It’s easy to miss the little wooden stairway on Stanyan Street just past 17th Street. It takes up only a sliver of sidewalk tucked between two houses and looks like the entrance to someone’s back garden.
In a sense, it is — if you consider the city’s public parks to be the back gardens of all who live here.
This week, a long walk outdoors is the furthest from many people’s minds. But once the smoke clears and your loved ones are out of harm’s way, it’s a good time to start exploring the 72-acre green space on the slopes of Mount Sutro, one of the city’s less heralded green patches. Overlooked, perhaps, because the western half of San Francisco is inconvenient for many residents, or because the green space is tucked between several neighborhoods and the hodgepodge of medical buildings that comprise the original University of California, San Francisco campus.
The wooden stairs near the top of Stanyan Street are one way to enter the Mount Sutro open space. The stairs lead immediately to the Interior Greenbelt, a city-owned park that connects to the larger network of trails owned by UCSF. The boundary between the two is invisible and the whole feels less like an urban park and much, much more like a wild tangle.
Mere feet after leaving behind Stanyan Street, the city noise begins to die down, dampened by walls of towering green. Many of the plants aren’t native, but it’s no less a salve for urban tension. Thimbleberry, wild roses, and western sword fern push in, while massive hedges of Chinese yellow lantern flank the path. Monterey cypress, Monterey pines, and eucalyptus shade the undergrowth and serve as trellises for the ivy and blackberry creeping skyward. The trail hugs a slope and the unmistakable spiciness of leaf litter and damp rises from the seasonal Woodland Creek. Birdsong and wind in the trees provide the soundtrack.
The Greenbelt and open space combined have more than five miles of trails. The Historic Trail, which winds westward from Stanyan before curling south toward the Laguna Honda reservoir, provides beautiful views but is not for the faint of heart (or knee). Its narrow and steep track is studded with rocks and roots, and poison oak encroaches in some places. Hikers and mountain bikers share the trail, leading to sudden and potentially dangerous encounters. (Best to leave the earbuds at home!)
Seeing Green
The city bought the Interior Greenbelt in the 1950s with the vision of making it one link in a chain of green in San Francisco’s heart. The vision never materialized, but it wasn’t the first attempt to cover the city in a verdant swath.
Adolph Sutro, an engineer, real estate investor, and San Francisco mayor, owned land throughout the city, including what was then called Mount Parnassus. On Arbor Day in 1886, he planted imported eucalyptus and native trees on the slopes of the mountain, later renamed in his honor. This grove was but a small part of the 1,100 acres he seeded in the city’s western neighborhoods.
“Mr. Sutro was a great believer in the idea that for every tree that is destroyed two should be planted, and to show that trees will grow on barren hills he at the time inaugurated tree planting in this city,” wrote the San Francisco Call newspaper in October 1901. Sutro never could have imagined that more than a century later his trees would be at the heart of a bitter war.
For decades, neighbors and others fought a plan to cut the forest’s dead and dying trees, remove non-native undergrowth, and replant both eucalyptus and native trees for a more biodiverse mix.
The plan that was finally approved in 2018 states that 7,800 trees will be removed over 20 years, about three-quarters of all the trees currently in the preserve. The work began in January. Foes of the plan, under the banner of Save Mount Sutro Forest, bemoan the destruction of what they considered an “enchanted cloud forest.” Amid photos of tree stumps, the group recently wrote on its site, “Sadly, this forest is now a shadow of what it was.”
If it’s a shadow, it’s still a damn beautiful one. Giant eucalyptus and conifers still shade the trails and block most views of the city. (Golden Gate Park, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay, and Tiburon are visible along a northern stretch of the Historic Trail.) Goats in a city grazing program denude blackberry vines and pay hikers no mind.
Ghosts of the Past
To find other legacies of San Francisco’s past on the mountain, hike all the way to the top on paths that wind through fragrant ceanothus, part of a native plant meadow created in 2005 by San Francisco’s Rotary Club.
During the Cold War, the site was one of more than 20 around the Bay Area that housed components of a Nike missile defense system. You can find others in the Presidio, at Fort Funston, on Mount Tamalpais and Angel Island; atop Mount Sutro, a former sentry building down the road from the mountaintop is the only reminder.
There might be other ghosts, too, if you’re paranormally inclined. Does that fog curling through the trees look a bit like a human form? After all, Halloween is just around the corner…
Winding downhill towards the Inner Sunset along the North Ridge Trail, a reminder of a very different type of past can be found. Shortly before the trail intersects Medical Center Way, a small rocky overhang forms a shallow cave. The cave is decorated with an assortment of objects — a plastic lion figurine, a used paintbrush, a faded polaroid, a Red Cross member card, a beaded bracelet — like a spontaneous shrine, but carries no clues to its origins.
Among those in the know, the location is called Ishi’s Shrine, named for the last survivor of the Yahi tribe of Native Americans. Originally from the Mount Lassen area, he was brought to San Francisco in the early 20th century by a U.C. professor, Alfred Kroeber. He lived the rest of his life in the city and was said to have spent time roaming the then-young forest planted by Sutro. A framed photo of him used to adorn the cave but disappeared a few years ago.
With seven trailheads, there are numerous ways to start and end a Mount Sutro hike. If you want to end near the Stanyan stairway, continue on the North Ridge Trail to the Edgewood Trail and pop out at Edgewood Avenue near UCSF. To head to the Inner Sunset for practically any type of snack imaginable, double back on the North Ridge Trail until you hit the West Ridge Trail, which dumps you out on Crestmont Drive close to the “swoon-worthy” Oakhurst stairs.
No matter how you get back into the city, take the wild solitude of Mount Sutro with you.
How to Get There
Mount Sutro is well connected by transit. On the north (UCSF) side, the N, 43, or 6 are all options. To the east, the 37 runs down Cole Street. On the west the 44 joins the 43 and 6, and the 36 loops around the south side. Neighborhood street parking is generally easy to find, and the trails are bike friendly, for those with two (mountain bike) wheels.