Happy trails: District marks its 250th mile for hikers
A new trail that opens this afternoon in the hills above the San Mateo County coast is a classic walk through a Bay Area nature preserve: 1.3 miles of breezy grasslands, rustic oak woodlands and shady redwood groves with scenic views off into the distance.
But the Grasshopper Loop Trail, tucked between La Honda and San Gregorio in the La Honda Creek Open Space Preserve, has a unique distinction: Its completion marks the 250th mile of trails built by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District since voters first created the government agency 50 years ago.
Walking all 250 miles would be the same as hiking from San Jose to Lake Tahoe or traipsing from the Golden Gate Bridge to Eureka.
The district commonly called “Midpen” was originally established in 1972 to protect wildlife and open space by stopping urban sprawl from spreading into the Peninsula hills. Since then, it has preserved 65,000 acres — an area twice the size of San Francisco — from Half Moon Bay, along the Santa Cruz Mountains and to the summit of Mount Umunhum south of San Jose.
All of its 26 preserves are free, and the 250 miles of trails running through them are open to hikers. Horse riding is allowed on 216 miles. Biking is allowed on 160 miles. Dogs on a leash are allowed on 63 miles. When people traveling along the Peninsula's stretch of Interstate 280 look west, many of the forests, grasslands and ridgetops they see in the distance are the district's protected lands.
“I'm thankful the local citizenry had the foresight,” said James Eggers, director of the Sierra Club's Loma Prieta chapter in Palo Alto. “The Bay Area and the Peninsula would be a very different place without Midpen. It's one of the reasons why so many people want to live here.”
“Without these preserves, it would look more like L.A. and some of the places I used to live in Texas,” added Eggers, who said he has hiked about 100 miles of Midpen trails. “There would be a lot more pavement. We'd have less wildlife. And we wouldn't be as healthy physically and mentally and emotionally because we wouldn't have as many natural spaces.”
The district, funded
largely by property taxes in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, will have a small ceremony this morning to open the newest trail at the La Honda Creek Open Space Preserve. The trail officially opens to the public at 3:30 p.m., although with only 22 spaces for vehicles, parking is expected to be tight the first weekend.
On a recent hike across the trail, Lewis Reed, a district botanist and rangeland ecologist, pointed out dozens of plant species and birds. He noted the new Grasshopper Loop Trail takes its name in part from the grasshopper sparrow, a diminutive brown and white bird whose song sounds a lot like the buzz of insects. But there is another meaning.
“One of the virtues of
this trail is that when you are hiking on it, you hop in and out of different habitats — from grasslands to redwoods,” he said, smiling.
The La Honda Creek Open Space Preserve is not as famous as many other Bay Area parks. But it has a colorful history.
Nestled along the western edges of Highway 84 on the route from Los Altos to San Gregorio, the 6,334-acre preserve — six times the size of Golden Gate Park — is Midpen's second largest, after Sierra Azul, a 20,000-acre wilderness south of Los Gatos.
For the past 175 years, the property has been a Mexican land grant, a dairy farm, a hideout for members of Jesse James' outlaw gang, an oil field, a redwood
logging mill, a cattle ranch and a retreat for heirs to the Weyerhaeuser lumber and Folgers coffee fortunes.
The preserve was established in 1984 with the purchase of a 255-acre property.
It grew significantly after 2006 when the agency bought the 3,681acre Driscoll Ranch. That property, a working cattle ranch that had been owned by Rudy Driscoll Jr. and other heirs to the Weyerhaeuser timber fortune, had been zoned for up to 100 luxury homes.
For decades, the broader landscape in the area was split into four different ranches and used for dairy farms, beef cattle and logging for roof shingles. In the late 1860s, it was used as a hideout by the notorious outlaws Cole Younger and John Jarret, who were part of Jesse James' gang.
Later, one of the ranches was owned by Peter Folger, the grandson of James Folger, who came to San Francisco during the Gold Rush in 1850 and founded the coffee company that bears his name. The Driscoll family bought the land in 1968 and sold it in 2002 for $21 million
to the Peninsula Open Space Trust, a Palo Alto environmental group that sold it to the open space district four years later for a reduced price of $9 million.
As a condition of the 2002 sale, Driscoll negotiated a 50-year grazing lease on the property for his Black Angus beef cattle. But Driscoll gradually moved out of the cattle business and gave up the lease. He died in 2015 at his home in Woodside.
Today, cattle still graze about 40% of the La Honda Creek preserve. Half of the preserve, which opened in 2017, remains closed to the public, following pushback from local La Honda residents who didn't want parking and a visitor center near the “red barn,” a beloved old landmark on the property.
With the addition of the Grasshopper Loop Trail, 11 miles in the preserve are now open for hiking and horse riding. This week, a trio of women who were bird-watching in the area got a sneak preview.
“It's a wonderful trail,” said Tricia Jordan of Los Altos. “It's peaceful and beautiful.”