Muir Woods National Monument

By the early 1900s this canyon, then called Redwood Canyon, was one of the last uncut redwood groves on the coast near San Francisco, and a water company had its eye on damming the creek. In 1905 a wealthy conservationist named William Kent and his wife Elizabeth bought the land to keep it from being logged and flooded.

When the water company moved to seize the land anyway, Kent donated it to the federal government, and in 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt declared it a national monument, one of the first created to protect a natural feature rather than a ruin. Kent asked that it be named not for himself but for John Muir, the great naturalist, who called the gift one of the finest acts of its kind he had ever heard of.

Coast redwoods live only in a narrow strip along the northern California coast, and they depend on fog. Through the dry summer, when it barely rains, the tall trees comb moisture out of the drifting fog, watering themselves and the ferns below. A single tree can pull hundreds of gallons of water from the air.

Redwoods are also nearly fireproof, wrapped in thick, spongy bark, and they resprout from their roots and even from fallen trunks, so a grove can regenerate itself for thousands of years. The forest floor is a soft world of sword fern, redwood sorrel, and fallen giants slowly returning to soil, all in the dim green light that filters down through the canopy far overhead.

This land is the homeland of the Coast Miwok, who lived across what is now Marin County for thousands of years, fishing the creeks and coast and gathering acorns from the oaks on the sunnier slopes. The redwood canyons were part of a landscape they knew intimately.

The Coast Miwok are today part of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a living community, not a memory. Their long presence here is part of the story of these woods, which were never truly empty wilderness but a homeland.

Redwood Creek runs the length of the monument, and in late fall and winter, when the rains raise the water, coho salmon and steelhead return from the ocean to spawn in the same gravel where they hatched, one of the last runs of its kind so close to a major city.

Overhead, northern spotted owls nest in the old growth, and Pacific wrens, Steller's jays, and the occasional pileated woodpecker move through the canopy. Black-tailed deer, gray squirrels, and banana slugs, the bright yellow mascots of the redwood floor, are the easiest wildlife to spot on a walk through the grove.

Muir Woods is cool and green year-round. Winter brings the fullest creek and the returning salmon; spring adds wildflowers and birdsong; summer is busiest, with coastal fog keeping the grove cool. Early morning and late afternoon are the quietest and most beautiful times, when the crowds thin and the light slants low.

Because parking is limited, a reservation is required in advance, and a shuttle runs from nearby park-and-ride lots in the busy season. Combine a visit with the coast at Muir Beach or the summit of Mount Tamalpais for one of the best half-days anywhere near the bay.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.