"They turned it into Muir Woods," I heard someone say as I was leaving Roy's Redwoods yesterday. Roy's Redwoods is San Geronimo Valley's busiest and most famous local redwood grove. There grows the tallest tree in Marin County.
I had heard this criticism of the $3.5 million Roy's Redwoods rehabilitation project before. The Marin County Open Space District site was closed all summer and completely redone. It is nice to be able to go back this fall and see what it looks like.
The goal of the project was to "
- Restore the hydrologic function of the alluvial valley;
- Improve redwood forest and wetland habitats;
- Guide visitors through an immersive and accessible experience of the redwoods."
When something like this happens, it is like gentrification of the woods. The "new" Roy's Redwoods looks nice--nice trails, well-organized, nice stone work (although the large boulders are a bit out of place and seem to belong in the Sierra Nevada), nice new boardwalks and bridges. It is welcoming in a familiar National Park sort of way, and makes walking the trails pleasant and efficient. I really like the nested loops of the named trails--once you figure out that pattern it is fairly easy to remember where the trails go. The Wilderness Way exploration and adventure zone is a nice (and surprisingly hazardous, and a totally fun mud pit when rainy) touch.
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| Nice new bridges |
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| Wilderness Way adventure area |
But the biggest problem with over-guiding and "progress" is often what has been lost. So what did we trade for the new and improved Roy's Redwoods?
The first thing my kids would tell you we miss is the loss of the "bouncy trees." Roy's Redwoods had two wonderful bouncy bay trees. One was near the fairy ring tree, and was a long limb that had a dip in it about waist-high. You could hoist a toddler onto the branch, they could straddle it and hang on to where it curved upward, and you could bounce it up and down, creating giggles and delight. Older kids could climb up themselves or get on with some help, and do their own bouncing. It is hard to tell exactly why this tree was taken out, but it appears to have been incompatible with the location of the new trail system.
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| The bouncy limb tree used to be here. |
The other bouncy tree--the best one--was over on the right as kids walked in from the footbridge over Nicasio Road from school. A fallen-but-still-alive bay tree extended outward over the flats from the hillside, about waist-high, for about 50 feet. A group of kids could get on it and bounce up and down, but the biggest bounces could be made by a grown-up standing on the end. I could get the tip to reach the ground with well-timed resonating bounces. It was so fun, and a mandatory stop anytime we went to Roy's Redwoods. It is now gone--cut off near the base, where a new trail passes through.
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| The cut base of the bouncy tree. Dec 28, 2024. |
Yesterday we looked for new bouncy trees. There was one candidate, but the end was too low to the ground to get good amplitude. Cutting it halfway down the trunk might make it work.
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| Roy's Redwoods in February 2024, where the bouncy tree used to be. |
Another loss seems to be a good place to play "Beckon." School groups and camps use Roy's Redwoods as a center of activities, and it was a great spot for this game where kids hide, have to go to a central "cauldron" if spotted by the person who is "it," but can free those imprisoned at the cauldron by beckoning them secretly from their hiding places. There might be good new places to play this game, but around the trails the understory feels more open, with fewer hiding places. It just has a different feel--the trails feel like a transportation system that perhaps shouldn't be blocked by a game. There is also a feeling that one should stay on the trail--and while I can't remember exactly where signs told visitors to do so, I'm pretty sure we aren't supposed to climb around on the hillside anymore.
In college (over 30 years ago!), in my Parks and Outdoor Recreation class, I learned about the importance of well-maintained and designed trails. Multiple user trails not only degrade habitat but confuse visitors. Closing those user trails and maintaining a well-organized and well-maintained trail system is a good way to improve both habitat and the visitor experience.
But trails also take people where they want to go. The existence of a trail is evidence that there was a desire to go that way by multiple people (or the same person repeatedly). Sometimes that desire is clearly not compatible with the engineering of the trail and protection of the soil, such as when people are cutting switchbacks. Or when you unnecessarily get a trail five-ditches wide through Tuolumne Meadows. Especially at heavily-visited recreation sites, organization is important--in areas with a growing population, as visitor density increases, more rules and control are required. And that is a shift we can recognize. And this blog is a place where we can reflect on that... and we can be sad about the loss of freedom--knowing that sometimes it is necessary.
We still need the wild places where we can roam free, especially within walking distance of our homes. Sometimes user trails reflect important routes to important places, and should not be closed. For thousands of years, people have walked the land and gone wherever they needed or wanted to go. We can't lose that. Our short 200-year experiment of doing things differently must be constrained. We can't let our population density gentrify all our open spaces.
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| The meadow is now closed. |
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| A four-foot-plus diameter redwood has already fallen on this spot and damaged the new boardwalk. I think they should leave it there and cut a tunnel through it, allowing kids leaving Wilderness Way to climb on it as they exit. (Dec. 3, 2024 photo) |
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| Dec. 28, 2024 photo of the fallen tree . |
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| Can you imagine an arch cut here? People could duck under. A perfect entrance to the adventure area Wilderness Way. |
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| Seemingly unnecessarily-large boulders embedded in Larsen Creek. |
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| These beaver dam analogues are nice |
So about the name "Roy." The name comes from a family's ranch. There is also a trail in Roy's Redwoods that is named the "David Hansen" Trail. David--one of the most traditional and common Euro-American names, and Hansen, one of the most common last names. A meaningless name to most people, yet I'm sure he is worthy and those who know him appreciate this trail naming. We could name another trail "John Smith" and another one "Mary Parker." Naming things after people is tricky. There is some historically interesting thing of value that comes from it, but most of our names honor white people that have only been here for the last 500 years. I'm honored that my mom's family has a street name in San Francisco, but also not sure that a small set of people who owned property during a short 200-year period and subdivided it should get to name our surroundings. What about the thousands of years of indigenous habitation that preceded this?
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