Secret Muir Woods: There’s a hidden back door to this popular park

There’s a secret back door to Muir Woods National Monument that most visitors don’t know about — and it’s guaranteed to delight hikers who discover it.

If you park high above the 554-acre preserve on Mount Tamalpais’ Panoramic Highway, just across the street from the scenic Mountain Home Inn, you can embark on a lightly trafficked footpath down into these famed redwood groves. It’s a two to three hour, 5-mile hike in all and an amazing, almost magical journey back in time to a place where some of Northern California’s few remaining old growth coast redwoods (sequoia sempervirens) thrive.

Hiking the Canopy View trail from Mount Tam is sort of an Alice in Wonderland experience.

Instead of falling down a rabbit hole, you walk south on the car-free Alice Eastwood access road to the easy-going Panoramic Trail, which parallels Mill Valley’s Panoramic Highway. Continuing south, you’ll find a grassy slope covered in coastal scrub and stands of bay and oak, French broom, sticky monkey flower and sweet smelling fennel — with the seamless mosaic of the Muir Woods redwood canopy spreading out below you to the west.

After about a 1/4 mile, turn right, heading downhill on the Canopy View Trail, where a massive granite boulder makes an awesome perch for panoramic views of Muir Woods and, on fog-free days, the Pacific coast.

Continuing on, a quick descent brings you into shady groves of California bay laurel, oak and Douglas fir until the redwood forest appears suddenly at the junction of the Lost Trail. The Lost Trail makes a steep descent into Fern Creek Canyon and the upper reaches of Muir Woods, but it’s best to continue straight on the Canopy View Trail, meandering through the woods to the bottom of the canyon.

At each turn, the stately, cinnamon-red sequoia get taller and taller, and the woods get deeper and shadier. As you descend, it’s hard to avoid feeling like you are getting smaller and smaller, just like Alice. When you reach Redwood Creek and the canyon floor, you’ll be joined by crowds of gobsmacked Lilliputian visitors staring in awe at the massive redwoods that soar impossibly high overhead.

Despite the Alice in Wonderland feel to the place, don’t expect to encounter a fidgety white rabbit or hookah-smoking caterpillar. You’ll likely see a noisy black raven or two, chipmunks and squirrels, pileated woodpeckers, robins and Steller’s jays. Larger animals that inhabit these dense, shady woods — the black-tailed deer, coyote, gray fox, raccoon, spotted owls, skunk, bobcat and others — are mostly nocturnal and rarely seen.

At the junction of the Canopy View Trail and Redwood Creek trail, the park’s main thoroughfare, you can turn left to head to the Muir Woods visitors center, where restrooms, a cafe and a gift shop with a huge array of redwood-related knick-knacks await.

Or you can turn right to follow the Redwood Creek trail into the heart of Muir Woods. The wide boardwalk trail is lined with sword ferns and primitive horsetail, fairy-bells and redwood sorrel — the prolific, clover-like ground covering of the redwood forest understory. Coho salmon and steelhead trout are seen seasonally, as they are born and spawn in this serene, shady stream.

Redwoods are fascinating survivors from an ancient time. They evolved out of the Cypress
family (Cupressaceae) nearly 240 million years ago, overlapping with the age of the dinosaurs. They are the tallest trees on the planet (the tallest is 379 feet) and can be very old (the oldest redwoods in Muir Woods are 800 to 1,000 years old, and they can live as long as 2,000 years.)

When they first appeared, this was a very wet, rainforest environment, and redwoods forests were much more common and widespread on several continents, including Europe and Asia. Today, coast redwoods are found only on the rainy, fog-swept coastal mountain range of Northern California and extreme Southern Oregon.

Because they’ve been around so long and through so many environmental changes, redwoods have evolved a host of adaptations — a clever bag of tricks — that has allowed them to survive challenges ranging from atmospheric change to continental drift, prolonged periods of glaciation and drought.

Their fibrous bark is two to 12 inches thick and soaked in tannin, a natural fire-retardant and repellant against insects and fungi. The trees have three modes of reproduction: seeds, sprouts from their base root system and gene-rich burls. And they are masters at controlling their environment, nurturing fellow trees though a symbiotic subterranean fungi and suppressing the growth of competing plants. Signage on the main trail illustrates much of the ecology of the redwood forest.

The Redwood Creek trail continues on through Cathedral Grove and past the Kent Memorial, a salute to landowner William Kent who donated this patch of unlogged, old growth forest to the government back in 1908. A lightly-used side path, the Fern Creek Trail, gets you back on single track dirt for a gradual ascent up a serene side canyon.

At the signed junction with the Lost Trail, turn right (uphill) to ascend back to the Canopy View Trail. Turn left at the Canopy View Trail junction to return to where your walk began, out of the fairytale setting of Muir Woods and, alas, back to civilization.

If You Go

Muir Woods is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily at 1 Muir Woods Road in Mill Valley. Park admission is $15 per person for ages 16 and up. Unless you’re arriving on foot or by bicycle, you’ll need parking ($9) or shuttle ($3.50) reservations, which require planning well ahead. Space is limited, and reservations are required year-round. Half the available reservations are made available at 9 a.m. 90 days before any given date at https://gomuirwoods.com or by calling 1-800-410-2419. The remaining reservations are released three days in advance.