Читать книгу Afoot and Afield: San Francisco Bay Area. A Comprehensive Hiking Guide онлайн

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Passing Bridge 3, left, you enter Cathedral Grove, where the path divides around this fantastic stand of trees. Here, on May 19, 1945, delegates who came to San Francisco to form the United Nations met to honor Franklin Roosevelt, who had just died. Some of the trees here show scars from fire; others have large, grotesque lumps called burls.

The coast redwood, a species that first appeared some 250 million years ago, has developed strategies to withstand natural disasters, including fire. These include thick, insulating bark, and sprouting from burls, or clusters of dormant buds.

Passing the Fern Creek Trail, right, you cross a stone bridge over Fern Creek, and then, in a couple of hundred feet, pass the Camp Eastwood Trail, right. Several hundred yards ahead, your path curves left, and a single-track trail, the Bootjack Trail, heads right, into Mt. Tamalpais State Park. After about 100 feet, you come to Bridge 4, which takes you across Redwood Creek.

Climb moderately on the rocky trail to a T-junction, where you turn left on the Hillside Trail and continue to climb, aided now by wooden steps. The grade soon eases, and you follow a narrow trail, sliced from a steep hillside, into a ravine that holds a tributary of Redwood Creek. After crossing a plank bridge, the route swings sharply left, finds a short stretch of level ground, and then descends on a gentle grade.