When people of European descent first came to the shores of the Pacific Ocean in the 1840s, the area was coated with forests of REDWOODS, the world's tallest trees. Sadly, within a generation the woods had been nearly clear-felled. It seems that the civilisation they were preaching was actually a thinly veiled complete disregard for the world they live in, an attitude for total destruction with barely a tear for its complete and utter loss.
Muir Woods is what's left, a last bastion of primordial woodland in an otherwise depleted landscape. That what's left amounts to just a pathetic 900 acres is disgraceful, but in otherways it is amazing it survived. It did survive because it was too difficult to log being stuck in a valley. Its value was discovered by some really far-sighted conservation heroes known as William and Elizabeth Kent and was named after conservation pioneer John Muir and it became a National Monument.
To walk the paths through the woods is like being in a venerable cathedral, to worship at the altar of nature. This was one of the places I wanted to visit whilst in the San Francisco area, I really wanted to see a redwood, and it made a nice contrast to the urban city.
To actually visit the site we had to take a tourist shuttle, to be driven there. Unfortunately that meant when we got to he woods we only had a fixed time there, an hour and a half, which was adequate to see the main visitor trails, but not to hike the more rougher tracks. As a result we didn't have the time to really explore the area thoroughly, but that's the only gripe I really have.
The landscape on the journey to the park was scrubby rough grassland and alien eucalyptus plantations which only enhanced how holy a place Muir Woods was. This was a really depleted landscape crying out for what has gone.
In the forest there was lots of twinkling and tittering of birds in the canopy, and if I knew the bird song of the area I would have identified a few, but the only bird I actually saw was a PACIFIC WREN. It somehow didn't matter that I didn't see any birds, this was a place I just wanted to visit.
From the shuttle bus I saw more birds, a nice RED TAILED HAWK on some electricity pylons, several STELLER'S JAYS perched on some bushes, several RAVENS and best of all, lots of TURKEY VULTURES, flying over the surrounding hills, a very atmospheric bird, really helping to frame this as a foreign and exciting land.
This was close to the top of my bucket list of the holiday and was worth the visit. Was it busy? yes. Was it difficult getting an appreciation of nature's grandeur because of that? in a way. But this is old growth woodland, as old as time, something that has almost disappeared, something otherworldly, and something genuinely alternative to our civilisation, which is something beyond any economical cost.
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