in those years; it survived by being inconvenient. And by the time William Kent came along to buy it, it wasn't one grove among thousands anymore. It was nearly the last one near the city. The rarest thing in the whole bay. So when you look across at these trees, don't only see what's here. See what isn't. See the ghost forest, the great vanished green country that used to stand on every hill around you and got turned into a city in a single generation. These trees on this slope are the last survivors, the sole witnesses left standing. That's why folks fought so hard to save this little canyon — and that's why you take your hat off, in your heart, when you walk it. Come on down. Mind the steps.
Photo: Peter D. Tillman · CC BY-SA 2.0
