And thanks to eagle-eyed Marvin Chiu. Marvin suggests that this might be a fun destination for a Guild FAM event.
By Olivia Harden, Travel Reporter Dec 13, 2024 - SFGATE
What was once a confusing piece of nature in the heart of a Bay Area county is now a raised wooded walkway through coastal California’s most celebrated trees.
Marin County Parks completed its $3.5 million project to restore Roy’s Redwoods Preserve, a 293-acre nature preserve in the San Geronimo Valley. The new trails allow visitors to enjoy a cluster of 300-foot-tall redwoods without getting lost.
“This site has been almost loved to death. There was never any designated or designed trail system. So when visitors would come, they would go every which way, and there was a lot of environmental impacts as a result of that,” project manager Jon Campos told SFGATE. “We really wanted to take a fresh look at this. How can we design a trail system in this site that really, at a foundational level, was designed to ensure the health of the redwood forest for generations to come.”
The county opened the land to the public 45 years ago, and Campos said visitors sometimes got lost in the preserve because trails were unclear or poorly marked. Following six years of planning, with several rounds of public input, Marin County Parks broke ground last summer to install elevated wooden platforms that guide hikers through a thicket of redwood trunks.
The department planted thousands of native plants to increase the area’s resilience and focused heavily on ecological and hydrological restoration. Overall, 5,670 feet of existing trail was realigned, with 1,900 feet upgraded to make it more accessible to people using mobility devices. Marin County Parks also closed over a mile of access to sensitive areas of the preserve.
“The community loves it, and that’s what we really wanted,” Campos said. “There are destinations like Muir Woods out there that are kind of global attractions. This site we kind of see for our local community to really appreciate and visit.”
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